May 16, 2024
The State of Skincare SEO in 2024
Skincare is one of the most competitive industries. To achieve visibility, capture revenue, and drive meaningful growth, your brand needs to leverage every possible marketing strategy, including SEO.
As a cost-effective, long-term business investment, SEO is key for fledgling e-commerce businesses and established enterprises alike, especially when you implement a customized, ROI-oriented strategy.
Whether you’re implementing optimizations on your own or working with a trusted digital marketing agency, it’s vital to understand the state of skincare SEO in 2024. This knowledge will inform both your strategy and your tactics.
Here are a few elements of skincare SEO your brand should prioritize in 2024.
User Experience
User experience is a fairly broad aspect of skincare SEO that encompasses many subelements, but digital marketers can’t afford to overlook it, especially in the hyper-competitive skincare industry.
Your site’s user experience is key to moving customers through the funnel, maximizing conversion rates, and building loyalty. Skincare is quite personal, and your user experience is how you show shoppers you understand their needs and care about their well-being.
These are some of the primary points you should prioritize as you create a best-of-web UX.
Hyper-Personalization, Courtesy of AI
While a premium UX is crucial regardless of industry, skincare brands have opportunities to deliver hyper-personalized, engaging experiences that allow shoppers to try your products and experiment with customized skincare regimens.
You can use conversational AI tools to offer virtual consultations. This new technology also presents an opportunity to level up the mainstay “skin quiz” with an AI-powered complexion analysis, followed by product recommendations based on the results combined with user-entered details about their current regimen, goals, and preferences.
Considering that digital natives are making up even more of the market, adopting technologies like AR and AI to enhance skincare product discovery is essential for any brand looking to gain or maintain a competitive advantage.
But as you do so, be sure to consider how this will impact your site performance.
Keep Your Finger on the Pulse of Your Website UX
There are many finer aspects of user experience worth drilling down on, like page speed, navigation, and hierarchy, to name a few. But sometimes, the best way to gauge your site’s user experience is to explore it firsthand and honestly assess it from a user’s perspective.
You could also ask new team members—folks who may not have spent much time on your site or haven’t used it at all—for their honest feedback. A fresh perspective can be extremely valuable.
In short, if there’s something you don’t enjoy about your site, odds are your customers don’t like it either.
Identify opportunities for optimization and prioritize these action items. The sooner they’re resolved, the better your brand will be able to compete.
Key Takeaway: User experience is crucial to generating leads and conversions. Focus on making your site, apps, and other tools as seamless as possible, making it easy for users to go from discovering to purchasing as quickly as possible.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO can get complicated fast, so it’s normal to hand off many tasks to your development team or agency partner.
The important thing is your team has the ability to perform a technical site audit, prioritize optimizations, and work through them in a timely manner.
Rewriting duplicate meta descriptions, shortening title tags where necessary, and using canonical tags properly are nowhere near as exciting as launching a new product or rolling out your brand’s first AR try-on tool.
However, technical SEO is vital to ensuring your site can be easily understood and navigated by users and search engines alike. For skincare brands, optimizing technical SEO can be an easy win that gives you a significant edge over your competitors in organic search rankings.
Mobile-First Site Design
Google and other search engines prioritize pages with mobile-friendly site design. This should come as no surprise, considering more than half of all internet traffic now comes from mobile devices.
People use mobile devices to search because it’s convenient. But if your site loads slowly, is difficult to navigate, or otherwise provides a subpar user experience, that nullifies the convenience of using a mobile device, so don’t expect your pages to rank well in organic search results.
Ease of interaction, responsive design, and mobile-specific features should be just a few of your goals.
Site Performance
How quickly your site loads and how well it performs directly impact user experience, which will affect your organic search rankings.
Unfortunately, It’s easy to overlook site performance, especially if your team is focused on product launches, responding to reviews, or any of the other digital marketing tasks that support your business.
