The beauty and skincare market is incredibly competitive. Sales of makeup, skincare, and haircare grew even faster than apparel sales over the past few years. So how do you make your products stand out in a sea of competitors?
Search engine optimization is a crucial strategy for matching your unique beauty brand to your ideal customers. Successful SEO strategies focus on storytelling, audience segmentation, and technical updates to ensure that your products rank highly in relevant search results.
As a full-service digital marketing agency, this is exactly what we do at SEO Design Chicago. Let us explain how the beauty SEO process works to increase your visibility and drive more sales.
Not sure if your current SEO strategy is working? Schedule a free comprehensive SEO audit today!
Best Beauty and Skincare SEO Strategies
The ultimate goal of SEO for beauty products is to make sure that your beauty or skincare products and services show up as top-ranking results for relevant searches. The #1 result on the search engine results page averages a click-through rate of 36.4% — dramatically higher than lower-ranked listings. A higher ranking gives you a valuable competitive advantage.
The best strategy for beauty and skincare brands combines different SEO tools to increase your ranking for the most relevant search terms.
Here are some of the ways we do that.
On-page SEO Services for Beauty and Skincare Brands
Search engines are constantly evaluating, or “crawling,” your website to rank it against its competitors. Many of the factors affecting your ranking aren’t even visible to you or your site’s visitors. On-page SEO deals with everything on your website — the content, coding, tags, links, images, display, navigation, and design. Optimizing each element of your on-page SEO ensures that your website will rank higher in search.
While this seems like a dizzying array of items to double-check on your website, think about it this way: everything on your website is within your control. If your product images aren’t displaying correctly on mobile devices, you’ll get an immediate bump for fixing that.
That’s why our SEO team typically starts with an on-page SEO audit to make sure there are no technical errors or bad design elements dragging you down.
Link Building Services for Beauty and Skincare Businesses
The beauty industry runs on trust and recommendations. Around 55% of customers trust online reviews when they buy a new product. Building a network of high-quality links to review sites, shopping platforms, and other brands can increase your cosmetics or skincare website’s trustworthiness among shoppers and search engines.
On the flip side, poor quality links can hurt your rankings. That’s why it’s crucial to build a gradual, sustainable link network that is supported by reputable backlinks.
WordPress SEO for Beauty and Skincare Companies
Your beauty or skincare company needs an online storefront, and for many leading beauty brands, that’s WordPress.
To create a professional WordPress site, you need to have your own domain name and reliable hosting to make a solid first impression on visitors. Furthermore, you need to have ongoing security and plugin updates, or your website may start to slow down. Since most people will navigate away from a website if it takes more than three seconds to load, your slow load times can negatively impact your SEO.
SEO Design Chicago offers customized WordPress migration, graphic design, hosting, and maintenance packages.
Shopify SEO for Beauty and Skincare Products
Shopify has grown in popularity for top beauty sellers in recent years. Top names like Glossier, Kylie Cosmetics, and Fenty Beauty all use Shopify to sell their products.
Just like you need the right SEO keywords for your website, you need the right keywords in your product descriptions to help market your products effectively.
For example, customers might be searching terms like “best skincare routine for winter skin.” Optimizing the descriptions for your new moisturizer will help your beauty brand capitalize on the benefits of SEO trends.
SEO Website Optimization for Beauty and Skincare Brands
Is your website just sitting there, with a catalog of your products, but no customers? Or is it working as an ongoing sales-generating machine?
One of the best ways to optimize your website for more sales and brand exposure is through expert keyword research. This is more complex than simply including basic, relevant keywords, like “lipstick” and “dry skin.” An expert keyword strategy takes into account user intent and finds opportunities to rank highly for search terms with high conversion rates and low competition.
Long-tail keywords match particular user questions. For example, skin care is a broad category, with lots of competition. The best SEO strategy will focus on the specific consumer that your products can help. For example, maybe you create haircare products for natural hair that is recovering from chemical treatments. In that case, a search term like “how do I get my natural hair back after relaxers” could be a competitive term for you.
Our team at SEO Design Chicago has years of experience navigating the ever-changing world of SEO strategy. We use a combination of time-tested monitoring and analytics tools, along with an understanding of the latest algorithm changes, to custom-design a winning strategy tailored to help you succeed.
