The online beauty industry is rapidly growing, reaching $66 billion in the US alone. With an increasing number of businesses trying to acquire a greater slice of the online industry pie, more are working to learn about, and grow traffic with, beauty industry search engine optimization (SEO) than ever before. The increased visibility in search engines not only amounts to more visits, but it’s great for brand building and awareness, and it also helps a company become a prominent figure in the online beauty industry. Of course, this sounds great in theory, but how do you actually implement beauty SEO successfully?
Today, we are going to look at 5 great ways to make your beauty industry SEO campaign successful. Some methods mentioned are rather simple, while others will require relatively more effort.
1 – Make Sure You Target the Right Keywords
An online cosmetics or skincare business can really hurt themselves in the early going by not making informed decisions in regards to keyword choices. A common misstep in beauty SEO would be to choose a keyword that is too competitive or broad.
For example, by targeting a keyword that is very broad and highly competitive, you may be setting yourself up for an uphill battle with much bigger, more established name brands. It’s good to be ambitious, but you shouldn’t try to topple a giant like L’Oréal Paris in the early stages of your SEO campaign. Start slower and build your authority by creating high quality content that targets long-tail keyword phrases. Generally, the longer and more specific the key phrase you’re targeting is, the more easily you can rank for it.
Moreover, if the keywords that form the basis of your campaign aren’t relevant, they won’t yield the visitors you want and your ROI will suffer. Getting a lot of traffic is one thing, but if no one converts, then what good is it? The simple solution: If things aren’t going well in your campaign, then you should definitely re-evaluate the keywords you are targeting. Then, go back to your initial research and identify the most relevant keywords that strike the right balance between search volume (i.e. people are actually searching for these queries) and minimal or moderate competition ratings. You can use a variety of online and offline tools to find the right keywords. Google’s Keyword Planner is free and a great place to start for beginners.
Quick Tip: Never be afraid to spend a little more time trying to find better key phrases and testing them (some would advise running a PPC campaign prior to your SEO campaign to see which keywords actually lead to conversions for you). More often than not, a smart keyword choice can help you gain dramatically greater visibility (provided your website is properly optimized for the term).
2 – Create the Right Content
If you want to make your beauty industry search engine optimization campaign successful, make sure you create quality content that provides both useful information and actionable steps to readers. This will help it rank higher and help make your campaign successful.
What can you write about? Well, if you’re in the beauty industry, then you can blog or create infographics that inform and educate about skin care, fashion, organic ingredients or anything else that you can share some insight on. Check out Coppyblogger to learn more about effective copywriting.
Quick Tip: Share your content around on social media and get to know other influential bloggers or Twitter users within your industry (Followerwonk is a great tool for finding them). If you can form relationships with these influencers, then you can perhaps get them to share your content with their audiences, a truly excellent boost to your SEO and traffic.
3 – Optimizing Socialization
Social media networks allow businesses to garner a large number of views in a short period of time from a significantly large audience — if you are being marketed correctly. When you post social media content on your various Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest pages and profiles, there is a good chance it may in turn show up in search results. This is especially true with Google-owned social networks like YouTube and Google+. Thus, if you optimize your content using SEO best practices, or even simply inserting keywords, hashtags and links into the content, your visibility may improve and your beauty SEO campaign will benefit.
Picture this, someone searches for the beauty or skincare product you sell in Google. They not only find your website, but they also find the two videos you published on YouTube, a post you made on Google+, and a LinkedIn status update — all on the 1st page. This scenario leaves very little room for your competitors, and it should help you see why social media gives you the potential to dominate Google search results.
Quick Tip: Regardless of the platform you use for your blog, make sure your posts can be easily shared on social media. If you are using WordPress, it should be easy to download and add a simple share plugin that add share buttons at the end of your articles, allowing your customers to share your content directly onto their social media profiles. This helps you gain even greater visibility. Social shares are arguably the best kind of links for SEO, because they’re 100% Google-compliant.
4 – Go Mobile!
Online businesses spend so much time creating and tweaking their websites for desktop and laptop users that they completely forget about an incredibly huge market segment — the mobile market. Research shows that there are over 4.5 billion mobile users, of which 195 million people use their mobile phones to shop online.
If you want to make your beauty SEO campaign truly successful, you need to ensure that you are reaching the mobile market. A mobile SEO campaign involves designing and creating both a mobile website and content that is optimized for the mobile environment.
When creating mobile content, make sure it is stripped down and simple and that only the most relevant information for conversion is used. Instead of placing informative content, place your business proposal at the top, your contact number in between, and your benefits at the end. We know you want to show off your beauty products with large, stylish images and flash videos, but these can really mess with mobile browsers.
Quick Tip: Consider using the website, MobileTest.me to find out your website fairs on a variety of different smartphones, tables and emulators.
