7 SEO Tips for Beauty Bloggers in 2019

I said in my 2019 blog content ideas that I wanted to share more of my digital marketing expertise, particularly how that relates to beauty bloggers. I’ve written a couple of guides on search engine optimisation before, but for this post, I really wanted to focus on SEO tips and predictions to help bloggers in 2019.

#1 Mobile

Google is starting to roll out mobile indexing as the primary version of your site, meaning its mobile performance is now more important than desktop. Realistically, most of your traffic probably comes from mobile devices so there’s no excuse for not optimising a website, but if you’re anything like me you’ll know how easy it is to post a blog on a desktop and forget to even check how it looks on mobile.

#2 Page loading speed

The mobile and desktop version of your site will also have different page load speeds which Google takes into account. As I mentioned above, mobile performance is now crucial and how fast your site loads on mobile is part of that. The biggest offender for beauty blogs is likely large images so it’s more important than ever to resize your files and check how they look and how fast they load on mobile.

#3 Brand

If you read my post on on-page vs off-page SEO, you’ll already be aware that getting links back to your site is a key ranking factor, and chances are you’ve also discovered that acquiring links is no easy practice (and nor should it be, IMO). But as well as physical links, Google uses unlinked brand mentions in its search algorithms. For bloggers who might not think of ourselves as being a brand, all this really means is getting mentions of your blog name whenever naturally possible online. By naturally possible, I mean don’t spam blog comments or forums but give other sites a reason to mention you by originating a cool idea or resource, offering guest content or working on collaborations.

#4 Quality content

Offering the best content on a given subject (search term) will give you a headstart with Google. Search engines want to show users content that’s unique and answers their search query, so that should be the aim of anything you publish that you want to be found. If you want your content to rank, avoid posting short blogs that lack detail, especially if better content on the same topic already exists online.

#5 Image search

For many beauty bloggers, taking great pictures to go with your content is second nature. But there’s no point having wonderful imagery if search engines can’t find it. Google doesn’t see images the way their users do, so it’s vital to optimise your site’s imagery by using the relevant keyword phrases in the filenames and alt tags. Because of the way people tend to use Google Image Search like a photo gallery, clicking through to find the best image, making sure that your site has the best image of a given search term is now an essential focus.

#6 User intent

SEO stands for search engine optimisation, but you’re not actually optimising for search engines, you’re optimising for search engine users. Google is likely to get even better at understanding what a user wants when they type in a search query in 2019, so your content needs to answer those queries or you risk getting left behind.

#7 Voice search

While I don’t expect this to have a big impact on beauty bloggers, it’s still worth thinking about. Our key SEO content is product reviews in most cases, and I can’t imagine many people are asking Alexa how the new ColourPop mascaras perform. But this type of search usually comes in question form so it’s important to think about other areas that might be popular in voice search such as instructions on how to use a product, how to apply a product etc.

We’re just at the start of 2019 so I expect there will be lots to change in search marketing this year but I hope this guide gave you some starting points to think about.

As always, I’m open to discussions and let me know in the comments if you have any thoughts/questions/ideas.