SEO Best Practices for Salons & Clinics
Marketing services in the beauty niche require additional SEO efforts. You still need all the same SEO tactics that direct-to-consumer product sales use, but you also need to pay attention to local SEO and in-person marketing strategies.
The best hair and skincare SEO strategies rely on building trust and connection with your geographically relevant audience.
Local SEO Strategy for Beauty Service Providers
If you run a skincare clinic, salon, or barbershop, you need to match your services to people searching for them. They probably won’t know your business name, so you need to match your local marketing efforts to their particular hair or skin concern, the services they want, and their geographic area.
This is what local SEO for skincare and haircare does. Local SEO links your main beauty site to local review listings and geographic search methods to show your beauty or skincare business as the obvious choice for people in your city.
Claiming and optimizing your Google Business Profile is the best place to start. This ensures that your business listing, which appears after a relevant search, is accurate — you would be surprised at how many salons and skincare clinics have outdated business hours on their public profiles!
Once that’s done, you also want to streamline your Yahoo and Bing Profiles, Facebook Business Profile, and Yelp profile to make sure they’re consistent. Add your accurate, updated information to any available public listings — your local Better Business Bureau or industry-specific boards are must-haves. These are called your local citations, and quantity and quality both matter here.
Finally, all these public listings are the perfect place to request service and product reviews. Customers trust these rankings, and positive reviews will make it far more likely that you rank for searches like “best skincare clinic near me” or “natural skincare spa open on weekends.”
Do you have a local SEO strategy? See how your website is performing with a free local SEO audit.
Combining SEO and In-Person Advertising
Advertising in the beauty and skincare industry is no longer just in-person or online — customers now blend both experiences. Today, a customer is likely to find a skincare brand’s website through a keyword-based search targeting a specific issue, then maybe visit a local salon that uses that skincare brand exclusively by clicking on a Google local service ad and booking an appointment.
A featured ad can give your clinic, spa, or salon the extra push it needs to convert leads into in-person visits. With a click-through rate of around 3.17%, Google search ads can complement your organic strategy to drive additional sales and services.
FAQs: Best Practices for Beauty Brands
We asked our SEO and content experts some of the top questions in the beauty niche to find out how they handle these tricky topics. Take a look at some of their answers.
Why isn’t my skincare website showing up on Google?
Your SEO strategy needs work. Try checking your on-page SEO for issues like broken links, 404 errors, slow load times, or display problems. Updating these technical SEO issues often improves your Google ranking. Adding content that engages your audience with interesting beauty advice and includes relevant keywords will also help your skincare website show up on Google.
How to get more online sales for beauty products?
Increasing leads and conversions for beauty products relies on connecting your products with the beauty enthusiasts searching for them. This requires a sophisticated SEO strategy that clearly matches the benefits of your beauty products to the desires and concerns of your ideal cosmetics and skincare consumers. You can achieve this by incorporating long-tail beauty and skincare SEO keywords, optimizing product descriptions and images, and adding customer reviews to build trust.
What is the best way to market a new skincare line?
We recommend a multi-channel strategy that leverages organic search, social media, and email marketing to communicate the benefits of your new skincare line to your ideal customers. Make sure that the content of your product descriptions, titles, tags, and images is optimized for relevant searches.
What are SEO strategies for launching a cosmetics brand?
Building high-quality backlinks through reviews from reputable websites is a great way to launch a new cosmetics brand. Make sure you include keyword-optimized descriptions, titles, and tags for your skincare and cosmetics products to help match your new brand to consumer trends and pain points. Integrating optimized social media channels is another great way to help beauty brands get noticed and generate more reviews and backlinks.
What has a higher return on investment when marketing a beauty brand: influencer marketing or SEO?
Influencer marketing can be useful, but SEO is essential for beauty brands. Influencer campaigns often provide short-term bumps in brand awareness and popularity, while SEO is foundational and scalable, promoting your brand to a wider audience and allowing for ongoing optimization. In short, they serve different audiences and purposes. Using influencer marketing and SEO together helps build your brand’s reputation, generates backlinks and consumer reviews, and increases relevance to consumer search trends.
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