5 – Optimize Images
Content is important, but there’s more to beauty industry SEO. You may have the most useful article on the internet but unless the text and pictures are properly optimized, the unfortunate truth is that no one will be able to find it. In addition to optimizing copy for keywords, you can also do the same for the the images within your content. Remember that Google has been providing different types of search (including image and video) for years now, and these are most certainly viable methods for getting found. Think of it like posting a neon sign outside your store. If you label these images so Google knows how to index them appropriately, they will shine very brightly and will grab the attention of a passerby who happens to be searching for something like what you’re providing.
Quick Tip: The two primary components to optimize are the file name and the alt=”” text. It should look something like this (“red lipstick” being the targeted keyword in this example):
<img src=”/images/red-lipstick.jpg” alt=”Luscious red lipstick for a great new look.”/>
You can use Screaming Frog SEO Spider to crawl the images on your website and take inventory of the ones that lack optimized alt text. It is common for websites to have images with random or dynamically-generated file names, but it really is worth it to go back and re-upload them with more descriptive, optimized names. You can’t expect Google to understand what “fnd456.jpg” is, but name it something more relevant, as shown above, and the image will be much more likely to show up in Google image search results.
In summary, beauty industry search engine optimization campaigns may seem rather simple at first, but you can never judge a book by its cover. If beauty industry SEO is done correctly, such as utilizing the tips we’ve given, it can dramatically increase your ROI and your online visibility.
Additionally, here are some additional beauty SEO bonus tips that you can follow to get ranked faster:
Bonus tip # 1: Encourage clients to leave reviews in online directories, such as Yelp, YellowPages.com and Google Maps/Google+ Local. Google places a lot of importance on authority and trust. Thus, genuine reviews from real clients will help you boost your rankings.
Bonus tip # 2: If you run an eCommerce website, consider asking your web developer to implement rich snippets. This is coding that helps search engines better understand the elements on your web page and may in turn enhance your search results with more features. You can use rich snippets to mark up your customer reviews, product information, local business information and more. As an alternative, you can use data highlighting in Google Webmaster Tools, which requires no coding knowledge.
Bonus tip # 3: Consider doing outreach for guest posts. You can ask beauty bloggers to review your products in exchange for some publicity and a link back to your website. If you manage to arrange a product review from an authoritative website in your industry, and it earns you a link, this will do wonders for your beauty industry SEO campaign. Start by searching Google for websites that do skincare product reviews.
If you have any further questions about beauty industry search engine optimization, feel free to write us a comment below or contact us.
The online beauty industry is rapidly growing, reaching $66 billion in the US alone. With an increasing number of businesses trying to acquire a greater slice of the online industry pie, more are working to learn about, and grow traffic with, beauty industry search engine optimization (SEO) than ever before. The increased visibility in search engines not only amounts to more visits, but it’s great for brand building and awareness, and it also helps a company become a prominent figure in the online beauty industry. Of course, this sounds great in theory, but how do you actually implement beauty SEO successfully?
Today, we are going to look at 5 great ways to make your beauty industry SEO campaign successful. Some methods mentioned are rather simple, while others will require relatively more effort.
1 – Make Sure You Target the Right Keywords
An online cosmetics or skincare business can really hurt themselves in the early going by not making informed decisions in regards to keyword choices. A common misstep in beauty SEO would be to choose a keyword that is too competitive or broad.
For example, by targeting a keyword that is very broad and highly competitive, you may be setting yourself up for an uphill battle with much bigger, more established name brands. It’s good to be ambitious, but you shouldn’t try to topple a giant like L’Oréal Paris in the early stages of your SEO campaign. Start slower and build your authority by creating high quality content that targets long-tail keyword phrases. Generally, the longer and more specific the key phrase you’re targeting is, the more easily you can rank for it.
Moreover, if the keywords that form the basis of your campaign aren’t relevant, they won’t yield the visitors you want and your ROI will suffer. Getting a lot of traffic is one thing, but if no one converts, then what good is it? The simple solution: If things aren’t going well in your campaign, then you should definitely re-evaluate the keywords you are targeting. Then, go back to your initial research and identify the most relevant keywords that strike the right balance between search volume (i.e. people are actually searching for these queries) and minimal or moderate competition ratings. You can use a variety of online and offline tools to find the right keywords. Google’s Keyword Planner is free and a great place to start for beginners.
Quick Tip: Never be afraid to spend a little more time trying to find better key phrases and testing them (some would advise running a PPC campaign prior to your SEO campaign to see which keywords actually lead to conversions for you). More often than not, a smart keyword choice can help you gain dramatically greater visibility (provided your website is properly optimized for the term).
2 – Create the Right Content
If you want to make your beauty industry search engine optimization campaign successful, make sure you create quality content that provides both useful information and actionable steps to readers. This will help it rank higher and help make your campaign successful.
