u/Sensitive_Income6998

I launched my online fashion store about 6 weeks ago. I can't do paid ads right now, the budget just isn't there, so organic search is basically my only real option for getting in front of people. I know fashion is competitive but I’m focused on a specific aesthetic/niche so I’m hoping that helps. right now.

I’m pretty lost on where to actually put my energy. do I optimize product pages first? work on collection pages? start a blog? try to build backlinks somehow? all of the above feels overwhelming and I'd rather focus on what actually moves the needle for ecommerce specifically.

I’ve been reading a lot but most SEO advice is written for content sites not stores and it doesn't always translate.

If anyone runs an ecommerce store and has figured out what to prioritize early on I'd really appreciate the direction - especially anything specific to fashion or apparel

I am trying to properly dig into what my competitors are doing - backlinks, top pages, keyword gaps.

I’ve played around with Ahrefs and Semrush but the pricing stings when you're not yet making money from the site.

Are there tools that give you a realistic picture of competitor SEO without the enterprise price tag? even directionally accurate data is fine. curious what people are actually relying on here.

My site got hit hard by one of the recent Google updates. we went from consistently around 1,000 page views a day to about 50 and it's been sitting there for almost two months now with zero signs of bouncing back. it's a content site I’ve been building for about two years, mostly informational articles in a health-adjacent niche.

I've read everything about the helpful content updates and tried to honestly evaluate my site against those guidelines. some of it is genuinely good content but there's probably older stuff that's thinner. I've started cleaning that up but I have no idea if that's enough or if I'm even addressing the right thing.

The emotional side of this is rough too - two years of work basically wiped out overnight. for people who've been through something similar: is recovery actually realistic or am I just delaying the inevitable? and if you did recover what did you actually do, not the generic "improve your content quality" advice but the specific stuff that seemed to turn things around.

I tried a few AI writing tools and most of them feel like general purpose writing assistants with an SEO badge stuck on. I need something that's actually built with ranking in mind, briefs, outlines, optimization, the whole thing.

Has anyone found tools where the output actually performs in search rather than just reading well? also curious if there's a noticeable difference in rankings between AI-assisted and fully manual content for those who've tested both.

I've been writing on Medium for about 8 months and a few of my articles get some traffic but it feels totally inconsistent and I don't really understand why some rank and others don't.

I'm trying to figure out if there's an actual SEO strategy I can apply here or if Medium just does whatever it wants like does keyword research even translate to Medium? does internal linking between your own articles help? what about the tags, the subtitle, how the article is structured?

I've seen some Medium writers clearly getting consistent search traffic and I can't figure out if they're just lucky or if there's something intentional going on. would love to hear from anyone who's cracked this without owning their own domain.

I tried a few AI writing tools and most of them feel like general purpose writing assistants with an SEO badge stuck on. I need something that's actually built with ranking in mind — briefs, outlines, optimization, the whole thing.

Has anyone found tools where the output actually performs in search rather than just reading well? also curious if there's a noticeable difference in rankings between AI-assisted and fully manual content for those who've tested both.