Beginners Guide to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Perfume Brands
The goal of SEO is to bring more organic traffic to your website that generates sales. We have already covered how important Direct-To-Consumer sales are for building an economically sustainable brand. Organic traffic is the lifeblood of the DTC revenue channel for brands. With paid advertising, you have to pay more money to reach more people, unlike organic traffic which attracts users based on the ranking factors of your brand’s website.
This article will cover our approach to:
On-Page SEO ranking factors
Keyword research blueprint
Off-Page SEO ranking factors
What is SEO and its Relationship to Revenue?
Search engine optimization essentially boils down to how discoverable is your brand on the internet. More specifically, when someone searches for a keyword related to your brand, how likely is your brand to appear in the top search results?
For example: When I search for ‘Vanilla Lavender Perfume’
The result is a Lavanilla perfume (at the time of writing this article). This is a small perfume brand that has optimized its website and ranking factors for the search keyword, ‘Vanilla Lavender Perfume’. They manage to outrank much larger perfume brands that also have Vanilla + Lavender perfumes like:
The benefits of ranking #1 for this keyword are substantial. Lets run some ballpark numbers to try and quantify how much money the brand Lavanilla is making from ranking #1 for ‘Vanilla Lavender Perfume’.
The above screenshot does not include some of the related, non-branded search queries similar to ‘Vanilla Lavender Perfume’. It should also be noted that we have found Google to consistently undercount search queries for keywords on their keyword planner. According to Google, we can safely assume that every single month 12,000 people are searching for ‘Vanilla Lavender Perfume’.
Based on the data from Front Page Sage, we know that 39.8% of people click on the first organic search result. In the case of our example, that number of people would be 4,776 people clicking on Lavanilla per month. The average conversion rate is 2.5-3%.
This means that, of the 4,776 people clicking on Lavanilla, 131 people will buy the perfume. In the case of Lavanilla which has a $48 bottle (priced on the very low end), this translates to $6,304 in sales every single month. They aren’t buying ads to bring in this revenue. They aren’t selling at 50% MSRP to retailers for these sales. This is all happening passively. Obviously they had to put in the time and effort to rank for this keyword, but as long as they maintain this keyword ranking, this revenue is nicely baked in.
This is only one non-branded keyword with low search volume that they are ranking for. Imagine you are a perfume brand that ranks for multiple keywords. And those keywords have an even higher volume of searches, and you have a higher-priced perfume. We know of multiple perfume brands that are bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars every single month strictly from targeted organic search traffic. I like this example of Lavanilla because it shows that even small brands can outrank much larger brands with a concerted SEO effort.
For more context on branded vs non-branded search behaviors read here.
On-Page SEO Ranking Factors
On-Page ranking factors denote specific qualities of your perfume brand’s website that Google assigns value to. For the sake of your time, this article will only mention major ranking factors.
This includes:
Age of website: Google favors older websites
HTML & CSS structure: Having bulky HTML increases load times and decreases Google site crawling frequency
Amount of content on the website: Google favors websites that have more content (more on this later)
Quality of content on the website: Google hates low-quality content, and can tell when content is bad through NLP and user engagement metrics
Schema markup: Markup allows Google to better understand your content and display it in the search results in a better format
Relevance of the website content to the search query: Google is trying to understand the content, products, and services offered by your site in order to best match it to the proper search queries
Load times and performance of the website: Google will penalize slow-loading websites
Internal linking structure of the website: Google can get a better idea of content relevance when you link relevant web pages to each other
Mobile optimization: 63% of Google searches on done on mobile. If your website does not render properly on mobile then Google will penalize your website
Content freshness: Google values websites that are consistently updated
What On-Page SEO Ranking Factors Should You Prioritize
Let’s quickly dispel ranking factors that shouldn’t be a top concern. Most modern ecommerce platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, Big Cartel, WooComerce, and Magento will have adequately formatted HTML & CSS. As long as you compress large images and don’t embed a bunch of videos or .gifs on your website, your website’s performance should be fine. Similarly, these platforms have acceptable mobile adaptation. It never hurts to run a performance test on the desktop and mobile versions of your site to look for weaknesses and usability issues, however, unless your website has major performance issues, your SEO strategy should focus elsewhere.
Note: Engagement metrics should also be used to increase Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) for your site.