Want to optimize site performance, but not sure where to start? Take your URL to pagespeed.web.dev and review Google’s PageSpeed Insights.
Here are a few common opportunities for optimization:
- Image format and size
- Unnecessary JavaScript
- Slow or ineffective third-party code
- Layout shifts
Optimizing performance is often a prolonged process, but don’t be deterred—with diligence and knowledgeable guidance, you’ll see meaningful results over time.
Internal Linking and Breadcrumb Navigation
Your revenue-driving pages should have an appropriate click depth, which is the number of clicks or taps it takes a user to navigate from your home page to the page in question.
Ideally, two to three clicks is all it should take. But can you achieve that without creating a bloated navigation menu that’s no longer user-friendly?
Breadcrumb navigation is a superb means of reducing click depth and improving the navigability of your website. With the breadcrumb trail visible beneath the header—something along the lines of Home > Sun Protection > Moisturizers with SPF—your users will more easily understand where they are on your site and how to find the things they’re looking for.
Internal linking within on-page content is another fantastic way to minimize click depth and put helpful, useful resources front and center for your users.
For instance, your SPF moisturizer product description could include contextual links to your blog post about the importance of wearing sunscreen daily, or a how-to guide that explains the best way for new users to incorporate the product into their existing skincare regimens.
Technical SEO also includes security, URL structure, XML sitemap, schema markup, and more.
Key Takeaway: Technical SEO plays a pivotal role in your site’s success, so commit the resources necessary to handle it correctly. Done right the first time, your site’s technical aspects can be easily optimized going forward.
Branded vs. Unbranded Keyword Strategies
Imagine sitting down to make a list of every product in your skincare regimen. You may know your most beloved skincare products by their exact name. Others you may only know by their type or function.
This is true for the vast majority of us. We practically never discover our new favorite products by searching for their exact name.
More often, we learn a new product’s name only after we find it online by searching for products of that type, using keywords such as “purple shampoo” or “gua sha stone” rather than a particular brand or product name.
Keep this in mind when optimizing your pages’ title tags, heading tags, and meta descriptions.
You have every right to be proud of your products and brand, and you certainly want to build awareness around their names, but when it comes to SEO, there’s an opportunity cost attributed to how your product is referenced on your pages.
Crafting Title Tags, Meta Descriptions & Heading Tags for Skincare Brands
Let’s say you want your new retinol eye cream referred to by its brand name: Vivacious Eyes. It’s a fine product name, but a subpar title tag. Remember that your title tag should describe the page, include the keyword for which you’re optimizing, and usually include the brand name.
So while you’re seeing unsatisfying organic search rankings and CTRs, one of your competitors that wasn’t so rigid about the product name is likely outselling you with a title tag such as “Anti-Aging Retinol Eye Cream | Better Skincare Brand.”
Think of title tags, meta descriptions, and even H1 tags as opportunities to tell people and search engines what the page is about. You don’t necessarily have to eliminate your product name to accomplish this.
“Retinol Eye Cream | Vivacious Eyes | Your Skincare Brand” is a much better tag than simply “Vivacious Eyes” because the former prioritizes your targeted keyword.
Similarly, use your meta description to tell people what your product does and why it’s the best on the market. That often means emphasizing USPs and value props, and omitting your product name in order to save space.
Key Takeaway: Adopt a pragmatic approach to see the best results from your SEO work. By relaxing requirements about when product names are used, you can achieve the flexibility necessary to climb organic search rankings—especially when a product name doesn’t include an exact mention of your targeted keyword.
Using Influencer Videos to Promote Your Skincare Brand in 2024
Influencer marketing and skincare brands go hand in hand. Whether on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, or another platform, creators are promoting skincare brands everywhere.
Promoting top products and growing new audience segments will always be among the most valuable uses of influencer marketing, but it certainly isn’t all your skincare brand can do. If you want to stand out among competitors, consider new and inventive ways influencers could showcase your brand.
