Tell us a little about you, your business and how you got started

Hi, I’m Louise! I own a baby and children’s fashion label, Sukoo. Sukoo was born as a rebellious act towards the fast pace of the fashion industry. I began as a stockist, selling beautiful items from other brands but grew frustrated with aspects I had little control over, like how quickly brands put items on sale, how much plastic stock arrived in and just how quickly the trends came and went. I’m proud of Sukoo and what it has become. We strive to move slowly as a label and are committed to producing high quality items that are durable and timeless. Forever items, to love and then pass on.

You’ve recently gotten really into SEO and making use of it for Sukoo - how’d this come about?

It isn’t a new love for me but a revisited one. Prior to my e-commerce journey, I had a travel blog. I loved writing about our over seas adventures and taught myself how to use SEO to position ourselves within that space. The blog was short lived but I taught myself a lot of basics that definitely come in handy now. While on maternity leave, I found myself with more time on my hands to finally implement the basics. I saw such a change in three months (moving from not ranking at all to top of page 1 on Google for words relating to my brand) that it became a little addictive.  I think as it became obvious that Instagram was no longer what it use to be, I knew I needed to do something else and that I could no longer rely on sales just from Instagram.

I feel like terms like SEO can sometimes be a bit confusing - tell us your take on it.

It’s enormous and ongoing. I think In simplest terms, you would break it into three.

1. On page SEO - this is your key words you want to rank for that you’ll use across your website.

2. Technical SEO-  I suppose you could call this optimisation/ health  of your site. Things like how easy your website is to crawl, load speed, link structure and so on.

3. Off page SEO- back links! The more reputable websites are linking back to you, the higher your website domain authority and trust score.

Tell us a bit about the impact and results you’ve had on your SEO journey.

It’s a steady process but one that I see continual results. My analytics are changing and instead of 90+% social traffic, we’re seeing figures more like 60% social 35% organic search from Google.  It doesn’t always mean sales, especially when some of the words we are  ranking for currently are very broad terms, so we don’t always reach our ideal customer.  With that being said, I’m paying closer attention to conversion history and seeing an increase in sales directly from Google. I’m only just getting started!  

Where to start? I know that optimising your website for SEO is an ongoing, HUGE task, where do you think we should start?

I started with on page SEO. Know your keywords and which pages you want to optimise for those words. You can discover what people are searching relating to your products on Google key word planner or by downloading the chrome extension “key words everywhere”. There are paid platforms to assist but I would recommend starting with the above first. You want to choose both key words and long tail key words (think- baby romper and also baby romper online Australia). Use these words in your title tags, descriptions, meta tags, alt texts and collection pages.

Want to fill us in on your resources? What are your top tools that you’ve found the most useful to guide you on SEO?

When you’re ready, you can do a free trial with something like SEMRUSH or sign up to a month of Hike. It’s fairly affordable for what you get. Ive recently gone down this path but still saw fantastic results doing the very minimal before any of this. I am now two weeks into Hike. You can spy on your competitors and tap into words that they are ranking for, check your website health score and work on completing some actions they identify for you and pick 50 words to optimise your site for. It will also make sure you're working on local SEO too. Get a Google account, connect analytics and Google console, ask for Google reviews from your customers, add a geo tag. Of course, if you don’t have time to do this you can outsource.

I am working on a few freebies for small businesses because I don’t gate keep! I want small businesses to learn this too because it’s been a hard year and a lot of brands only know instagram.

Lastly, I know people don’t want to hear this, but join TikTok. I have learnt so much in the two months about business marketing. It’s bite sized information that is easy to action!