What can you write about? Well, if you’re in the beauty industry, then you can blog or create infographics that inform and educate about skin care, fashion, organic ingredients or anything else that you can share some insight on. Check out Coppyblogger to learn more about effective copywriting.
Quick Tip: Share your content around on social media and get to know other influential bloggers or Twitter users within your industry (Followerwonk is a great tool for finding them). If you can form relationships with these influencers, then you can perhaps get them to share your content with their audiences, a truly excellent boost to your SEO and traffic.
3 – Optimizing Socialization
Social media networks allow businesses to garner a large number of views in a short period of time from a significantly large audience — if you are being marketed correctly. When you post social media content on your various Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest pages and profiles, there is a good chance it may in turn show up in search results. This is especially true with Google-owned social networks like YouTube and Google+. Thus, if you optimize your content using SEO best practices, or even simply inserting keywords, hashtags and links into the content, your visibility may improve and your beauty SEO campaign will benefit.
Picture this, someone searches for the beauty or skincare product you sell in Google. They not only find your website, but they also find the two videos you published on YouTube, a post you made on Google+, and a LinkedIn status update — all on the 1st page. This scenario leaves very little room for your competitors, and it should help you see why social media gives you the potential to dominate Google search results.
Quick Tip: Regardless of the platform you use for your blog, make sure your posts can be easily shared on social media. If you are using WordPress, it should be easy to download and add a simple share plugin that add share buttons at the end of your articles, allowing your customers to share your content directly onto their social media profiles. This helps you gain even greater visibility. Social shares are arguably the best kind of links for SEO, because they’re 100% Google-compliant.
4 – Go Mobile!
Online businesses spend so much time creating and tweaking their websites for desktop and laptop users that they completely forget about an incredibly huge market segment — the mobile market. Research shows that there are over 4.5 billion mobile users, of which 195 million people use their mobile phones to shop online.
If you want to make your beauty SEO campaign truly successful, you need to ensure that you are reaching the mobile market. A mobile SEO campaign involves designing and creating both a mobile website and content that is optimized for the mobile environment.
When creating mobile content, make sure it is stripped down and simple and that only the most relevant information for conversion is used. Instead of placing informative content, place your business proposal at the top, your contact number in between, and your benefits at the end. We know you want to show off your beauty products with large, stylish images and flash videos, but these can really mess with mobile browsers.
Quick Tip: Consider using the website, MobileTest.me to find out your website fairs on a variety of different smartphones, tables and emulators.
5 – Optimize Images
Content is important, but there’s more to beauty industry SEO. You may have the most useful article on the internet but unless the text and pictures are properly optimized, the unfortunate truth is that no one will be able to find it. In addition to optimizing copy for keywords, you can also do the same for the the images within your content. Remember that Google has been providing different types of search (including image and video) for years now, and these are most certainly viable methods for getting found. Think of it like posting a neon sign outside your store. If you label these images so Google knows how to index them appropriately, they will shine very brightly and will grab the attention of a passerby who happens to be searching for something like what you’re providing.
Quick Tip: The two primary components to optimize are the file name and the alt=”” text. It should look something like this (“red lipstick” being the targeted keyword in this example):
<img src=”/images/red-lipstick.jpg” alt=”Luscious red lipstick for a great new look.”/>
You can use Screaming Frog SEO Spider to crawl the images on your website and take inventory of the ones that lack optimized alt text. It is common for websites to have images with random or dynamically-generated file names, but it really is worth it to go back and re-upload them with more descriptive, optimized names. You can’t expect Google to understand what “fnd456.jpg” is, but name it something more relevant, as shown above, and the image will be much more likely to show up in Google image search results.
In summary, beauty industry search engine optimization campaigns may seem rather simple at first, but you can never judge a book by its cover. If beauty industry SEO is done correctly, such as utilizing the tips we’ve given, it can dramatically increase your ROI and your online visibility.
Additionally, here are some additional beauty SEO bonus tips that you can follow to get ranked faster:
Bonus tip # 1: Encourage clients to leave reviews in online directories, such as Yelp, YellowPages.com and Google Maps/Google+ Local. Google places a lot of importance on authority and trust. Thus, genuine reviews from real clients will help you boost your rankings.
Bonus tip # 2: If you run an eCommerce website, consider asking your web developer to implement rich snippets. This is coding that helps search engines better understand the elements on your web page and may in turn enhance your search results with more features. You can use rich snippets to mark up your customer reviews, product information, local business information and more. As an alternative, you can use data highlighting in Google Webmaster Tools, which requires no coding knowledge.
Bonus tip # 3: Consider doing outreach for guest posts. You can ask beauty bloggers to review your products in exchange for some publicity and a link back to your website. If you manage to arrange a product review from an authoritative website in your industry, and it earns you a link, this will do wonders for your beauty industry SEO campaign. Start by searching Google for websites that do skincare product reviews.
If you have any further questions about beauty industry search engine optimization, feel free to write us a comment below or contact us.