Rolling out a new AR experience that will let users try products before they buy?
Use influencer marketing to get ahead of any skepticism over this technology by showing people how easy it is to use. Ask influencers to review your AR tool, then share how well it analyzed their complexions and how satisfied they are with the product recommendations.
Remember that unboxing videos are excellent for showcasing not just your products, but also your new, sustainable packaging.
If you’re a clean skincare brand, have influencers compare and contrast the results from your products with those from more traditional cosmetics.
These are just a few examples, and there are plenty of other ways your brand can leverage influencer marketing. Influencer culture is only going to grow with Generation Alpha, so if you haven’t embraced this opportunity yet, there’s no time like the present.
Key Takeaway: If your brand isn’t investing in influencer marketing, now is a great time to start. From micro-influencers to creators that reach millions of users, partnering with the right creators can help expand your brand’s reach and support other areas of your digital marketing strategy.
Publishing Helpful Content Is a Must
As a term to describe the type of work we’re covering, “Search Engine Optimization” is borderline inaccurate. These days, SEO is about optimizing for users just as much as search engines, because search engines are increasingly prioritizing the user experience.
There was a time when SEOs would publish on-page content as a vehicle for keyword stuffing to manipulate rankings. That’s ancient history.
You’re likely aware of Google’s 2022 Helpful Content Update. That algorithm change has since evolved into a full-blown system that evaluates the quality and, of course, helpfulness of website content, impacting organic search rankings.
Although many perceived this change as a disruption, this news presents an enormous opportunity for skincare brands looking to capture audience attention and differentiate themselves from competitors in a contentious industry.
On-page content is an opportunity to showcase USPs and help shoppers understand how your products meet their specific needs more effectively than anything else on the market.
Types of Helpful Skincare Content
If you aren’t sure where to start with your content creation, use these tried-and-true types of content and see what other ideas they might inspire.
Product Descriptions
A product description should never be just that. Instead of explaining what a product does, detail how your product does it better than anything your competitors have to offer. Discuss how your product might fit into an overall skincare regimen and highlight what consumers can do to achieve optimal results.
FAQs
The questions you elect to answer in an FAQ section should never be selected at random. In fact, it’s often better to work backward: Start with a list of your priority USPs, then turn each one into an answer or a solution for your customers’ questions or problems.
Buying Guides
Succinct buying guides are most valuable on collections pages, where users explore and compare products. As marketers, we’re often focused on our products. But the most useful buying guides are typically structured to identify skincare goals or concerns first, and then recommend the appropriate product and briefly cover the top value propositions.
How-To Guides
How-to guides, especially YouTube videos, are an excellent addition to any product page. These guides are ideal for people who are just getting started with skincare, trying out a new product to address an emerging concern, or reinventing their regimen.
Images
Use alt tags on images that are high-quality to maximize your site’s accessibility. Not only is this key to providing the best possible user experience, but it’s also something that Google evaluates for page rankings. Don’t be shy about emphasizing your attractive packaging or natural ingredients, but again, keep your users top of mind.
These are the most important elements of on-page content, but don’t think of this work as “set and forget.” Routinely evaluate and update your content to deliver the greatest possible value to users.
Key Takeaway: Look at each page on your website as a chance to connect with users. Then, think about how you can make the most of that connection by incorporating helpful content that will deliver the utmost value to shoppers.
Drive Your Skincare Brand Forward in 2024 with VELOX Media
As if you didn’t have enough competitors, the skincare industry is further complicated by constantly evolving consumer preferences and trends. Your brand needs every advantage it can get, and a partnership with the right skincare digital marketing agency can make all the difference.
With VELOX, you’ll see how leading-edge research, the latest technology, and proven techniques combine to drive exponential growth and help your enterprise scale.
VELOX is a Google Premier Partner, ranked among the top 3% of agencies globally because we consistently exceed client expectations. Contact VELOX today to learn how.