In today’s world, not being readily found online is like not existing. Not having a social media presence is suspect and not having a fully-functioning and robust website where users can find out everything about you is deadly for your brand. There are many methods that SEO’s and beauty marketers use to get found online and create a booming online presence, here we’ll outline some main concepts in how SEO gets you found and why it’s crucial to your online reputation.
SEO Audit and Technical Optimization
Before you get to the colorful stuff, the foundations have to be in order. Your website should be in tip-top shape to handle everything you throw at it, from a technical perspective. In fact, many technical aspects, like site-loading speed, are factors in Google’s ranking algorithm. In order to fully diagnose your website, you’ll need to perform an SEO audit.
According to SEOWorks:
“An SEO Audit is a health check for your website. It looks at the technical infrastructure of your website, the on-page elements and off-page essentials to optimize Search Engine visibility, usability and conversion.”
The SEO Audit is the beginning to every SEO optimization project. If the tech isn’t right, your content can’t reach its full online-visibility potential. You need to diagnose things like broken links, 404 errors, slow page-loading speeds, missing alt text on your website’s images, missing page titles and meta descriptions, and so forth.
A fantastic tool that is widely used by the SEO community is Screamingfrog. This software analyzes a website in minutes and tells you if you have any of the above issues and tells you where they are on your website. It has a free and premium version, depending on what your needs are.
Many ecommerce beauty sites have hundreds, if not thousands, of individual pages because of the sheer amount of product available for purchase. Having a clean SEO protocol for page creation and organization can save you hundreds of hours of optimization and coding clean up on giant sites such as these. If you’d like to check out more SEO data tools we recommend you checking out Dareboost, SiteLiner, SEOSiteCheckUp, SEMRush, Moz, and Ahrefs.
Page speed is another technical SEO aspect that is vital to the search engine health of an ecommerce beauty website. Tools like Pingdom, GTMetrix, or Google’s Page Speed Insights can give you insight into your website’s loading speed and give you an estimate of what actions you need to take in order to improve site speed. The reason why Google places such a large emphasis on page loading speed is because of the user experience. If your website takes too long to load, it is very likely the user will choose to just exit out of your page and go back to Google search results, and with research indicating our fastly-waning attention spans, this is almost a certain possibility.
Here are some examples of page speed tests for Kylie Cosmetics:
As you can see, you can see the levels of optimization for both the mobile version of your site and the desktop version. It also gives you suggestions for increasing the site speed:
After getting your foundations in order, it’s time to move on to keyword research!
Keyword Research and Mapping
This is the foundational level of your SEO/Content strategy – keyword research. Keyword research involves identifying the search queries that your audience uses in order to tailor the content of your site to them more effectively as well as increase your Google search result rankings for those keywords.
For example: if you’re a natural skincare brand, there are many things potential visitors can search for to find you. They may identify your business establishment as an organic brand, a “green” skincare line or a “sustainable” brand. They can use a combination of these words when searching for natural skin care products that align with their values and desires.
This data is from Google’s Keyword Planner – a valuable tool when conducting keyword research. It tells you how many people per month, on an indexed scale, search for a particular key term. It also shows you whether the competition for that keyword in Paid Search is high or low and suggests a bid amount if you’d like to run a campaign on Adwords.
As you can see, these different variations of natural skin care all have different search volume. “Green skincare” has a lower search volume, but has high competition. This means it’s probably not worth pursuing as a target keyword, because people don’t tend to search this way. “Natural skin care” and “organic skin care” both have high volume and high competition, so those are good targets, but still very tough to rank for. The sweet spot is finding a keyword with high volume and low competition. In the beauty industry, that’s tough to do since almost every keyword out there has high competition.
There are many other tools to look up search volume, Google’s Keyword Planner is particularly useful because it shows how much people are bidding for keywords, which gives you a sense of how competitive the keyword is under Google’s data API.
This is the type of thinking that goes into making decisions about which keywords to target organically in your SEO strategies and which keywords to bid on using Adwords, Google’s paid Search Engine Marketing (SEM) platform. Other tools for keyword research include SEMRush, Soovle, UberSuggest, KeywordResearch.io and Moz Keyword Explorer. Learn more about keyword research here.
Keyword-Driven Content Strategy
Creating a piece of content with the intent to rank on specific keywords is the motivation behind a keyword-driven content marketing campaign. It’s what beauty gurus do when they review products or create tutorial blog posts online. Most high-ranking influencers are conscience of the keywords the use and what they’re readership/viewership is searching online. They then provide the content and use other SEO methods (like backlinking, which we’ll discuss in the next section) to help that piece of content rank on Google SERP’s on the first page.
Let’s take a look at what happens when we type in “How to Use Liquid Highlighter”
Let’s dive a little deeper: Here’s the headline of the number 1 result
They’re probably trying to rank for the terms “how to use liquid highlighter”, “how to use powder highlighter”, “how to use highlighter”. Let’s drop this URL into SEMRush and see if this intuition is correct.
Let’s see how they achieved this. Doing a quick skim, let’s see where these keywords show up on the page:
- Headline
- Page Title
- Body of Text
- Alt Text
There’s also a few authoritative links on this site signaling to Google that this, too, is an authoritative site.
You can see from this example how keywords have driven the creation of this piece of content to become the first-page result on Google. Whether it’s blog posts, youtube tutorials, category page descriptions, product description pages, etc. your beauty products should show up in results for specific key terms you’ve intentionally targeted as being high-commercial intent keywords.
After all this talk about keywords and tech SEO it seems that we’ve got the basics down, but there’s one more key ingredient in your website’s SEO cake that needs to be added: Backlinks.
Backlink Research and Domain Authority
This is the definition of a backlink according to Google:
Despite many of the recent Google updates, Backlinks remain a critical Google ranking factor. In the study conducted by Backlinko analyzing 1 million Google search engine result pages, the findings showed that the number of domains linking to a page correlated with rankings more than any other factor.
Not surprisingly, authoritative domains tend to rank higher in Google’s search results, like these SERP results for “high quality eyeshadow”:
Having a robust backlink portfolio for your site is essential to increasing your Domain Ranking. The Domain Ranking is a metric that backlink tools, like Ahrefs, Open Site Explorer, and Majestic, assign a website based on its credibility and trustworthiness.
You can obtain Backlinks by reaching out to other industry-related sites and offering relevant content they would want to feature on their blog or website. Backlinks can also come from PR efforts, infographics, and guest blogging.
Here’s an example:
This is a blog article review from hudabeaty.com for Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty launch collection. The highlighted portion is a backlink that leads directly to Fenty Beauty’s homepage. This is extremely valuable for Fenty Beauty since hudabeauty is an already established and popular website with a domain ranking of 58 (which is nothing to scoff at).
You can use the free backlink research tool called Open Site Explorer to view the Domain Authority rating for your website, or any other website on the web. You can also compare the domain ratings of your beauty competitors. For more backlinking strategies and methods check out this guide by backlinko.
