One of the top 5 brands from our 2022 Beauty Industry digital report is Allbeauty. Over 2021-2022, they’ve had a real glow-up; performing 44% better than the market average. With 12,000 keywords ranking on page 1 of Google.
This is an SEO campaign that we should all be paying attention to.
How To Utilise Brand Power As A Beauty Retailer
Brand names are a major traffic diver in the beauty space. Showcasing brand and collection names will capture a huge search volume. Having a ‘brands’ section hosted within the meganav is considered best UX practice for both users. This also translates well into search engines indexing the pages.
Allbeauty has taken the approach of an alphabet search:
Allbeauty includes a bestsellers list, which is great practice for promoting popular, high converting pages.
Gateways for traffic
As we mentioned in our 2020 article deep-diving into Boots’ tactics for getting massive 4.7 million monthly visitors, one of the best ways to use the full potential of a brand page is to create a gateway.
“Gateway pages are essentially category pages that help to filter people to specific products and sub-categories. They help to identify the intention of the consumer and position them in the direction they need to head.”
If we consider the intent behind a brand name search over a specific product it’s fair to say users are looking for information and not ready to purchace. Targetting these sorts of terms means that you can capture high volume, top of funnel traffic which if guided correctly, will convert.
L’Occtaine is one of the biggest brands featured on Allbeauty, the brand has taken a user-first, gateway approach to target generic brand terms. Ranking in position 4 for “L’Occitane” just below Marks and Spencers and Instagram, the strategy is cetrainlyeffective.
Utilizing a navigational product a filter within the fold aids the user to narrow down their product search.
However, we feel, the page falls short of Boots’ approach, check out this brand page for Soap & Glory:
The above page functions solely as a means of guiding users to higher intent pages.
Logical Breadcrumbs
Gateway pages are also great for site structure as they create a flow through the site, rather than relying on parameter filters, which are not best practices for building authority and a solid pathway. This all comes under structured data, which is how your site “talks” to Google. One of the clearest examples of structured data is breadcrumbs, the name of the text pathway that shows a user where they are on the site.
Allbeauty has some great foundations with its categories. As mentioned, the brand folder makes it clear what is available on their site when navigated by humans and crawled. We can see some great examples of clear breadcrumbs that make the site much more useful:
This structure creates a clear semantic relationship through the site that groups information quickly and easily. It’s also incredibly helpful for users to see where they have come from and move back into the right space, which improves user experience and will increase your conversion rate.
Clean URLs inspire confidence
Implementation isn’t perfect, however. In a lot of URLs, we get something that looks like this:
While there is evidence that Google is more likely to use your breadcrumbs and category names to crawl through the site, there is a human consideration here. Clean and straightforward URLs with relevant keywords are far more likely to be clicked on as searchers feel that they are being taken to the right place. Superfluous or meaningless elements in a URL can have an impact on click-through rate.
The takeaway
Allbeauty has a really solid position in the online beauty space and has definitely implemented some great practices to help them get top rankings. However, their application is not quite as flawless as it could be. When it comes to creating a show-stopping digital campaign, site structure is the primer upon which your look is built.
Ensure that you have clear, signposted navigation to where your users want to be. This means reducing how long it takes to find a page by adding important locations to the meganav and ensuring that there is a simple and logical path through the site. And don’t forget to keep up with the trends. The beauty industry is full of fast-moving trends, and staying ahead of the curve is key, so always keep popular and emerging brands in a prominent position.
There’s tough competition in this space, and Allbeauty is doing a lot of the right things to get themselves noticed. The big things we would recommend are cleaning up the URLs and expanding the brand landing pages. If your site is effortless to use, then that tells everyone who comes onto it that they can trust the brand.
Remember, this only skims the surface of Allbeauty’s site health and performance. If you would like us to go deeper with your brand, then get in touch for a free digital audit and see how you could improve your digital presence.