How much SEO value does a fashion site get from bolting text onto the bottom of home page? Does the value compensate for cluttering up a page focused on an iconic image?
-
Getting ready to launch a completely redesigned site for a fashion designer. Since it is a fashion site, visitors do not need text to describe what the site is about., We are weighing three options: 1) clean design with no text (just images and navigational links), 2) bolting on a couple of sentences of text at the bottom of the page to signal keyword terms to the search engines, 3) following the lead of the top ranking site in the category and adding lots of text to the bottom of the page.
Do the SEO benefits justify cluttering up the design by bolting text onto the bottom of the home page, and if so, how many characters of text seem to be the minimum to be effective?
-
Nice work!
-
I am going to close out the conversation by thanking the respondents and admitting that I was wrong, wrong, wrong. Google's current rankings for the most competitive keywords in my niche have become highly correlated with the sites that have the most comprehensive text. In my opinion, it is providing a skewed result, as many viewers of fashion sites ignore the text, but there is not much sense in fighting the algo. The algo isn't smart enough yet to be able to judge great photography.
-
As the owner of a design firm/SEO agency, I feel justified saying that designers need to grow up a little bit and stop making excuses (imho.) It is not that hard to make a high quality site that includes both text and images. Photographers do it all the time (like this.)
Put information on your site that visitors will actually enjoy reading. Talk about what kind of materials the clothes were made from. You can describe the stitch patterns, the designer, what famous people have worn your clothes (if any) suggestions of how to accessorize the item with other products from your store...etc.
Obviously, you should find tactful and organic ways of including that information. In closing, I'd like to point out that sites without textual content rarely out-rank their competitors. Even PR 7-10 sites like Facebook & Pinterest are not able to rank for pictures without text.
-
Agreeing with everyone here, text is vital. Perhaps the non-text sites that rank do so because no other sites compete with them meaning links alone are placing them up high (i.e. no SEO optimization). Imagine being able to add some nice text to a well designed page and quickly gaining great placement.
As well as permanent introductory text I'd also recommend adding text that will change out, like a placement for the hottest fashion accessory and another for the hottest designer. Have these change out regularly and also link through to lower level pages. This will also give people another reason to come back, just like a womens gossip magazine, people buy them week after week because they know content is updated often.
-
Randy those two sites are VERY well known brands - they can get away with less content to a certain extent (they're going to get a lot of natural links easily). I agree with EGOL, text is very important. Add some content about what your site is about, deep links to some key pages on your site, blog excerpts etc. Remember, getting visitors to your site and then off your homepage to other areas of your site is the key, not some fancy banner that takes up half the page and 'looks nice'.
-
My previous response makes a bit more sense if I added the word "fashion" in front of the word designer in the first sentence. I totally agree that letting "web" or "graphic' designers make final decisions about web pages is a deadly mistake. However, when developing for a fashion house and the fashion designer is also paying the bills, his opinion counts for a lot, even if it is lousy SEO. On a anecdotal note, one of the most competitive terms in the fashion industry in "wedding dresses". The top ranked designer site has a lot of text in their links, but virtually no other textual content. So here is an anecdotal example that text content is not necessary to rank well for a fashion site. However, it is obviously foolhardy to give a lot of weight to a single example that may just be an exception to the rule.
-
I know lots of designers who are adamant about their opinions.... but very few to none of them have done A/B testing to determine the impact of their designs on visitors, conversions or search engines.
Lots of redesigns tank when they go up. Traffic drops or conversions drop or rankings drop. Or a combination of these.
I am all ears to hear about case studies... but don't have a lot of faith in untested opinions.
I let my visitors inform me of how the design is working. They are the voice that counts.
-
Many designers, who ultimately approve the design of their sites, would disagree with your opinion. A couple of examples of sites with minimal text on the home page are, marcjacobs.com and versace.com. Obviously, the fact that there are examples of sites with home pages with minimal text does not mean it it appropriate, maybe just the in way to go. But then again, being on trend is everything in the fashion industry
-
Visitors don't need text? I find that difficult to believe. People like to read about fashion, as you can see from the numerous fashion blogs that get tons of hits. If the design wasn't created with text in mind, it sounds like the design needs to be changed.
