Driving traffic to your makeup ecommerce store is important—and there’s a way to do it for free. Yes, sometimes organic search marketing sounds too good to be true because, unlike pay-per-click advertising, it’s not based on bids.
However, there’s a slight catch. If your organic content strategy is vague or misaligned, it will end up being a waste of time for everyone involved. Your team will have spent time targeting the wrong keywords and consumers, while shoppers will be frustrated that they expected one thing and found another on your site.
This is part of the reason why targeting the right keywords is so important, especially in niche fields like cosmetics ecommerce. Here are a few angles to consider.
Broad Keywords Mean More Competition
There’s a lot of competition on broader keywords like “eyeshadow” and “makeup brushes.” Rolling out an organic search strategy targeting only high-level keywords is like putting all your eggs in one basket, so to speak. It will be tough to rank for them, and you’ll miss out on opportunities to carve out a niche—especially if you’re a small- or medium-sized brand competing against established industry giants.
Once you come up with a list of potential keywords, breaking it down into categories can help. As Kissmetrics writes, “If you ended up with 500 audience keywords but only 15 product keywords, you probably can drop some of the less interesting audience terms. Focus on the categories closest to the center of the target.”
Keep useful keyword variations, but weed out redundant similarities. Try to select keywords from a variety of categories covering a variety of user intents and searches. Some will be broad, others will be highly specific. This variation is the recipe for a healthy keyword strategy.
Mistargeted Keywords Mean False Advertising
Now let’s say you discover you can rank on the first or second page for a more niche keyword, like “Halloween skeleton makeup tutorials.” That’s great… but only if the link leads to a landing page on your website complete with Halloween skeleton makeup tutorials. If you try to capitalize on a keyword that doesn’t really pertain to your product catalogue or how you sell makeup, your customers will quickly sniff out the discrepancy. Your bounce rates will skyrocket as a result, and you’ll lose valuable trust from consumers.
A good rule of thumb for any intelligent keyword targeting strategy: “The keywords are all related in one way or another to content available on your site.” Only focus on keywords that align with your product offerings, how-to videos and blog content. Otherwise you risk attracting customers to your website for all the wrong reasons.
Ask Yourself These Questions
Keyword research is the basis for any informed content strategy. Moz recommends you ask yourself a few questions when you’re evaluating the quality of a given keyword:
- Is it relevant to your website’s content?
- Will it lead online searchers to the content/products they’re seeking on your site?
- Will they be satisfied with the corresponding content they find there?
- Will this traffic result in revenue or achievement of other marketing/branding goals?
If your answer to all four of the queries above is a resounding yes, then the keyword is probably worth pursuing. But you should also plug it into major search engines and look at the results for a wider frame of reference. What are your cosmetics competitors doing with that keyword? How difficult will it be to rank for a given search term? What’s the ratio of paid-to-organic search content that appears?
Targeting the right keywords is so important in cosmetics ecommerce because it helps sellers drive the right kind of traffic to their website for free. Solid keyword planning leads to better search marketing ROI.
