Top Beauty Industry SEO Trends for 2022
The digital landscape of the global beauty market continues to evolve, especially considering the pandemic’s influence on the purchasing of beauty products and services online. In 2022, a strategic organic search plan that includes optimized quality content can make a significant difference in SERPs for beauty brands.
Table of contents:
- SEO Trends for the Beauty Industry You Should Look out for in 2022
- SEO Trends for the Beauty Industry – The Takeaway
SEO Trends for the Beauty Industry You Should Look out for in 2022
Before the pandemic, 85% of beauty products and services were purchased in person. Consumers went to stores not only to buy products but to sample them and get advice from beauty experts. All that changed with the pandemic.
Today, consumers are increasingly shopping for beauty products and services online, but they still demand the same information and advice. That’s why it’s so important to be aware of the SEO trends for beauty industry. Brands that can deliver this level of information in the desired way will catapult themselves above the competition. In addition, having an online store versus providing beauty services may differ quite a bit in your overall SEO strategy and your promotional campaigns online.
Google Likes Websites that Answer Complex Queries
Google unmasked the Multitask Unified Model (MUM) update in 2021, an advanced AI-powered algorithm to improve online search capability for complex questions. Its goal is to serve up websites that answer a complex question all in one place. And hopefully, that’s your website. This is a very important beauty industry SEO trend because consumers want specific answers to their personal beauty questions. Businesses need to provide detailed information either in written form or in a video about their products and services to satisfy their clients’ needs.
For example, if a querent searches for the best beauty routine for oily skin, your content or video must explain why your product or service answers the querent’s request. This includes how and why your product or service can help the querent.
How can you include this trend in your content? We prepared a few examples:
- a video on how to use and in what order to apply the products.
- a blog that describes the morning and night routine to follow.
- a detailed product description with photos of models applying the product.
- a video of a customer getting a facial that helps reduce oily skin and includes an optimized video description (which we will talk about later in this blog.)
Quality Content – The Focal Point of SEO Trends for the Beauty Industry
Even with all this descriptive content, don’t forget Google’s EAT standards. In order to rank well in Google searches, you need to foster your brand for its expertise, authority, and trustworthiness — which is exactly what E-A-T stands for.
Establishing EAT may include having beauty experts rate your products, write guest blogs, or appear in a video interview about how they used your products. Whether it be video, blog, product descriptions, or information articles, your content must establish your brand in the minds of consumers as a brand they can trust and look to for beauty advice.
Quality content can be shared across the web and that’s how you acquire backlinks from other authoritative websites to help Google to see you as an authority. For example, a dermatologist who mentions your product or service as a great treatment for acne would definitely help your brand and service rank higher in SERPs, especially if you had other high-ranking backlinks.
To sum up, this SEO trend for beauty industry includes quality content that meets Google’s EAT standards and establishes authority with beauty experts and authoritative backlinks which increase your rankings and help to influence your customers to buy your product.
Concentrate on the Most Relevant Topics for your Audience
With today’s educated and eco-conscious consumers, it’s always a good idea to include content that details your products’ ingredients and ecological impact. If your products are not tested on animals, you need to say that. If your packaging is recyclable or planet friendly, mention that in your detailed product descriptions.
Hypoallergenic products are also on the rise and that’s why listing the ingredients of your products is important. Also, according to a Google report, many people search for beauty products by their ingredients, such as “aloe vera.” So, listing all your products that contain aloe vera is vitally important from the SEO point of view.
Writing a blog or creating a video of specific ingredients’ benefits or how the ingredient is cultivated and used in beauty products may also be helpful to position your website.
Knowing your target audience and what they are searching for is crucial to target your content to capture that audience. Several applications to ascertain what is being searched in beauty and services include Google Trends, Buzzsumo, Moz, and SEMrush, to name just a few.
User-Generated Content is Critical for the Beauty Industry
It’s especially helpful for buyers to know what other consumers bought and what they liked about your products or services. Since buyers cannot sample your products or services, reviews have been a powerful tool and an essential SEO trend for beauty industry. According to a 2021 Bizrate survey, 91% of respondents said they read at least one review before deciding on a product, business, or service.