-
My homepage looks like the homepage of the LATimes.com.
Tons of text.
Intentional.
Those tons of text pull in thousands long tail visitors.
So, if I removed all of that text and slapped up an image I would loose a lot of visitors, a lot of income and a lot of SEO benefit that those visitors produce through likes links tweets and shares.
Nobody is going to "bolt" anything onto my site. I would tell the designer... "This text is an essential part of the design... non negotiable. Use your creativity to make it look great."
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Should I optimize my home-page or a sub-page for my most important keyword
Quick question: When choosing the most important keyword set that I would like to rank for, would I be better off optimizing my homepage, or a sub page for this keyword. My thinking goes as follows: The homepage (IE www.mysite.com) naturally has more backlinks and thus a better Google Page Rank. However, there are certain things I could do to a subpage (IE www.mysite.com/green-widgets-los-angeles ) that I wouldn't want to do to the homepage, which might be more "optimal" overall. Option C, I suppose, would be to optimize both the homepage, and a single sub-page, which is seeming like a pretty good solution, but I have been told that having multiple pages optimized for the same keywords might "confuse" search engines. Would love any insight on this!
On-Page Optimization | | Jacob_A2 -
Question about multiple versions of home page
Hi guys, I'm having a question, answer to which i'm unable to find anywhere. I browesed the whole internet lol. So the question is about multipple versions of the home page. In particular, i want to know how should i deal with home page URLs with this extention: /index.html All the rest possible versions of home page i know how to deal with but this one "/index.html" i don't. I did add a cononical tag to it but i'm wondering whether or not i should add 301 redirect to chosen version og the home page (let's say it is www.mydomain.com). Please advise the best practices on how to deal with this. Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | odmsoft0 -
Any issue with my On page SEO
Kindly review my website and let me know if there is any issue with On page or I am missing anything? Home page - http://www.ayurjeewan.com Deep Page - http://www.ayurjeewan.com/natural/divya-triphala-churna/
On-Page Optimization | | MasonBaker0 -
Can horrific grammar and spelling in comments hurt the value of an otherwise great page?
I've got a website whose pages get lots of comments. Tons of activity, which I would think Google would like (and seems to like). However -- I just can't put this nicely -- most commenters are not very bright. Their grammar and spelling is horrific. These are not foreigners who lack English skills, they are just about all primarily English speakers and the site is 99% US traffic. It's a low-income segment of the population. So, I've been wondering recently if Google will mark down the value of the page due to the bad grammar and spelling in the comments, even if the page's content is otherwise very good and lengthy. I have read that they grammar and spelling into consideration when looking at the page, but would that include comments, or would they know they are comments and not judge a page on that? It would be a pain, but maybe I should I run all the comments at least through a spell checker? And manually fix their grammar? Problem is I get about 40 comments a day. And when I say bad grammar and spelling, I mean REALLY bad. Embarrassing.
On-Page Optimization | | bizzer0 -
Best SEO Extension/Plugin for NOPCommerce Site?
Hi I am working for a client who is using NOPCommerce. It doesn't look like they have a SEO Plugin in - although you can add meta descriptions to Products - which works fine, the Product categories have SEO components too but do not seem to work and all 'other' content /CMS pages have no SEO components whatsoever. Does anyone know of a plugin which would resolve this? (PS never used NOPCommerce before!)
On-Page Optimization | | AllieMc0 -
How does a keyword get crawled and pointed at a certain page
I was wondering if you can give me some insight on how a keyword that I put on my campaign gets linked to a specific URL on my website by SEOMoz or Google. For example: updating a brick fireplace is my keyword. On the campaign when I am looking at my on page optimization, the URL assigned (or given) to it is my homepage. How is this determined and is there a way around it and or directing it to the correct page? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | SammyT0 -
Home page ranking dropped below internal pages
The index page for a site I manage has dropped significantly - internal pages rank above it. It's a new site, 2 months old but was ranking at 1st. Any suggestions as to how I can debug this?
On-Page Optimization | | OptioPublishing0