Fashion is a visual industry. It’s all about how things look, selling an image. In traditional fashion marketing images, visual content is king, however, in SEO the opposite is true. Search engines rank text higher than images as they understand it better.

Fashion and accessory websites, like to keep their pages clean, with high-quality, editorial images that show their products at their best, and while this is important, it doesn’t mean much to search engines. In order to rank on the search engines, your website needs to tell the search bots what the page is exactly about. Think of these bots as being highly literate but essentially blind creatures. The beauty of your editorial images are lost on them. It is also helpful to your user to have some text on your pages, so they know what to expect when they land on the page and browse through your website.

You also need to ensure that you don’t put text within images assearch bots sill won’t be able to read them. You’ll be surprised how often this happens without many companies realising that they’re doing it. Here are some examples:

• While putting your logo on your website is vital, make sure the company name is mentioned too within onsite text.
• Ensure that high level category or hero product descriptions are not inside the headline image. Make sure there is room for text on your pages.

Ensure that important information such as your address, about us and collection information appears in text form at least once.

What about ALT tags?

ALT tags tell search engines what an image on your website is. It’s an important part of SEO and can help with ranking, however ALT tags will only take you so far. Search engines still rank on-page text higher than ALT tags. Ideally, when writing ALT tags aim to be descriptive without over-using keywords within the tag, which is also known as keyword stuffing.

How much text should you have?

How much text a page should have is always a matter of debate, search engines such as Google are cryptic about how much on-page text is enough. In its guidelines, Google states that the amount of content on a page is important for the website’s overall quality score and “the amount of content necessary for the page to be satisfying depends on the topic and purpose of the page.” While this does not state specifically the amount of words required, the general industry consensus is a minimum of 300 words per page should be enough.

Of course, the amount and the quality of your content is not the only thing that search engines are looking for when crawling your web page, a whole myriad of things make this up including backlinks, page speed and mobile optimisation; but the old SEO adage that ‘content is king’ still reigns in the SEO industry today. So make sure text is part of your fashion website’s aesthetics as well as your digital marking strategy.