Last week I *hopefully* convinced you that it’s not only worth the time and effort to blog about your fashion brand, but it’s imperative. If you missed that post you can read it here.
Today I want to talk about the not-so-sexy side of creating content for your brand and why your blog strategy depends on these three letters:
S
E
O
SEO stands for “search engine optimization” — Wait! Before your eyes glaze over and you click away… let’s take a pause for a puppy break.
Okay, still with me?
In layman’s terms, SEO is the language that the internet speaks and is the reason that some articles rank on the first page of Google and why a very similar article could be buried in the depths of the cloud.
Why is this important to you? Because you want to rank on the first page of Google.
Why should you care? Because it’s one more way that your target customers can find your business.
It looks like this:
Cara has a sustainable fashion brand that sells five-piece capsule collections through her Shopify store.
Cara also has a blog that features articles about minimalism, sustainability, ethical fashion, travel, clean beauty and other topics that appeal to her ideal target customer.
Now, here’s where SEO comes in.
Because her blog titles are “optimized” for the “search engines” with “keywords,” her blog posts come up when her ideal target customer searches for a topic she’s written about.
So, let’s say a potential customer is searching on Google, looking for bloggers to follow who have sustainable wardrobes.
The very first article that appears on Google’s front page is Cara’s article: 10 Bloggers Who Will Inspire Your Sustainable Wardrobe
The potential customer clicks on Cara’s blog post, finds herself reading valuable and engaging content and knows she’s found exactly what she was looking for.
What happens next?
Maybe the potential customer clicks away, but it’s far more likely that one of three things happens:
- She clicks over to another related blog post and stays on Cara’s blog longer.
- She is invited to subscribe to Cara’s email list through an email opt-in.
- She clicks over to Cara’s Shopify site where she realizes that not only does Cara blog about sustainable fashion, she has an entire line of sustainable fashion to purchase!
Do you see how powerful this machine of SEO and blogging works?
The task of creating blog content is something that can benefit your brand for months and years to come.
Okay, so now that I’ve *hopefully* convinced you that SEO is important to your blog strategy, it begs the question — how do you get started optimizing and finding keywords to write about?
First, I would encourage you to install an SEO plug-in to whichever blog platform you’re using (I use Yoast for WordPress.)
This will help you find keywords and optimize your blog posts — there’s an easy red light, yellow light, green light system that Yoast uses to tell you if you’re good to go.
Beyond that, there are people much smarter than me who have written all about SEO, so I’m going to link to them below:
- If you prefer reading, HubSpot has a very thorough guide here.
- If you prefer listening, Jenna Kutcher has an SEO podcast here.
- If you prefer outsourcing, current Factory45’er Gabbby Covay runs an agency that provides SEO services here.
And if you want to take a closer look at Cara as my guinea pig, her blog is here and her brand is here.
She’s also a Factory45 alum, so I’ve been able to witness from the beginning how she’s built each block of her business strategy (it’s impressive).
These technical things are what we, as creatives, tend to avoid but I’m here to tell you, there’s no point in blogging for the sake of blogging.
There needs to be a consistent strategy around what you write about, and SEO is a big part of that.
Phew. I know. It’s a lot of work… More puppies?
You can do this.