Schema markup doesn’t convey a direct ranking signal to Google, instead, it helps improve click-through rate, which might indirectly help your brand’s SEO. In our approach to SEO for perfume brands, it is not a top priority.
Internal linking helps new web pages get indexed quicker, provides added relevance to content, and also might increase a website visitors ‘time on page’ which is a positive ranking signal for Google because it conveys user engagement. All things considered, internal linking should not be a top SEO priority for perfume brands. Internal linking becomes more important for larger websites that have thousands of web pages, but for any niche fragrance brand (and even some designer brands) it should be relegated to a low level of importance if your brand’s goal is to bring in more website traffic.
Prioritizing Content Is Your Top Concern For On-Page SEO
Your website needs more high-quality content. It provides more opportunities to rank for keywords. Furthermore, Google likes to see active sites that are constantly publishing new content. It signals that the brand is invested in the website and providing more content for site visitors. Google will typically crawl a website every 3-4 weeks to index new web pages.
More content on your brand’s website also gives Google more information that it can use to categorize your website. This enables Googe to more accurately display your site for relevant search queries.
Collection Pages
Assuming you have the hierarchical structure of your website formatted properly so that products fall under collection pages, the most obvious place to start adding content is on collection pages.
Here are some examples of perfume brands using text that contains SEO-relevant keywords on collection pages.
Multiple paragraphs of text at the bottom of Muglers perfume collection pages.
Multiple paragraphs of text at the bottom of Carner Barcelona’s Collection pages.
This text at the bottom of Giorgio Armani’s perfume collection pages.
This text is at the top of the Chanel perfume collection pages.
Most brands include keyword-laden text on their collection pages. Let’s take a closer look at Chanel’s collection page text:
CHANEL perfumes and fragrances are lifelong companions for the bold, luminous woman who is in perpetual movement. Each CHANEL fragrance for women is inspired by Mademoiselle's world, and in turn creates its own imaginative and feminine olfactory experience. The scents extend into lines designed to provide a complete beauty experience.
The above text is highlighted orange whenever a keyword is intentionally placed in the text, regardless of how unnatural sounding it is when read aloud. In the first highlighted example, ‘perfumes and fragrances’, Chanel wants this page to rank for the keyword, ‘Chanel perfumes’ and also ‘Chanel fragrances’.
In the second orange highlighted example, there are many other ways to word this sentence so that it sounds more fluid, however, it would be at the expense of not including ‘fragrance for women’ which is an important keyword to rank for and receives over 10,000 searches per month.
If you analyze some of the verbiage used on collection pages for perfume brands, you will find many instances of brands using words and sentence structures that can sometimes sound forced. The sentences will be grammatically correct but still sound unnatural. This is done to include relevant keywords that they want to rank for. When you try to include the same keyword multiple times, it is often referred to as, ‘keyword stuffing’.
Product Page Content
Something you may notice is that product pages tend to be absent of unnatural-sounding keyword stuffing. This is because brands very rarely have to worry about getting outranked for branded keywords. In fact, the only time the perfume brand will lose search engine position to a branded search query is when they lose position to another retailer who carries their perfume.
To put it simply, Tom Ford never has to worry about another perfume brand, optimizing their SEO for the keyword ‘Tom Ford Black Orchid’ because Google will never give that perfume a higher search ranking than the actual Tom Ford Black Orchid because they want a search query to result in well-aligned search results. In other words, Google wants to serve people content that they are searching for — as accurately as possible.
This is why you will see perfume brands competing for non-branded keyword rankings on their collection pages. Collection pages are competing for non-branded search queries like:
Gourmand fragrances
Rose perfumes
Sensual scents
These search queries are up for grabs because they are non-branded, general product categories or scent classifications. Google will serve results based on what page it thinks is most relevant, in addition to other off-page ranking factors (covering this topic later in the post).
In regards to the content on product pages, there is no need to keyword stuff branded keywords. The name of the perfume does not need to be added into the content unnaturaly. Through Google’s NLP machine learning models, it is smart enough to know that the website is Tom Fords official website, and the product title Black Orchid denotes that this is Tom Ford Black Orchid. Including, ‘Tom Ford Black Orchid’ multiple times in the perfume’s description will not help increase the rankings for that keyword.
The product description should focus on notes and accords of the perfume in order to provide the customer with more information on the scent’s composition. No need to overcomplicate things at this point in the sales funnel. Product pages are designed to sell, not keyword stuff.
