Top 6 SEO Strategies for Cosmetics Industry Websites

As a cosmetics industry website, you need to show up in your potential clients’ search queries so that they learn about your beauty products and start buying from you. The cosmetics market, which is expected to reach 429.8 billion by 2022, is highly competitive, and there are thousands of websites striving to bring customers to their pages for selling their self-care merchandise. When your prospects search for products online, Google uses hundreds of different ranking factors to deliver the most relevant pages in a query. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will help you target the ranking factors Google algorithm uses, so your cosmetics industry website improves positions in search engines and more users look at the products you sell.

1. Learn About Your Customers

SEO is all about improving your website for better user experience and communicating the context of the site with Google. This is so it understands the relevance of your beauty products to users’ needs, and you can increase the traffic to your site. SEO is not a single step you take that will bring results overnight, but a long process that requires time and energy. The first thing you need to determine before your big departure in the SEO world is who your customers are. If you create your buyer personas before building your SEO strategy, it will be an excellent foundation for your optimization efforts, as you will be aware of who you are trying to bring to your site. Looking at your merchandise, you need to determine who you need to land on your site so you can make more sales while your customers find what they need.

Creating buyer personas for cosmetics products may not be as tough as you may think, and the reason lies within your products. The creams, lotions or other merchandise you sell are already designed specifically for men or women or specific age groups. If you primarily sell face creams for women above 50 to help reduce wrinkles in their skin, your buyer persona won’t be an 18-year-old male. However, a buyer persona isn’t only about age or gender, but more specific identifiers such as the education level, income, buying behavior, interests, and concerns. Fictional characters, also known as market personas, represent the ideal customers you want to bring to your site.

To collect information about your customers and see their buying patterns, you can create questionnaires for your existing clients and ask questions that most interest you. These can be such simple questions as “how did you hear about our website?” or “How frequently do you shop for beauty products?”

With the information you have, you can group your customers into common issues and goals.

Gabriella might be a real estate agent, 45 years old, with an average income of $75,000. She’s married with two children and lives in Charleston, SC. Her goal is to find sunscreen to protect her skin from sun damage while moving around the city during sunny days in Charleston. Gabriella wants to purchase a sunscreen that comes in small packaging so that it can fit in her purse. She needs a sunscreen that doesn’t make her sweat and won’t ruin her makeup. She shops for skincare products online regularly, but she is frustrated with the time required to choose between hundreds of similar skincare products.

Not that all customers shopping for sweat-proof sunscreen must be from South Carolina, but you may want to consider your ideal customers’ weather conditions. A sweat-proof sunscreen will not be an essential part of someone’s life in North Dakota – one of the driest states in the US.

2. Determine How Customers Will Find You

Learning how your clients are looking for your products online isn’t any less important than who your customers are. The way people conduct their searches online is crucial for building a successful SEO strategy. Users type words and phrases into search engines – known as keywords. For instance, Gabriella can write something like “best sunscreen that won’t ruin my makeup.” Your goal is to appear at the top of Gabriella’s search results, so she lands on your cosmetics website. The first thing you can do is brainstorm keyword ideas by looking at your products and your buyer personas to learn how your customers are going to find you. How else can Gabriella search for your sunscreen? She could possibly use: “oil-free sunscreen,” “sunscreen for oily skin,” “sunscreen for humid weather,” “sunscreen for acne-prone skin,” etc.

There are numerous keyword ideas you can come up with related to your sunscreen. Tools like SEMrush allow you to see keywords related to the seed keyword you choose. A seed keyword can be “sunscreen.” Just type it in, and you will get keyword variations. Next to each keyword, you’ll see metrics such as:

• Keyword volume – average monthly searches
• Trend – the interest of searchers towards the keyword during a 12 month period
• Keyword difficulty – how difficult would it be to outrank competitors
• Cost Per Click – how much advertisers pay for a user’s click on an ad for that keyword
• Competitive Density – the level of competition among advertisers bidding on the keyword

And how many results are in the search for the given keyword.

When choosing the keywords for your SEO strategy, you must consider the essential metrics, such as the volume and keyword difficulty, to see if you can get traffic to the site with the chosen keyword. Usually, the higher the volume of a keyword, the higher the keyword difficulty. There is no perfect number for each metric, and the way you interpret these depends on the size of your business, your products, competitors, etc.

