SEO Strategy for Beauty Brands: Reaching the Top Shelf in Search Engines

The journey to discovering the perfect beauty brand often begins with a simple online search. And the search box leads users to an overwhelming array of options. Brands that appear at the top of search results are perceived as more credible and relevant, making a strong SEO (search engine optimization) strategy crucial. 

Our collaboration with brands like Beauty Works, Slow Cosmétique, and Zohoor shows how important it is to get SEO right. We’ve helped them by developing SEO strategies that improve their visibility online, supporting them through website migrations to maintain their SEO performance, and continuously monitoring their site to adapt to changes in search engine algorithms.

This article will discuss our approach to SEO and highlight how strategic SEO efforts can help a brand maintain and improve its online presence. 

SEO support during migration for Slow Cosmétique

Slow Cosmétique is a selective marketplace featuring over 300 beauty brands that proudly bear the Slow Cosmétique mention that signifies a brand’s commitment to ethical and ecological quality. Our team set out to transition this bustling marketplace from Magento 1.9 to the latest Magento version with ScandiPWA.

Project goals

The migration was also an opportunity to enhance the website’s SEO performance and user experience. Our SEO experts ensured that every aspect of the new marketplace was optimized for search engines, from the early planning stages to the final implementation, with the primary objective of increasing organic traffic while making the website more intuitive and user-friendly.

Our approach

Achieving SEO-friendly URLs was a big part of our strategy. We scrutinized and refined the marketplace’s vast array of product pages, vendor boutiques, category pages, and filtering options, adhering to SEO best practices. We aimed to create a seamless navigation experience that would make finding the perfect ethical and ecological beauty products effortless for users.

We transformed the marketplace’s structure by optimizing URLs for search engines, keeping the user in mind—we ensured that each link was intuitive, easy to follow, and descriptive of the content it led to. 

Results

After the migration, the SEO team’s involvement improved search engine rankings, organic traffic, and overall user experience. For Slow Cosmétique, this meant thriving after a challenging migration and continuing to connect ethical and eco-conscious brands with their audience in a digital space that was more accessible and visible than ever.

SEO support during PWA migration for Eurokos

Eurokos is a leading beauty and cosmetics retailer in its region, offering a wide range of products both online and in stores. As part of their digital transformation to provide their customers with a faster, app-like browsing experience, Eurokos decided to migrate their legacy eCommerce platform to PWA. The migration posed SEO risks due to the heavy reliance on JavaScript, which could affect search engine crawling and indexing.

Project goals

• Ensure smooth SEO performance during and after the migration
• Mitigate any risks related to JavaScript rendering affecting the site’s visibility in search engines
• Maintain site speed and improve user experience while ensuring the website remains SEO-friendly.

Our approach

We conducted a thorough audit of the existing website’s technical setup and SEO performance and implemented best practices for JavaScript SEO, including:

• Linking absolute URLs in the HTML code to avoid incorrect URL generation by bots
• Creating a robots.txt file specifically tailored for JavaScript websites 
• Implementing an in-house pre-rendering solution, Rendy.JS, to ensure the content appeared correctly and quickly on the first load
• Using an SEO-friendly pagination approach with anchor tags.

Results

The migration was a success. Just one month after the migration, organic clicks showed an increase of 11%. When comparing YoY organic metrics, we saw a 16% increase in users, +24% in clicks, and +10% in revenue. 

SEO monitoring and support for Zohoor

Zohoor Alreef has been a prominent player in the Middle East’s perfume industry for over three decades. We partnered up for a digital transformation project: migrating from Magento 1 to Magento 2 with ScandiPWA frontend. scandiweb SEO team’s mission was to ensure that this transition preserved the existing website’s good practices and enhanced Zohoor Alreef’s online visibility and SEO strength after migration.

Pre-migration steps

We began with a gap analysis, which allowed us to evaluate and map out what Zohoor Alreef had already mastered and identify areas to improve. This analysis covered the homepage, product listing pages, layered navigation, product detail pages, content management system, blog, and technical SEO elements such as URL suffixes, pagination, redirects, canonicals, meta robots, robots.txt, XML sitemap, hreflangs, structured data markup, meta titles, meta descriptions, reviews, and custom OG tags.

With the insights from the gap analysis, we prepared the requirements and proceeded with a pre-migration SEO audit of the staging website, verifying and addressing potential SEO vulnerabilities to ensure a smooth transition. Additionally, we did 301 mapping for a successful domain name change.

Go-live support

Our team provided on-demand support throughout the go-live phase, monitoring the website’s performance and identifying and resolving any emerging issues to minimize disruptions. A proactive approach is critical to maintaining SEO rankings and site stability during migration.

Post-go-live monitoring

Migration was successful from an SEO standpoint. Zohoor saw notable improvements in SEO KPIs post-migration—increased clicks (+12.6%) and impressions for branded and non-branded search terms. We also observed an increased number of sessions per user and average session duration, conversion rate, and total number of completed purchases, as well as backlinks and referring pages.

Significant advancements were made in the technical side of the website: page load time was reduced by 21.42%, server connection time by 62.61%, server response time by 66.72%, and page download time by 47.01%, all while keeping a steady domain rating.

