Quick links
Hiring an E-commerce SEO agency to optimise a sports and fitness apparel online store a few months before Christmas – the biggest sales season of the year – is the priority in marketing managers’ check list this Summer. Sports and fitness fashion E-stores are part of a fast growing industry, which requires SEO to help continue its growth in the online market. Webmasters , E-commerce managers and marketing directors need to make sure they are prepared and working in sync for the potential increase in online sales in the December-January period.
As we enter the holiday season, SEO becomes paramount for marketing teams managing websites on ecommerce CMS and hosted platforms. Ensure success with our comprehensive guide: “Navigating Christmas with Ecommerce SEO.”
Optimise Your Online Store Before Christmas
With the fast growth of the health and wellness market in the UK, the last and first weeks of the year are crucial: Not only do consumers now turn to sports retailers to purchase Christmas presents (and fitness stores for January detoxes), they now do it online. Christmas 2014 recorded an impressive 19.2% increase in internet purchases from the year before, a clear sign that online retailers need to optimise their websites now to be SEO-ready for the booming season and beat their competitors in the race for rankings.
Marketing managers of fitness and sports apparel online retailers need to get in touch with webmasters or an outside E-commerce SEO agency to tackle the following:
| ✔ Do all sports fitness products have SEO in place? | ✔ Does the online store have a mobile first experience? |
| ✔ Do all sports fitness categories have SEO in place? | ✔ What are the Google Paid Listing Ads (PLA)? |
| ✔ Are product information and customer reviews available for content? | ✔ Is the online experience enhanced through various tracking methods? |
| ✔ Are there ‘related products’ on each product page? | ✔ Is there natural internal linking? |
| ✔ What are the different search channels, including social media? | ✔ Are all meta data, open graph and schema tags relevant? |
Record Keyword Rankings for Each Search Engine
Sports and fitness online retailers may want to focus their online search marketing on one search engine as a cost saving method, however keeping in mind current search engine market shares.
As of June 2015, Google has a market share of 80.7%, while Bing still has 9.83%, followed by Yahoo with 9.57%. Search engine to watch Duck Duck Go is slowly becoming a new favourite to a category of knowledgeable users, as it offers a private approach to online search, with a competitive advantage over Google. With 7 million searches a day on Duck Duck Go in 2015 so far, digital marketers must include this newcomer in their SEO strategy.
A key factor marketing managers must consider is they way these search engines operate. Bing and Yahoo share a similar search algorithm, which accounts for 19.4% of search algorithms in the market. It is highly recommended for digital managers to record keyword rankings for each of these search engines, ensuring they each have their own SEO strategy.
Planning SEO Months Ahead
With multiple sales seasons in the year, sports and fitness apparel E-commerce has to cater to each in advance to ensure the SEO strategies for each season has enough time to be indexed, to be linked to and to gain a strong page authority. Planning at least three months ahead which products and target audience members to focus on is a key priority for marketing managers and their E-commerce SEO agency.
An SEO strategy for Winter would be aiming at customers who play winter sports and may want under-armor. The efficiency of an E-commerce is easily seen in the way it grabs the attention of potential customers as soon as a webpage loads up. Digital marketers of sports retailers can direct traffic to a targeted sports and fitness apparel category with a large banner with strong, high traffic and relevant keywords resulting from months of SEO research (Ie -‘fitness clothes on sale’).
Seasonal SEO for Sportswear Websites
Case 1: Samurai Sportswear
Online retailer Samurai Sports is currently running a summer sale campaign for the Samurai sportswear line, using the keywords, ‘sportswear summer sale’. In order to start ranking for this popular search term, the digital marketing team must have integrated SEO into the store’s overall E-commerce marketing strategy about 6 months ago, a time frame recommended to E-commerce marketers to build SEO. As soon potential customers see the page’s meta data in the SERPs, they are bound to click through and immediately see the digital banner showing sportswear offers, an immediate call for action.
Case 2: Columbia Sportswear
Columbia Sportswear is following a similar digital marketing strategy, by already running a Winter sale campaign through SEO. Both online stores have the type of sale displayed first in their title tags, in their URL structure and in their meta description, as known as the three SEO fundamentals to put in place to increase potential customer clicks-through.
Polaris is an E-commerce SEO agency in London, with expertise in building successful digital marketing strategies for online retailers in the sports and fitness sector.