3. Provide Potential Clients with Helpful Content

There is way more to your cosmetics website than just the catalog of the products. Most of the time, your customers start their journey of discovering self-care products by learning about them through conversations, blogs, videos, or other types of content on the internet. Users may type “which sunscreen is the best in the humid weather.” Instead of providing a page of the product to buy, Google offers a blog post to the searcher to read about the best sunscreens in humid weather. Readers can see the pros and cons of different available options and then decide which product they want to buy.

Creating a blog will help you answer your customers’ questions and address their concerns. By writing about essential topics in the cosmetics industry, you increase your site’s chances of appearing in more relevant queries. The more you write, the more keywords you can target so that you can increase traffic to your site. Additionally, you increase the trustworthiness of your business. If visitors trust you, you have more chances of converting them to paying customers.

Create a schedule and publish blog posts regularly on essential trends in the industry, self-care tips, and the products you sell. It will be a great addition to your site and an excellent way to start building relationships with customers.

4. Create an SEO Friendly FAQ Page

Some may underestimate the power of an FAQ page, but it can help your customers in the purchasing process by providing answers to the most common questions, eliminating unnecessary emails, and reducing calls to customer support in order to find more information – and it can boost your SEO.

If you have an FAQ page on your site, you are able to answer crucial questions your customers may be asking Google, you improve your rankings, and you can bring more targeted traffic. Many of the questions you answer on the FAQ page can also make a great blog post. So some of the answers may contain links to your blog articles for visitors to read.

“A Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) page contains a list of questions and answers pertaining to a particular topic. Properly marked up FAQ pages may be eligible to have a rich result on Search and an Action on the Google Assistant, which can help your site reach the right users.” – Google

The critical factor in your FAQ page is the schema markup – a code for SEO on your website to help search engines provide searchers with better search results. Schema markup gives context to your content, so Google better understands the relevance of your page. The FAQ schema markup can get you to featured snippets, also known as position 0 – the featured snippet section above the list of pages in search results. Implementing schema markup to your FAQ page can help you improve your website visibility and boost your cosmetic’s website SEO. According to Neil Patel, less than one percent of businesses benefit from the FAQ schema markup.

5. Improve Your Site Speed

Even when you create compelling content and have products your customers need, if your site isn’t working correctly, you will not rank well in search results. One of the most common reasons for failing to comply with Google’s expectations about your website’s health is the time your site takes to load in users’ browsers. If your site takes more than 3 seconds to load, your customers will go to a different cosmetics website to find the products they need. There are various reasons your site may be taking a long time to load and to find out if it falls in the category of slow and how to speed it up, click here.

Another reason for Google not liking your site can be a design that is not mobile-friendly.

The majority of customers will visit your website from their phones. If your site can’t load properly on their devices, it means that they will have an unpleasant experience and perhaps will leave the site. Google doesn’t want to provide such pages to users, and failing to have a mobile-friendly site may be harming your rankings. To see if mobile-users are having a pleasant experience with your site, click here.

The layout of the pages on your site should also be well organized and simple. Visitors should quickly find what they need. A design with too many colors, pictures, texts, or graphics will result in the users having an unenjoyable experience with your site.

6. Create Videos

You can help your potential customers not only by the blog posts you write but also the videos you create. When it comes to cosmetics and beauty products, people want to know ‘how-to’ use products and get the maximum benefit out of each one they have. Videos you create can be a simple ‘how-to’ guide on essential topics that your clients want to know. If we go back to Gabriella – your buyer persona – she is concerned about possible sun damage to her skin. You can create a video on how to properly apply SPF over makeup. Some topics are better seen, and applying SPF to the skin is one of them.

Most importantly, videos can boost your SEO. People stay on a page twice as long if it features a video, which may signal to Google that the page is relevant. Besides, the more high-quality content you create, the more backlinks you might get – other sites linking to yours. Videos are a great addition to your site and will help your customers find answers to their questions.

We hope with the strategies above, you can bring more customers to your site and increase sales. This will help your cosmetics company keep growing and assisting people in their self-care routines.