Keywords are the foundation for building your beauty business. If you’re working towards launching a blog, website or an e-commerce site in the beauty space you’re going to hear certain terms over and over again. One of those terms is “keywords”. No content, no copy, advertising or product descriptions are written without the inclusion of keywords.
If you look at a basic definition of the term “keywords”, it’s often defined as a search term for search engines and words that identify the content of a given website. Sounds like tech talk, right?
While you may not fully understand what keywords are, you have in one way or another, influenced the choice of keywords of random websites on the internet.
Everyone who uses the internet has. When people go to Google or any other search engine and enter a query, let’s say, “best beauty product ideas”, that query is technically a keyword.
Another way of defining the term “Keywords” is that they are words or phrases that are used on blogs, websites and e-commerce sites aimed at you, the internet user. As a website owner, you’ll assume the possible words internet users might type in when searching for their products/services and use them.
If they choose the right words (keywords), then they stand a good chance of being found by a lot of people who are searching for your products/services.
Keywords Can Boost Your Website’s Rank on SERPs. SERPs (search engine results pages) are the pages delivered to you once you type in a “keyword” or “keyword phrase” in the search box.
Google is the number one search engine on the internet, therefore, make sure your website meets Google’s standards. The only way internet users will find your site, is if Google can find it. While there are more than 200 factors Google considers when ranking a website, what will make Google find your website is the keywords you use. Google is all about giving its users relevant answers to their searches which is why it depends (not exclusively) on keywords to find websites or web pages that are relevant to the queries users enter.
Therefore, using the right keywords can make Google bring up your website or web page anytime people search for words that are related to your keywords. In other words, using the right keywords is part of optimizing your pages and can make your website appear on the first page of search engine result pages (SERPs). Google rewards websites that use keywords that are relevant to users’ queries by boosting their rank on search results pages.
When your website ranks on SERPs, it gets seen by more people and many of them will click on your website. These people will be added to your website’s traffic. This means that keywords can also increase the number of visitors your website gets.
Think about what your brand stands for, who your ideal customer is, what they need, and how they will search for your products or services.
Then create a list of possible words and phrases your ideal customer can use when searching for your products/services.
If you already have a website and some customers, you will learn a lot about the language your customers use by simply asking them. You can carry out surveys or A/B testing to learn more about your customers. Secondly, if your website has a search button where customers enter their queries, you can use a data-collecting tool to record the terms they use. You can also use a data-collecting tool to record the term “visitors” who were redirected from SERPs used.
What keywords are mostly used in your niche industry? What keywords are your competitors using? Do your research to find out.
Keywords that are popular in your industry are automatically right for you. And if your competitors are ranking on SERPs for particular words, that should tell you that the same words or phrases can also be right for you.
Some popular keywords used in the beauty industry are: acne, dark spots, hyperpigmentation, SPF, skin care, skincare, natural, organic, eco friendly, clean beauty … you get the picture.
Type any one of these words or phrases into your Google search box and you’ll see the SERPs (search engine results pages) that have been chosen by Google.
If you don’t want to go through the stress of keyword research, then you can use keyword research tools to find good keywords. There are many of them both free and premium, do your research to find out which tool is best for you.
Examples of keyword research tools would be, Google keyword planner, Ubersuggest, or keyword finder.
The first thing you should know about using keywords is that it doesn’t guarantee that your website will do well on SERPs. There are other factors such as quality of content, page load speed, bounce rate, etc, that determine how a website is ranked on SERPs. Therefore, they should be used along with other practices that can grow your website.
One of the reasons why using keywords became so hard is because marketers abused it. They manipulated their use to deceive Google’s algorithms and eventually got punished for it. Now, Google will flag your website if you abuse keywords. What does it mean to abuse keyword use?! Using the same word five or six times in one three-line paragraph is a good example. This is known as a form of keyword stuffing.
So, make sure that your keywords blend well with the rest of your web content. Use those that are relevant to your web content and Website-at-large to avoid misleading visitors. Avoid keyword stuffing.
Always input relevant keywords in your elements. One of your website elements is your URL. Use your primary keyword here. It represents the entirety of what your website is about. If your niche product is colorful lipsticks, your URL could be colorfullipsticks.com. This tells your visitors that your website is all about colorful lipsticks.
Title tags: use relevant keywords in your article titles. Using them in your titles will influence your click-through rate.
Images and videos: As you upload images and videos on your website, change the automatically generated nonsensical name. Using the name of the article is always good. Input a relevant keyword here. You should always transcribe your videos and include relevant keywords in the transcripts.
Other elements that you can input keywords in are; schema markups, alt tags, alt attributes, ARIA tags, meta tags, internal links, link anchor texts, subheadings, and lots more.
You’ll learn more about these terms as we delve deeper into getting your website ready to sell your beauty products.
The aim of using keywords is to rank on SERPs and grow your web traffic. It wouldn’t make sense if you don’t monitor them to see how they perform.
This is also why you need to have keyword tools. You want to find out which of your keywords are bringing in traffic, which ones are increasing your click-through rate, and which ones are doing poorly.
It’s like an experiment, you keep doing what’s giving you your desired results. You fix the ones that aren’t. Or stop using them.
Start your keyword research now if you are yet to launch your website.
I know … it’s a lot to take in. You’ll get there in due time. You can’t rush the process. However, you can be consistent in your approach.
That’s it for this week. As always…
Dedicated To Your Success
Juliette Samuel,
