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Online fashion retailers must understand Google’s keyword gender bias
By Karl Kleinschmidt, SEO manager, Searchmetrics W
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...adding certain words to longer tail search terms changes the gender of the search results that Google displays.”
hen consumers search for ‘jeans’ or ‘pajamas’ on Google,
the first page of its search results almost exclusively shows pages targeting women according to a new analysis by Searchmetrics, the search and content optimisation platform. And online fashion retailers need to be paying greater attention to this kind of gender bias in which Google automatically decides the gender intent of certain keywords.
The research, which analysed the search results for 10,000 fashion-related search terms on
Google.com, found that even when the search terms did not include a stated gender (using words such as men’s, boy’s, women’s, woman’s etc) around 20 per cent produced first page results that were identified as being gendered. 13 per cent were categorised as being female-gendered by Google, while 3 per cent were male-gendered – the remaining 4 per cent produced a mix of search results, some targeting men and some targeting women.
Deeper analysis by Searchmetrics reveals that
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adding certain words to longer tail search terms changes the gender of the search results that Google displays. One example is ‘belt’, which transitions from mixed-gender to female-only when you add ‘cute’, ‘trendy’ or ‘waist’ – and male-only when you add words like ‘cool’ or ‘best’.
Colours and materials have a similar effect; adding the word ‘gold’ makes ‘belt’ female, while adding ‘leather’ can make the search results Google displays primarily male.
The research from Searchmetrics suggests that online fashion retailers should review the top keywords they are targeting and check if Google has a gender bias for those terms. They should take this into consideration when building their SEO and content strategy explains Karl Kleinschmidt, SEO manager at Searchmetrics:
“For a search like ‘jeans’ which Google’s sees primarily as a female search term, you would find it harder to get on Google’s first page with pages targeting men – it would be a
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