Beauty SEO Tips

Beauty is a multi-billion industry and according to the analysts, this will become even bigger and will continue to grow faster than ever compared to other industries. It’s all anyone can blog about, post about or talk about in real life. There are so many influencers, bloggers, vloggers that are disseminating information. The beauty market is incredibly influential in skincare. More and more new beauty brands are popping up because it is a booming industry. Most beauty brands invest a lot of marketing budget on social (especially Facebook, Instagram and YouTube) as that’s where the bulk of their audience spend time the most in researching about skincare, personal care, makeup, fragrances, toiletries, hair care & grooming products, accessories for eyes, face, lips, nails, colour cosmetics and more. However, search, especially SEO will help your customers find your brand online for free if you dominate for niche high volume beauty keywords.

Let’s look at some of the big players in the beauty industry that dominate in SEO. Below is the recently released leader board released by PI-Datametrics for the Beauty Industry showing brands that dominate in Google UK.

Beauty is one of the most competitive industries when it comes to SEO presence. The SERPs are dominated by leading multi-brand retailers like Superdrug, iconic brands like L’oreal, fashion magazines like Elle, new and independent beauty brands and YouTube video carousels. Before you start building your SEO and content strategy for your beauty company, it’s essential to understand your audience/buyer personas.

So, what’s the objective of this Beauty industry search engine optimisation guide?

• Improve high page rankings for beauty terms on major search engines and outrank the fierce competition for target terms.
• Show up for your brand name or “beauty term + city” searches in your local area.
• Make some savings from otherwise expensive high CPC beauty search terms. An increase in organic traffic and better rankings would mean increased ROI and long term success for the brand compared to paid channels.

SEO tips for Beauty Industry websites

STEP 1: Beauty Keyword Research

Keyword research is the most important step when it comes to eCommerce Beauty SEO. The keyword research will depend on the type of Beauty website and your target audience. The objective here is to optimise for the high-volume keywords relevant to your target audience who could fall under the below categories;

• Younger Age Demographics / Millennials.
• Ageing Population
• Gender-specific. Could cater to both men & women or could be in the market for men’s beauty products & cosmetics only.
• Environmentally-Friendly Products
• Sustainable brand
• High-end luxury consumers.

Based on the target audience, this step involves identifying the target search terms to feed into your SEO & Brand Content strategy.

Let’s take a look at some of the top search terms in the Beauty industry. According to SEMRush, in Google UK, the searches for “make up” related keywords get around 6.8 million per month. “Skincare” variations get around 600,000 searches per month and lastly “beauty” variations make up around 11 million searches per month.

Below is the 12-month seasonality trend for top terms such as skincare, makeup and beauty keywords. The keywords were gathered using a combination of SEMRush & Google Keyword Planner. Ahrefs, Soovle, UberSuggest, KeywordResearch.io and Moz Keyword Explorer are other tools you could use to perform keyword research.

Skin Care SEO Keywords

As you can see, the term “tropical skincare” has the highest average monthly searches which peak in December. Click here to view the complete list of Skincare SEO keywords. Please note, I have excluded keywords with average search volume less than 100.

Makeup SEO Keywords

As you can see, the term “makeup” has the highest average monthly searches which peak in November. Click here to view the complete list of makeup SEO keywords. Please note, I have excluded keywords with average search volume less than 500.

Beauty Keywords List

As you can see, the brand term “beauty bay” has the highest average monthly searches which peak in November. Click here to view the complete list of beauty SEO keywords. Please note, I have excluded keywords with average search volume less than 400.

Shortlist the best high-value keywords that your potential customers might be using from your keyword research. The search volume, competition, keyword relevancy and intent are some of the factors to consider when identifying the best keywords for your beauty brand.

STEP 2: Have a Solid Content Strategy

Shoppers are purchasing more beauty products online than ever before because they want to research online before making a purchase. So there’s a huge opportunity for beauty brands to provide good content at all stages of the purchase funnel to truly connect with their audience and increase engagement with consumers.

The data from the beauty keyword research step is very valuable in coming up with an effective content strategy to address search intent. Whether it’s on platforms like Instagram / Facebook, Influencer blogs, online videos or via the site’s own blog, the brands are investing a lot of money in producing the right content to be seen by their target audience. A blog these days is a must-have for a brand to distribute valuable content online and a way to improve rankings of your primary and long-tail keywords.

