Brandefy is an app that compares beauty products and provides less expensive and clean dupes (less expensive look-alike alternatives to popular name-brand products) for its users. It saves them money and has a community where users can have questions answered by dermatologists and other members. I created this project to boost their blog traffic through using SEO – search engine optimization – strategies to rank their posts higher on organic google searches. 

Beauty is an oversaturated market.

Whether it be for hair, cosmetics/makeup, or skincare products, there’s an endless sea of content.

However, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to find our way into the spotlight. With effective research and strategy, we can create algorithm-friendly content that’s more likely to be ranked.

In this blog, we’ll cover content strategies to help Brandefy rank higher in SERPs (search engine results page), bring in more traffic, and convert that traffic into Brandefy app users. 

The Strategy

The end goal of Brandefy is not to purchase a product from their website: it’s to download an app. Luckily, 70% of web browsing happens on a mobile device. 

As a starting point, Brandefy already formats their blog posts to be mobile-friendly, meaning the posts are formatted to be easily readable on mobile devices – big win – but there are other strategies they could implement to score more SEO points.

Title Tags 

I won’t go into to much detail with this one, but the title tag, also known as the meta tag, is apart of the website coding that serves as a headline, and is what pops up on the search engine page. It should mirror the headline that you see at the top of a blog post.

Clickability starts with a post’s ability to be seen when its given topic is searched for, but after that, it comes down to having a click-worthy title. Certain blog title formats are more likely to be clicked and shared. There are three things that can be implemented for Brandefy:

Keyword Additions

Adding keywords to the title is critical to SEO. For example, if our keyword was “Maybelline”, we’d want to include it in our title: “Our 10 Favorite Maybelline Products that We Recommend for Your Makeup Stash.” The trick here is to place it naturally within the given title while avoiding “keyword stuffing” – which is when you repeat the keyword over and over within a title. This also applies to the article itself, but we’ll cover that later. 

A stuffed title might look like this: “Our 10 Favorite Maybelline Products Out Of All Other Maybelline Products We’ve Tried (Maybelline Product List 2022)” Adding the keyword more times won’t help it get noticed. It’s actually a big no-no with Google. They’ll see it as spam, and it will harm your blog post rather than help it.  

Brackets (or Parenthesis) 

Did you know that posts with brackets improve the click-through rates by up to 38%? I didn’t until I found that statistic in Brian Dean’s video. Nonetheless, adding brackets in the title is a way to get more clicks. 

Adding Numbers

“5 Best…” “11 Things…” Using numbers in a title is one of the most popular ways to get ranked. It generates 73% more shares, shows a reader how much time they’ll need to dedicate to the article, and creates structure.

Now that we’ve covered titles, the next key step is content. 

The Content

If the content of a post isn’t easily digestible, helpful, or fails to fulfill the promise given in the title, readers will bounce fast. It will also hinder you when trying to rank higher in a SERP. It’s important to stick to one topic in a given post, and provide value to the reader.

Headings For Skimmibility

Headings are important and makes a blog post easy to skim. This also makes it easy for Google bots to get a handle on all of the content you’re sharing, like in this post. 

Link to Older Blog Posts, As Well As Reputable Sites

Backlinks (when someone else shares the link in their blog post, hence “links back” to the post) are one of the top ways to build authority. The more backlinks a blog post gets, the more Google sees it as trustworthy, or an authoritative source. By linking to previous Brandefy posts, it allows for backlinks to those posts, while also encouraging readers to spend more time on the site. 

By linking to reputable sites, it helps Google view you as more trustworthy. If you’re grabbing information from high-authority sources, what’s not to trust?

Keyword Research

The tools I used to research keywords were Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends, and Neil Patel’s website Ubersuggest. 

Both Google Keyword Planner and Ubersuggest, on varying degrees, have tools that display the average search volume on a given keyword per month, and options to discover related keywords that might be helpful. Google Trends, on the other hand, shows you the current search trajectory of a given keyword, and which ones are on the rise. 

To try and bring in more web traffic to Brandefy’s website, I decided to use both keywords and keyphrases. Keywords are 1-2 words in length, while keyphrases are longer. 

I want to mention one issue I ran into was that Google Keyword Planner ranks difficulty by the competition for ad room as opposed to organic search results. To get these measurements I used Ubersuggest. 

The table below displays the findings of my keyword research:

Keyword: This is either the keyword or keyphrase that someone would type in the search engine to find a given topic	Search Volume (per month): This is how many searches a given keyword (or keyphrase) gets in a month	SEO Difficulty Rating (0-100): This is a score on how difficult it is to organically rank based on the amount of competition present. Higher score means more competition.
beauty supply	100k-1m	32
skincare	100k-1m	76
makeup dupes	1k-10k	59
skincare brands	1k-10k	81
skincare essentials	1k-10k	62
cheap makeup websites	1k-10k	54
cheap skincare brands	1k-10k	70
cosmetics brands	1k-10k	61
clean skincare brands	1k-10k	71
best makeup dupes	100-1k	54
affordable skincare routine	100-1k (900%+ 3-month change)	60
where to buy cheap makeup	100-1k (900%+ 3-month change)	60
good cheap skincare	100-1k	44
affordable makeup brands	100-1k	66
best skincare dupes	10-100	64

The Posts Ideas + One Sample Posts

The following is a table that includes one fleshed-out sample post, as well as four other title ideas and their corresponding keywords.

	Title	Keywords included within the post:
Sample:	Need To Update Your Beauty Supply? 5 Affordable Makeup Brands Sold Online and in Drugstores [2022]	Beauty supply, affordable makeup brands
Idea:	5 Affordable Clean Skincare Brands You Need to Know About for Your 2022 Skincare Routine	Clean skincare brands, skincare essentials, skincare brands
Idea:	The 5 Best Makeup Dupes You Need To Know About in 2022 [Cruelty-Free]	Best makeup dupes, where to buy cheap makeup,  makeup dupes
Idea:	Affordable Skincare Routine for Glowing Skin (Made Up of the Best Dupe Skincare Products)	Affordable skincare routine, good cheap skincare, skincare brands

Next Steps:

If Brandefy would like to use my blog post example, keyword research, or any other strategies I’ve offered in this post, they are more than welcome to do so (for free!)

Through this project, I outlined some strategies I believe would benefit, not only Brandefy’s existing blog post, but future blog posts with ranking in SEO. They have a lot to offer with their app as well as their new skincare line that is releasing. SEO strategies are a  great means for them to reach a broader audience!