Industry: Beauty & Cosmetics
Market: United States
Timeline: November 2024 – December 2025
Services: Technical SEO, Keyword Research, On-Page Optimization, Content Writing
The Starting Point
Some sites struggle. This one had simply been abandoned.
A legitimate beauty brand with real products, a real customer base, and years of history behind it. But the site had been left without any meaningful SEO work for long enough that organic visibility had collapsed to almost nothing. No non-brand keywords ranking. Traffic that was essentially zero outside of people searching directly for the brand name.
That’s a particular kind of problem. The brand equity was there. The product catalog was there. But none of it was doing any work in search.
For a US beauty brand, that’s a serious gap. The cosmetics space is one of the most search-driven categories online. Buyers research shades, formulas, ingredients, comparisons. They look up specific product types before purchasing. A brand that doesn’t show up in those searches is leaving a significant amount of potential revenue on the table, regardless of how good the products actually are.
What the Site Looked Like When We Started
Technically, there were issues that had built up over time from neglect. Content was thin across product and category pages. No blog presence worth mentioning. The site ranked for the brand name and little else.
The foundation needed work before anything else would matter.
What We Did
Technical Cleanup First
A neglected site accumulates problems. Crawl issues, indexing gaps, slow or broken pages, structural problems that quietly prevent Google from understanding what the site is about. We worked through these systematically before touching content.
This part isn’t glamorous, but skipping it means everything else underperforms. Content on a technically broken site just doesn’t rank the way it should.
Keyword Research for the US Beauty Market
The beauty space in the US is competitive, but it’s also enormous. There are thousands of specific searches happening every day around lipstick shades, formulas, finishes, ingredients, and comparisons. Most brands only go after the obvious ones.
We mapped the full opportunity, including product-specific terms, ingredient-driven queries, and informational searches that attract buyers earlier in their decision process. A lot of the best keyword opportunities in beauty aren’t the most obvious ones.
On-Page Optimization
Product pages, collection pages, and category pages all got proper attention. Title tags, heading structure, meta descriptions, internal linking. For a beauty e-commerce site, this layer matters a lot because product pages are often where purchase decisions happen. If they’re not optimized, you’re losing traffic at exactly the wrong moment.
Content Writing
This was the other major driver. We built out a content program targeting the informational side of beauty search: shade guides, formula comparisons, ingredient explainers, how-to content. Stuff that a real buyer in the US market actually searches for before spending money on lipstick.
Not filler content. Specific, useful pieces built around real search behavior and matched to what the brand actually sells.
The Results
Sixteen months from a near-zero starting point.
Traffic growth:
- From essentially 0 non-brand clicks/month to 52,500 total clicks over the tracked period (GSC)
- 9.17 million total impressions across the same period
- 23,000 monthly visits across all traffic sources currently
- Average position of 12.3, with a 0.6% CTR
Keyword growth:
- From 0 non-brand keywords to 1,700+ according to Ahrefs
- 6,800+ keywords tracked in SEMrush
The GSC chart tells the story clearly. Flat through late 2024, then a steady climb through early 2025, accelerating significantly from mid-2025 onward, and still trending upward going into 2026. That curve is what consistent, compounding SEO work produces.
AI Citation Visibility
Beyond standard search rankings, the site has built up real visibility across AI platforms. According to current Ahrefs data:
| Platform | Citations | Pages Cited |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | 1,400 | 190 |
| Perplexity | 537 | 133 |
| Copilot | 490 | 149 |
| Gemini | 178 | 163 |
| Google AI Overview | 102 | 76 |
2,707 total AI citations across 5 platforms.
ChatGPT alone cites 190 pages from this site. That means when someone asks about specific lipstick formulas, shades, or beauty topics this brand covers, there’s a real chance the AI answer pulls from these pages directly.
This is a direct result of the content strategy. AI systems cite content that’s specific, credible, and genuinely useful. Generic product descriptions don’t get cited. Detailed, well-structured content does.
The beauty industry is increasingly being shaped by AI-driven discovery, particularly among younger US buyers who ask ChatGPT or Perplexity for product recommendations before ever opening Google. Showing up in those answers matters.
Why This Project Worked
The brand had something real to work with. Good products, an established name, an existing customer base. What it lacked was the SEO infrastructure to connect all of that to organic search.
Once the technical issues were resolved and a proper content strategy was in place, the site responded quickly. The growth curve from the GSC data shows that clearly.
A few things made the difference:
- Technical cleanup that removed the bottlenecks quietly holding the site back
- Content built around actual buyer behavior in the US beauty market, not generic topics
- On-page optimization across product and category pages where purchase decisions happen
- Consistent execution over 11 months without cutting corners or chasing shortcuts
Beauty is a crowded space. But a neglected site with a real brand behind it, given proper SEO attention, can move faster than most people expect.
Working with a beauty brand that’s lost its organic footing, or never had it? This is exactly the kind of project we take on. Get in touch.