The beauty industry has become highly competitive as new brands enter the space, especially in the age of convenient online shopping and social media influencers. Buyers have a huge variety of products to choose from these days – so, how do make your brand stand out with marketing for the beauty industry?
By implementing search engine optimization (SEO) techniques, you can grow your online presence and help your business flourish.
In this blog, you’ll learn about SEO and content marketing for the beauty industry, including:
- Creating a content strategy that is helpful for your users
- Leveraging influencer and user-generated content
- Optimizing your website’s technical SEO
- Enhancing your local SEO to reach buyers in your area more effectively
Develop a Content Strategy
No matter the industry, a successful content strategy involves creating copy, imagery, and video that is unique, valuable, and helpful.
Start by creating a strong game plan and cohesive story for your brand that can be used to generate content across your channels, and update it regularly to stay relevant.
The first step in creating the content strategy is thorough research that will help lay the groundwork for your future efforts.
Build Your Buyer Personas
Your marketing department may already have a set of buyer personas that you can use to better understand who you’re trying to reach with your content strategy. Understanding their lifestyle, aspirations, and pain points gives you a great jumping off point for identifying the types of content that will be most helpful to them during their beauty buying journey.
If you haven’t already identified your buyer personas, here are a few key elements to understand:
- Demographics like age, gender identity, income, and location
- Unique identifiers like communication preferences and most used channels (e.g. email, text, social media)
- Challenges or common problems they face (e.g. acne, redness, mature skin textures)
- How you can help them solve those problems and achieve their goals
Interviews, forms, surveys, and other forms of outreach are great ways to gather this information to help build your buyer personas.
Identify Pillars & Content Clusters
Next, use what you know about your customers to build out a content structure. Source beauty content ideas that address their unique pain points and the solutions you can provide for them.
This type of user-focused, helpful content is not only hugely impactful for website performance but also builds strong relationships with your buyers.
A helpful way to organize your content structure is to start with pillars, or broad topics with high search volume, and branch out into subtopics to create clusters.
For example, content ideas for skincare brands may include a pillar topic like “anti-aging” with subtopics like “minimizing crow’s feet,” “brightening skin tone,” “treating wrinkles,” and more.
To help you get started, we’ve put together a list of some potential content pillars specifically for the beauty industry:
- Makeup
- Skincare
- Haircare
- Wellness
- Hot topics or current trends
- Culture and celebrity beauty news
- Behind the scenes at events
- Product spotlights
- Tips and tutorials
Understand Search Intent & Choose Keyword Targets
Choosing the right SEO keywords for beauty products and skincare is all about meeting your customers where they are.
Understanding search intent can help you target the most impactful keywords for each of your pages and posts.
Here’s a breakdown of the four types of search intent:
- Navigational intent indicates that users are searching for a specific website or page (ex. the name of your brand or product) and are ideal for general web pages and product description pages.
- Informational intent indicates that users want to learn more about a topic (e.g. “how to” or “what is” questions) and are ideal for informational and blog pages.
- Commercial intent indicates that users are researching options before making a purchasing decision (ex. comparison, “best” or “review” terms) and are ideal for blog and product pages.
- Transactional intent indicates that a user is ready to buy (e.g. price or shipping related queries about a specific product) and are ideal for product listing and description pages.
Keeping search intent in mind, use a keyword research tool to discover queries your consumers are using to find the products and information they need, then match them with your content based on relevance.
Some consumers may be more savvy with beauty terminology (e.g. “retinol serum”) where others may be seeking solutions to common problems (e.g. “how to cover under eye bags”), so it’s a good idea to incorporate a mix of terms to help reach a broader audience.
To get started with keyword research, here are some high-level categories for the beauty industry:
- Age demographics (Millennials, Gen Z, the aging population)
- Gender-specific (men, women, non-gendered)
- Environmentally friendly beauty products
- Cruelty-free, organic, vegan products
- High-end, luxury beauty
Once you have identified appropriate keywords to target for a given post or page, incorporate the most relevant keyword in the title tag and meta description of your page, the primary headline (or “H1”), and early in the main content.
Check out our guide to SEO content writing and tips for optimizing product pages for more SEO best practices.
Leverage Influencer Marketing & User-Generated Content
Some of the best skincare marketing campaigns incorporate content created by online influencers or directly by their consumers.
Influencer marketing and user-generated content (UGC) have become hugely popular in the beauty industry because users see faces that they feel they can trust. This content is especially effective when it demonstrates products’ capabilities in real-world scenarios.
Product demo and tutorial videos are great opportunities for beauty brands.
Consider allocating some time and budget to outreach to influencers whose audiences match your buyer personas or existing customers who can act as brand champions to reach audiences that are already primed to buy.
Optimize Technical SEO
The beauty industry is understandably image-heavy, so you should be mindful of your page speed scores and other core web vitals (CWV), which contribute to user experience.
Additionally, technical SEO can set you apart from competitors through rich results, which help search engines to understand your content and take search results to the next level by increasing visibility. Incorporating appropriate schema markup, like FAQ and review snippets, makes you eligible for these rich results opportunities.
Enhance Your Local SEO
Since many consumers still shop for beauty products in person – think color matching and swatching – it’s also important to make sure users can find your physical locations when shopping.
Be sure that your location and contact information are up to date and easily accessible across the web. We’ve created a complete local SEO checklist to make this process simple.
Tying It All Together: Marketing for the Beauty Industry
Search engine optimization involves ongoing efforts to keep your brand at the top of search engine results pages and adapting to an ever-changing digital landscape. At ROI Revolution, our SEO experts are equipped to help optimize ecommerce websites and discover untapped growth opportunities for every industry. If you’re seeking a partner to help your beauty brand shine, send us a message today!
Sources
- HB Freelance, Beauty SEO Tips.
- SEO Design Chicago, Why is local SEO important for cosmetic brands?
