How to Do SEO for the Child Care Industry?

It’s an extremely appealing industry that requires entrepreneurs to take appropriate steps in the online world. Due to the increasing popularity of all the aspects related to parenting, the competition is quite significant and it’s worth learning how to mark your presence in the child care industry, make your store stand out from the crowd, and reach a specific, demanding target group.

What are the characteristics of the child care industry?

The number of people interested in parenting increases every year. It shouldn’t be surprising. Most of us perceive the Internet as a valuable source of information, therefore, there are more and more parents looking for child clothes to buy, types of pacifiers to choose or bedding fabrics that are the safest for their bundles of joy. On the Internet, you can also ask questions concerning your baby turning over from its back to its tummy or find out when to expand the diet and what to include in it. Although there are many inquiries, it turns out that there are even more answers. The online world is full of websites offering advice, tips, or recommendations for parents. All of this at your fingertips!

Online stores with toys and clothes for children

Websites exploring exclusively children’s issues, blogs run by parents, forums, and incredible social media profiles addressing child care are parts of the broadly understood online child care industry. People captivated by parenting shouldn’t complain about limited dedicated content. Just the other way round, the Internet abounds in this type of text and the popularity of parenting websites is constantly growing.

However, one of the most significant roles in the sector is played by online stores that sell baby items: clothing, footwear, accessories, furniture, toys and many more. When taking them into account, it’s possible to observe a clear change that has taken place in trends in the child care industry over the past few years. Not so long ago, Smyk was the real tycoon of the industry. After its first year of operation in the online world, it recorded a 50% increase in turnover in e-commerce and the total share of online sales amounted to 0.4%. Endo, a children’s clothing store, came in second place at the time. Interestingly, in 2018, the podium was dominated by stores selling hygiene, nutrition products, and gadgets.

Therefore, finding the right niche in the market isn’t a piece of cake, especially when taking into account the fact that the competition itself is pretty sizable, and apart from your direct market rivals, you also need to deal with competitors from other e-commerce sectors. Child care products can be usually accessed in online stores (e.g. bookstores or electronics stores) that aren’t associated strictly with parenting.

However, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s impossible to succeed in the industry. You just need to devise an appropriate strategy and consistently implement its individual objectives. What kinds of objectives? Let’s check it out!

Target group: take advantage of its engagement

When running an online store, it’s worth noting that parents and grandparents are probably one of the most involved target groups in the world. Although prices of individual products and expenses associated with organizing a layette for a newborn should translate into rational purchasing decisions, it’s incredibly easy to use the emotions of potential buyers of child care products to your advantage.

In order to reach the right target group, first, you need to get to know it. Analyze why people visit your website, what requirements they have, and what type of content they want to find. Learn whether you address mainly men or women and what’s their average age. This will allow you to create a user persona, thanks to it, you’ll be able to communicate with potential buyers more effectively and present your brand in an appropriate way.

Seasonality of the child care industry

If you operate in the child care industry, you should pay special attention to its seasonality throughout the year. At the turn of November and December (St. Nicholas’ Day, Christmas), it’s possible to observe a significant sales peak. The second one can be noticed before Children’s Day. Because of the increased interest in specific products, the popularity of particular keywords improves. Therefore, when planning the sales strategy of your online store, it’s crucial to take into account the seasonality of given items such as LEGO or educational toys. This way, you’ll be able to ensure not only appropriate subpage visibility and SEO activities but also a supply of a sufficient number of products likely to be sold at a specific time.

When running a store with accessories for children, bear in mind that SEO activities should be planned well in advance as intended results don’t appear overnight. Moreover, sometimes they become noticeable only after a few weeks. If your offer includes winter hats for kids, start performing SEO activities much earlier, even in summer, despite the fact that this type of product enjoys the greatest popularity during the colder months. To learn more about doing SEO for the clothing industry, go to our previous blog post: https://delante.co/clothing-industry-visibility/.

SEO for the child care industry

It’s hard to mark your presence on the market and reach satisfactory sales results with so many online stores selling toys, children’s clothes or baby accessories. However, an appropriate SEO strategy can help you achieve the objective by increasing your website visibility in the search results and, consequently, attracting more potential customers visiting your store and purchasing products. So what steps should you take to achieve satisfactory results?

#1 Accuracy as a key to success: a selection of appropriate keywords

Before performing any SEO activities, create a database of keywords describing your business profile. Start with choosing appropriate phrases tailored to your landing page (brand name, website profile – toy store, children’s accessories store, etc.), category subpages, and most important product pages. Considering the highly competitive nature of the industry offering toys, clothing, and children’s accessories, it’s worth going for precise long-tail phrases that will make it easier for users to encounter your page while searching for selected items.