Search engines like Google establish a website’s credibility when displaying search results, including looking at your company reviews. Last year, Google made it abundantly clear that customer reviews were even more important in rankings by rolling out two updates to its review algorithm in 2021. One in April, the other in December.
Find out more about E-commerce Product Reviews. Why Are They Important and How Do They Affect SEO?
These updates were designed to better reward in-depth product reviews that include “insightful analysis and original research”, especially “content written by experts or enthusiasts who know the topic well.” As mentioned above, having an expert review your product will help to increase your rankings in SERPs.
Now that you’re aware of how advantageous reviews can be for your beauty business, it’s vital to ask for reviews after customers complete your service or purchase your product. This is especially important for local businesses, which was confirmed by changes in Google local search. If you own a small, local business, check out how to prepare for SEO changes in 2022.
If customers are happy with their experience, they will be more willing to leave a review. The more transparent your business is to feedback, the more you will improve your rankings and see your brand flourish online. Ensure your customers leave specific information in their reviews as Google ranks detailed reviews higher.
Over 25% of survey respondents only trust a rating with between 11 and 50 reviews, and 19% of shoppers expect between 51 and 100 reviews.
Passage Ranking- Reach the Zero Position
Google’s passages are another beauty industry SEO trend that encourages you to include specifics about your beauty products’ benefits, ingredients, or uses. Early last year, Google rolled out its US passage ranking update that will eventually be rolled out globally.
So, what is a passage? How does it affect SERPs? Google can now search within websites and pull-out single sentences or paragraphs within long-form texts to answer very specific searches, displaying this excerpt in position zero. Passage ranking allows Google to distinguish the topics of different passages on the same page and rank them separately.
The reason for the passage update, according to Google, is sometimes the best answers are hard to find. Prior to passage ranking, top-ranking results or the zero position may have been articles providing general information on a topic. Google may rank other articles higher with a passage ranking who answer this question succinctly with just a section of the page rather than a website.
SEO best practices still apply with passage ranking, including keyword research, metadata optimization, backlink acquisition, user experience, etc. However, with passage ranking, you should also focus on long-form content. There is also more emphasis on long-tail keywords, headers, titles, and of course, quality content that is both unique and relevant to those consuming or buying your beauty products or services.
Video – Essential Beauty Industry SEO Trend
Since more and more people are purchasing beauty products and services online without having the advantage of talking with in-store advisors or trying on samples, videos are an excellent way of demonstrating your beauty product or services online.
Nearly half of the videos online are beauty videos, which makes this SEO trend crucial for beauty industry.
Many online marketers agree that SEO results suggest that Google prioritizes search results with the video above results without it. Although Google doesn’t confirm this, video can improve your other SEO metrics like dwell time, bounce rate, and CTR so that your website ranks higher in SERPS. Additionally, video can help rank your website for competitive keywords. Videos also keep people engaged longer with your high-quality content.
Including video in your overall SEO plan, you’re more likely to achieve higher SERPs, leading to more brand awareness and more conversions.
Popular beauty videos include how-to instructions like “how to pick the right shade of lipstick “, “how to properly apply foundation”, etc. Anything that can help consumers determine why they need to purchase your product or service is a valuable topic. Consumers want to know more before buying, and video is the perfect medium for that.
Now, you need to make sure that your beauty video stands out amongst the sea of beauty videos on the internet. A strategic video SEO plan will help your video rank higher in SERPs. Here are a few SEO tactics that will help increase your video’s visibility:
- Pick a keyword-loaded title – the more descriptive your title is, the more likely your video will appear when people search for those keywords.
- Write a good description for the video – begin your description with a hook that catches the audience’s attention immediately. Remember that only the first 110 characters will appear before your description is truncated in search results.
- Create a video transcript, which gives Google additional information on the video, increasing your chances of showing up in search results.
