SEO Tips For Unknown Activewear Brands Trying To Compete

The sportswear market has become extremely competitive, while some would argue saturated would be more accurate. As a new brand starting out trying to crack this market, it can feel a bit like David vs Goliath as you look to compete with iconic brands. With bigger brands having much larger marketing budgets, many smaller activewear brands turn to SEO, where the playing field is a little more level.

With that in mind, we’ve put together some strategic SEO tips that can help you gain the upper hand as an unknown activewear brand trying to steal market share from much bigger players.

Quality Over Quantity

Link building is an important part of SEO, and a strong backlink profile will signal to Google that you’re a trusted business. But in 2025, a strong backlink profile is more about the quality of sites linking to yours, as opposed to the quantity.

Try to identify websites that generate high volumes of traffic, but also fall within your niche. Any website that covers topics such as sports, fitness, and health will be more relevant to your brand. Not only is this good for SEO, it may also bring more qualified traffic to your website.

You may find it tough to gain these types of links in the beginning, so you may want to explore the option of dedicating some of your budget to PR links, which will come from well-established websites.

Target Less Competitive Keywords

While you’d love to rank first for keywords which generate 100,000 searches every month, this isn’t going to happen overnight. In the beginning, it may be a good idea to dedicate a large portion of your time to targeting less competitive keywords.

Less competitive keywords are likely to be what we refer to as long-tail keywords; these are searches that are made up of more words, usually more than three words. For instance, it’s probably unrealistic to expect to rank for ‘gym clothing’ as an unknown startup.

Focusing on more niche terms, such as ‘oversized gym t shirts’, may be a far more fruitful strategy due to fewer brands focusing on this term.  

Build Branded Links

As a new brand, it can be easy to focus on the short-term and things that bring in immediate revenue. In terms of SEO, this often means focusing on keywords that relate to products or collection pages.

However, you also need to appreciate that as a new brand, you may not even be ranking for your own name. Ranking for your brand name is important as a new company, as this will be a common way for your audience to find you. 

Imagine you see a new activewear brand being worn by someone you follow on Instagram. You like the look of the products and can make out the name of the brand on the logo, but you don’t know the brand’s website URL or their socials. The most likely solution would be to type A-Game into Google and hope the website appears at the top of the search results.

Unlinked Mentions Matter Too 

More and more users are using AI as a search engine. As a result, it’s important to optimise your SEO strategy so that your brand is appearing in AI-generated snippets and AI responses as well as on search engine results pages.

Google’s AI summaries and ChatGPT’s responses to questions don’t rely as heavily on links. Instead, they’re able to scour the internet and understand the context of different web pages. It can be good for your brand to appear in articles with titles such as ‘Top 5 Upcoming Activewear brands’ or ‘Why A-Game Is The Next Big Thing’ even if your brand isn’t linked in the article.