Product pages can rank for specific non-branded, longtail keywords, however, this should not be a top SEO priority — especially if the longtail keyword is highly competitive. In our analysis, a product page is very unlikely to outrank collection pages. Looking at this from the perspective of Google, is it easy to see why this is the case. Google wants to serve users the best results. If someone is searching for a scent classification like ‘Sweet Gourmand Perfumes’, Google understands the search intent is broad. The searcher is likely interested in seeing a variety of perfumes in the sweet gourmand category. The most applicable search result in this case would be a large retailer that has a collection page consisting only of sweet gourmand perfumes from a variety of brands. We ran this experiment for multiple categories of perfume and the result is almost always the same. The top result is a collection page dedicated to the perfume category that the searcher is looking for from a large retailer that carries multiple brands.
Another consideration for product pages is including schema markup in order to help Google display your products in a much better format to people searching for your particular perfume. Schema markup ranks low on the list of SEO activities that move the needle for building search traffic, however, if you are going to apply schema markup to pages on your website, the first place you should apply schema markup is your product pages.
Final Note: All images on your website should include meta tags and alt-text descriptions that use relevant keywords. If the image file sizes are overly large then the image should be compressed in order to decrease site load speeds.
Blog Content
Perfume brands that have a blog are at a large advantage as it pertains to SEO. Your blog is an excellent place to rank for non-branded keywords and higher sales funnel search terms. More importantly, a blog can help contextualize what searches are relevant to your brand. For example, if your blog is constantly posting articles about sustainably sourcing perfume ingredients, this provides more context for Google to display your website to people who are searching for environmentally sustainable perfume brands.
A blog can cover many different aspects of your brand. Our brand marketing guide provides an advanced overview of how to develop a content strategy and a content roadmap for high-level perfume advertising that leads to sales.
Some ideas for content to include on your blog:
Brands origin story
Upcoming perfume releases
Behind-the-scenes content
Seasonal promotions
Perfumer interviews / content
Perfume inspiration stories
Company news
Company events
These are just a few content types to keep a perfume brand busy. It can easy to get carried away with over-optimizing content for SEO and using specific keywords. Remember, you are writing for people.
Keyword Research
The process of keyword research is arguably the most important aspect of both on-page and off-page SEO. So many brands have spent countless hours and wasted huge amounts of money trying to rank for keywords that are either too difficult to ever meaningfully rank for, or the keyword was never a keyword they should have tried to rank for in the first place.
What Makes a Keyword Worth Ranking For?
Finding the right keywords to dedicate your SEO energy towards is a step that should be carefully examined. Before thinking about keywords, you need to take a step back and evaluate:
What keywords your brand is already ranking for? If you are ranking for short-tail keywords, has your brand considered expanding your SEO strategy to ranking for the long-tail version of these keywords?
Are there any commonalities among your perfume lines? If you have multiple perfumes with an ‘Oud’ note, the keyword Oud would be a good starting point for finding a keyword to try and rank for.
What non-branded keywords are responsible for website conversions? Expanding your keyword search from these keywords to other similar keywords is a good starting point.
After you are able to narrow down the list of keywords you want to try and rank your brand’s website for, the next step is to evaluate each individual keyword based on metrics that you can gather using various SEO tools.
These metrics include:
Where does the keyword fit in the buyer’s journey? Some keywords naturally have a higher buyer intent. If you want to see a more significant correlation between keyword ranking and revenue then looking at high buyer intent keywords that are lower in the sales funnel will generate revenue more quickly. The difficulty is that these keywords are more competitive to rank for. An example of a high buyer’s intent keyword is any keyword with the word, ‘buy’ or ‘gift’ in it. A high buy-intent keyword can also be indicated by it’s level of specificity. Someone who searches for, ‘an aquatic eau de toilette perfume with a citrus note’ is looking for a very particular type of scent and is likely closer to making a purchase decision than someone who searches for, ‘aquatic perfumes’.
How difficult is the keyword to rank for? If the keyword is really difficult to to rank for, it might be better to avoid it altogether, regardless of how well it fits into your perfume brand and content strategy. Pursuing highly competitive keywords can often be a long, arduous task that would require huge amounts of money with no guarantee of success. Imagine a brand new fitness supplement company trying to organically rank for the keyword, ‘protein supplement’ or ‘protein powder’. Even with hundreds of thousands of dollars for SEO and a dedicated small team of people, success is unlikely within a year. There are better ways to spend those marketing dollars.