- Choose a thumbnail that stands out – a unique thumbnail is especially important for mobile, whether on a web browser or in an app. Your video’s title and thumbnail are your primary means of communicating to potential viewers.
- Use clip markup, which manually marks important segments in your video to help users quickly navigate to specific points in a video.
- Include seek markup – this enables Google to automatically identify key moments and link users to those points within the video by indicating how your URL structure works.
Influencer Marketing a Must-Have SEO Beauty Industry Trend
The beauty industry was one of the earliest to adopt influencer marketing. Influencers have become an essential communication and marketing part of the beauty industry. Collaborating with social celebrities has allowed consumers to see the products being used with real results in front of their eyes.
Influencer content is the most engaging type of content as its most of the time done with authenticity and transparency. When choosing an influencer along with having clout online, it’s also important to select influencers that have multiple channels, including Facebook, YouTube, and a website or a blog.
Although Instagram is a great promotional tool, it doesn’t work well for SEO purposes.
Collaborating with influencers is now imperative to build awareness, increase engagement, and drive sales. According to a Digital Marketing Institute Report, 86% of women use social media for purchasing advice, and over half of women make purchases due to influencer posts. Additionally, 70% of teens trust influencers more than traditional celebrities, and overall, 49% of consumers depend on influencer recommendations.
Influencer marketing is one of the major beauty industry SEO trends and a key to a successful SEO marketing plan and promotion online for beauty products and services. It’s not an option anymore, it’s the norm.
Keep the Conversation Going with LaMDA
Is your website optimized for voice search, which is growing in popularity? With 65% of 25-49-year-olds using voice-enabled devices at least once per day, according to PWC, your website must be ready for this SEO trend for beauty industry to capture that traffic.
In recent years, Google has put an emphasis on conversational queries. With the advent of AI coupled with Google’s continual focus on improving the user’s search experience, optimizing for voice search will continue to factor into a strategic SEO plan.
Google’s LaMDA was launched last year, which builds on earlier Google research, published in 2020, that showed AI-based language models trained on dialogue could learn to talk about virtually anything. Since then, Google has found that LaMDA can be trained to read and understand words and the relationship between words to predict what may come next.
So, what does this mean for the beauty industry going into 2022? People are searching increasingly with voice-enabled devices, and businesses will have to adapt their content to show up in these conversational queries.
How to get ready for this beauty industry SEO trend? Follow these tips:
- Identify what your target audience’s intent is. Content needs to be optimized to clearly answer the actual questions they are asking the search engines through their voice searches.
- Refocus your phraseology in your content to answer those questions. Most conversational phrases start with who, when, what, why, or how. So, adapt your content to answer those types of questions.
- Consumers also look up information about a particular brand to compare products or services. For example, they may ask, “What shampoo brands are better for color-treated hair?”. Create content that provides informative and direct answers that fit those types of questions, and you will increase your chances of showing up in SERPs.
- Keep in mind that voice search keywords are longer and conversational, and long tail keywords are needed to rank higher in SERPs. People generally ask an entire question instead of just saying a few keywords.
- Focus on snippets or short answers to questions in your content.
- Consider the vernacular phrases of the language. Are there specific phrases that may be spoken by your target audience? For example, will your customers search for a “hair salon” or a “beauty salon,” “hairdresser” or a “hairstylist”? Consider those types of language differences and or colloquialisms for your geographical area.
SEO Trends for the Beauty Industry – The Takeaway
Organic search represents a significant business opportunity for beauty brands and services in this ever-changing digital landscape. Following the SEO trends for beauty industry is crucial to stay relevant these days. The beauty market has experienced a shift in consumer demand following the COVID-19 pandemic. Consumers are shopping increasingly online and strategic, well-optimized content enhances the connection between brands and customers precisely when they are seeking products and services.
As a result, today’s organic search landscape looks significantly different compared to pre-pandemic times. And businesses that deploy a strategic SEO plan that keeps up with how consumers want to shop, what information they need in their decision-making process, and how they search online will significantly increase their online visibility in 2022.