If you have basic product names like “shoes for newborn”, enrich them with the manufacturer name, model, color or fabrics the product is made of. This will increase your chances of selling the item. Customers looking for specific products are willing to buy them if the search result meets their expectations.

#2 Educate: unique content appeals to users

One of the most important steps of every child care industry SEO process involves saturating the website with an appropriate amount of content. However, it’s worth making sure that texts are unique and optimized for keywords tailored to specific subpages or to the landing page of your online store. As far as the child care industry is concerned, it’s crucial to pay particular attention to the style of your descriptions and the types of information you decide to provide. Parents always want to make sure that they select products that are the most appropriate for their kids. Therefore, the quality and safety of the product are highly important elements. Sometimes listing the fabrics a given piece of clothing is made of or including information on whether a given toy is age-appropriate is enough to convince users to buy.

If you run an online store with child care products, it’s a good idea to create a blog and post regularly. It can be used to advertise products you wish to sell at a given time and to inspire users’ trust. As we’ve already mentioned, parents want to make sure that the products they buy for kids are of top-notch quality, therefore, they willingly read entries like “Which beanie to choose for a newborn?” or “What should a spring layette for a baby include?”. When coming up with topics for blog posts, you can use Google Trends to see what queries are typed in by users the most frequently at a given time of year.

#3 Let users find you – appropriate website optimization

Unfortunately, the creation of unique content is not enough to reach high positions on Google. It’s crucial to focus on technical website aspects, which include activities like:

• Optimizing content on the home page, category subpages, and the most important product pages. Creating and optimizing H1-H6 headers for relevant keywords,
• Optimizing title and meta description tags,
• Creating 301 redirects,
• Optimizing images published on the website – they should have appropriate weight (not more than 200 KB), it’s crucial to create ALT attributes that are URL-friendly and optimized for keywords,
• Improving page loading time,
• Getting rid of 404 errors (“Page not found”) – don’t delete subpages of products withdrawn from sale, instead, provide a notification “product temporarily unavailable”.

It’s also worth benefitting from the so-called internal linking. Thanks to it, you’ll attract users’ attention to other products from the same or similar category to the one they’re interested in. This will help you improve the power of the linking page. Provide links in product and category descriptions, consider creating separate website sections such as “similar products” or “others also bought”.

#4 Appropriate link base and internal linking

To support on-site activities, it’s crucial to create an appropriate link base for the website which means obtaining a sufficient number of backlinks to your store. Make sure that the links come from pages with high domain authority and are diverse. It’s best to obtain valuable links from:

• website directories
• sponsored articles
• guest posts
• posts on online forums dedicated to the child care industry – forums are quite popular among parents
• social media

#5 Social media and the power of Instagram

Social media is an effective source of external links. However, that’s not the end! Using the most popular platforms can help you easily and conveniently advertise your store and build direct relationships with potential customers which improves brand recognition and credibility. It’s important to mention that users voluntarily choose to participate in the life of the brand by liking profiles, commenting on photos, taking part in competitions, giveaways, and surveys. Take advantage of this opportunity and show people that they can trust you and that the products offered at your store are a great choice!

It’s definitely worth being active on social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. The latter two platforms enjoy great popularity among parents. How-to videos focused on comparing different baby accessories or promoting specific products are a recipe for success. Why don’t you start a vlog and post videos from time to time? They don’t have to be long, actually – the shorter, the better! Young parents usually don’t have a lot of time on their hands to watch lengthy materials.

The child care industry is incredibly popular on Instagram. There’s a mini-community of instamoms that willingly share photos of their children, clothes, meals, or accessories. They discuss experiences, pieces of advice, and recommendations. Therefore, it’s worth entering this world and presenting your brand to instaparents! Convince them that you offer quality products safe for children.

The child care industry abounds in influencers, try to cooperate with them. Over the years, they’ve been building their credibility and personal relationship with their audience by sharing events from their daily lives. Think how effective the advertisements on their profiles can be – when parents see your product in a photo and a description recommending it, they’re more likely to purchase your items. You can also organize giveaways together. See how positively it can affect the promotion of your online store.

The takeaway

The child-care industry is a highly competitive sector of the e-commerce market. Although it offers numerous opportunities, it’s essential to know how to take advantage of them and make your online store benefit as much as possible. Take care of proper on-site and off-site SEO activities, build a quality link database – cooperate with influencers, mark your presence in social media and see how great results you can achieve by devising an effective strategy for your online store.