SEO program for Beauty Works

Unlike migration-focused support provided in our previous case studies, this example highlights our capability to develop a full-scale SEO strategy from the ground up. We use a holistic approach, creating a comprehensive plan that integrates content optimization, technical SEO improvements, and strategic alignment with the brand’s market goals and driving tangible results through strategic SEO planning and execution.

Beauty Works stands at the forefront of influencer-driven eCommerce. With an army of social media enthusiasts and influential brand ambassadors, they have harnessed the energy of online communities to establish a strong market presence. 

Our main goal was to increase non-branded organic traffic as the main valuable traffic from an SEO perspective. We also aimed to improve the Beauty Works blog, increase traffic via blog and informative content, and increase non-branded organic traffic for commercial pages.

Based on the initial review of the website, we developed a 4-month SEO strategy. Through content and technical audits conducted in the first month, we uncover more immediate opportunities, adapting based on early findings and the strategic priorities of Beauty Works.

Technical SEO

To ensure that all technical SEO issues are resolved and that nothing is holding the website back from ranking, we did a technical SEO audit, cross-checking more than 80 different technical aspects, such as indexation, internal errors, and structured data markup.

We focused on a few main areas:

• Page indexing issue resolution—reviewing issues causing 404 and soft 404 status codes, proposing solutions, and resolving indexing issues where applicable.
• FAQ implementation for PDPs and PLPs to make them more useful and show up better in Google’s search results.
• Meta description optimization to fit better with what people are searching for, helping improve the click-through rate from search results. 
• Multiple technical SEO fixes for the following issues
  • GeoIP redirect issue
  • Blog articles that endlessly load
  • Incorrectly applied HTTP status codes
  • Canonical tag applied to URLs with noindex, nofollow tags
  • URLs that generate a loop
  • No SSR for the store view homepages & blog URLs
  • Mobile header inconsistencies
  • Pages with broken URL rewrites
  • etc.
• SEO monitoring—setting up Content King to provide real-time SEO audit and website change tracking, finding and resolving any technical issues in a timely manner. 

Website quality audit

Given that the Beauty Works website has approximately 2,000 pages generating organic traffic through more than 50,000 keywords, it was necessary to perform a website quality audit to enable effective use of SEO resources. 

Website quality audit helps us to find:

• Content and products to focus on to increase organic traffic in the shortest time
• Content that is underperforming and should be merged or culled
• Similar-intent pages and near-duplicate content
• Existing product and page clustering and internal linking improvement opportunities.

During the website quality audit and 6-month traffic data analysis for Beauty Works, we spotted many areas for improvement in the overall website organic performance. We set a goal to clean up non-valuable content from the website and focus only on valuable content with opportunities to grow and rank.

Keyword gap analysis

At this stage, we analyze top competitors in the industry to identify opportunities for new content development, highlight main transactional keywords, and get a strategic overview of Beauty Works’ current market situation. From this analysis, we outline pages and topics to optimize for, as well as internal linking and other optimization opportunities.

On-page optimization

With strategic on-page adjustments, we aim to clarify content focus, improve search engine understanding, and enhance Beauty Works’ visibility and ranking for key search terms.

To tackle the drop in rankings for “near me” keywords, despite not having physical stores, Beauty Works had an opportunity to leverage its network of partner locations. We reworked the content to better rank for local searches and optimized their Google My Business profile.

We also identified internal competition between pages for certain keywords, confusing search engines on which page to prioritize. To streamline this, we established a page that serves as a hub, linking to related product pages and utilizing the continued search interest in this collaboration to boost traffic. We suggested the creation of tutorials and inspirational content for the blog. Additionally, multiple PLPs and the homepage underwent content expansion. 

International SEO review

The scandiweb SEO team performed an in-depth review of the international aspect of Beauty Works business to highlight opportunities for increased organic traffic generation outside the UK and helped Beauty Works expand to the German market.

Results

A few months into our SEO efforts, we noticed a positive trend in organic KPIs YOY: +19.9% impressions, +29.2% transactions, and +21.6% revenue (June 2023 compared to June 2022). By October, the YOY revenue had reached a 121.8% increase.

Non-branded keyword performance

• +17.8% MOM
• +28.1% YOY
• Many target keywords constantly achieving the 1st positions in UK Google search results
• New featured snippets in Google SERP

During our collaboration, scandiweb also seamlessly transitioned from the old Beauty Works trade store to a new B2B site by leveraging the B2C store’s code base. The SEO team was a crucial part of this migration. 

B2B SEO post-go-live performance

• +57% organic traffic after migration
• average CTR increased from 2.8% to 4.8%
• Average keyword position increased by 3 positions

Conclusion

Our SEO journey with Beauty Works, Slow Cosmétique, and Zohoor showcases the multi-faceted approach required to enhance online visibility in the Beauty industry. Technical SEO can significantly impact organic traffic and user engagement, while a comprehensive SEO strategy that includes audits, on-page optimization, and content strategy development can help rank for highly competitive keywords. SEO success requires technical optimization, strategic content creation, and continuous monitoring. 

If you want to take your beauty brand’s online presence to the next level, contact us today using the form below for a free consultation. Our team of SEO experts will develop a customized strategy that addresses your brand’s challenges and goals.

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