Beauty SEO Content Strategy Tips

• Get in front of the shoppers early in the research shoppers. Have a dedicated slot on the homepage to link to your content.
• Identify your content pillars that will form the basis of your on-going content. Remember that to retain audiences and to keep them coming back, you’ll need to create a brand personality, tone, and atmosphere that is familiar to your fans. That’s why creating content pillars and sticking to them will enable you to create the right content that stands out as well. Examples of content pillars for the beauty industry;
  • Makeup
  • Beauty
  • Haircare
  • Wellness
  • Food
  • Trends / What’s Trending
  • Home
  • Culture & Celebrity
  • Travel
  • Fashion
  • Brand events & shows, behind-the-scenes
  • Looks
  • Product Picks
  • Tips, How-To & Tutorials
• Create content to answer user content by targeting your keywords in all your content pieces.
• Don’t just stick to makeup and beauty content. Try to include broad lifestyle content about travel, fashion, culture & celebrity content. However, always consider your brand’s audience and identity when determining whether to keep content broad or narrow.
• The best forms of beauty content are helpful advice, how to’s, tutorials and beauty lesions.
• Don’t forget to include links to your beauty categories and product pages from within your blog content.
• Include guest posts by beauty influencers on your blog to engage with the influencer audience.
• Create content with social channels in mind. Add lots of videos and images to your blog posts as visual content adds life to text-only content. Additionally, these assets can be shared on social media and Youtube and can link back to your site.

Let’s now look at the top-performing blog posts of popular online brands

From the above examples, what’s common is the brand’s top blog pages focus on high-commercial intent keywords via how-to’s or informative advice posts. It’s important for every brand to develop original, shareable, engaging content that gets linked automatically because of its value.

STEP 3: Perform a Technical SEO Site Audit

Beauty retailer sites are usually large eCommerce websites with thousands of products and several pages which is precisely why It is essential to have a website which is implemented correctly from a technical perspective. Tools like ScreamingFrog, Botify, Deepcrawl, Oncrawl, Sitebulb etc lets you perform technical SEO audits. A few things that need to be considered to improve your visibility online are;

1. Having the right site structure affects the website visibility in a positive way.
2. Fast site load speed is vital to any website as it improves user experience and is also one of the ranking factors. Google’s Page Speed Insights can provide a good insight into your website’s page speed metrics, the issues and actions you need to take to improve your page speed scores. There are other tools like Pingdom, GTMetrix, Dareboost etc that can be used for the same purpose.
3. Fix broken links (404 pages).
4. Ensure your site is designed with mobile-first and mobile-friendly principles in mind.
5. You can’t avoid large brand images on a beauty website. Ensure they are well compressed using lossless compression and create images of the right sizes.
6. Implement schema on your site to provide additional information search engines to understand your pages better. Beauty websites typically have schema implemented on product pages, and breadcrumbs on product listing pages.

Step 4: On-page Optimisation

1. Include alt text of your website’s images.
2. Optimised page titles, headings, meta descriptions, body text and URLs using your target terms.
3. Optimise your product listing pages and product description pages with relevant headings on lots of details of the product. Urbandecay & Glossier are great examples of an optimised product description pages with a lot of product content, visuals (photos & videos) and reviews section to convince the visitor to purchase.

Make sure you optimise the site page with the right keywords. If you are a new brand produce content to target long-tail keywords before moving on to broad and high competitive search terms.

Step 5: Off-page Optimisation

Backlinks still remain one of the most critical Google ranking factors besides tech and on-page SEO. There is a correlation between higher rankings on pages with high-quality backlinks.

1. Develop a long term white-hat link building strategy to obtain high-quality backlinks from local and relevant websites that not only counts as a vote but also drives relevant referral traffic.
2. Don’t just build links to the homepage. You links profile must also include deep links pointing to your product listing and product description pages
3. Competitor backlink research: Use tools like Ahrefs, Majestic, SEMRush, Open site explorer or Backlinko to spy on competitor backlinks.
4. Outsource your link building, Digital PR and influencer outreach to a specialised agency as this is a full-time job while you focus on the on-page and the tech SEO elements.

Step 6: Local SEO

If you own a physical store and want to appear for brand name + city/near me searches, then there are a few things to consider to improve your local SEO ranking.

Set up a Google My Business account for your store locations. This is required if you want to appear on the Google local pack for near me or brand local searches. You can enrich your GMB listings by adding photos, optimised business description targetting your high volume keywords, showcasing your reviews and social channels.