There are multiple ways to measure the competitiveness of a keyword. You can use one of the many SEO tools which have keyword research functionality. Many of these tools will assign a difficulty score to the keyword based on the brands that are currently ranking for that keyword. The software tools can measure the number of backlinks these brands have and reverse engineer the diifficulty for another brand to surpass their rankings for the keyword.
Another way to gauge the level of difficulty for a keyword is to use the Google Ads - Keyword Planner Tool which allows your to see the search volume of the keyword, and also how much money advertisers are bidding for that particular keyword.
In the case of the keyword: Floral Perfume
We see in the ‘Competition’ column that this keyword is labeled as ‘High’. The average ‘Top of Page Bid’ column paints a more accurate picture of the difficulty of the keyword. The more advertisers are willing to spend on the keyword correlates with the difficulty in ranking for it organically or bidding on the keyword with Google ads. When you are using the Google Keyword Planner Tool, search for several related keywords to get an overall idea of the types of keywords advertisers are bidding on and how much they are wiling to spend for keywords within the fragrance industry.
Another way to check the competition of a keyword is to search for the keyword yourself on Google. When you search for Floral Perfume, who occupies the first 10 search results? Are these big brands? Using SEO tools you can research the brands ranking for the keyword. What is their backlink profile? How large is their website? How much content do they have dedicated to this keyword?
When using 3rd party data from Google, SEO tools, and your own intuition on the brands currently ranking for the keyword that you want to target, you can paint a picture of the level of difficulty required to rank for that keyword.
3. What is the monthly search volume of the keyword? If you want to increase your perfume brand’s top-of-line revenue, targeting keywords that only get 300 monthly searches isn’t going to do much unless you are ranking for many lower-volume keywords. Ultimately you want to be targeting keywords with a monthly search volume of over 5,000 — preferably higher. This ensures that when you do start to rank for this keyword, the juice wass worth the squeeze.
Off-Page SEO Ranking Factors
Off page SEO is anything that you do that is NOT on your website to boost your website’s SEO rankings. This essentially amounts to one thing: backlinks. A backlink is simply a link on another website that links to your perfume brand’s website. The more backlinks that you have from other websites, the more Google will favor your website and rank it higher for keywords. Backlinks act as a trust signal for Google. Despite what Google might publicly say about their algorithm decreasing the effect of backlinks as a relevant ranking factor, it just isn’t happening anytime soon. There is no better proxy for conveying trust than backlinks. Google ran an internal experiment years ago where they didn’t use backlinks as a ranking factor and the search results were terrible.
What Makes a High-Quality Backlink?
Backlinks only act as a positive trust factor in the eyes of Google when they meet a set of criteria.
The External Website That Links to Your Brand’s Website
The quality of the site linking to your brand’s website is the most important ranking signal for Google when analyzing a backlink and the impact it will have on your brand’s website. A website that has a lot of traffic, backlinks, and an older domain age will appear more trustworthy than a spammy casino gambling website that has an IP address from Belarus and was created 2 weeks ago. Some websites such as Forbes, Vox, and CNN generate a substantial amount of revenue by selling backlinks to other companies because they know that a backlink from their website will have a powerful impact on the website that they link to.
Using SEO tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs will give you a really good insight into the domain authority of the website linking to you.
We use the Similar Web free Chrome extension to get a quick search traffic volume metric for the website.
Website Relevancy
Google will more favorably weigh the importance of a link from a perfume review website than a backlink from a car repair website. Furthermore, a relevant backlink will also bring in more targeted traffic to your website. Who do you think is more likely to click on the link and visit your perfume brand’s website? Someone who was recently reading perfume reviews — or someone who was looking at a car repair website?
Anchor Text
The anchor text indicates the visible and clickable words that are being hyperlinked. The most important aspect of anchor text is that it is a ranking signal for your perfume brand’s keyword rankings. For example, if your perfume brand is trying to rank for the keyword, ‘Jasmine floral perfume'‘ then you want the anchor text of any of your backlinks to be ‘Jasmine floral perfume’. This is a strong relevancy signal to Google that your site has Jasmine floral perfume related content or products. This anchor text will help your brand’s site rank for the specific keyword ‘jasmine floral perfume’. If you get a backlink to your perfume brand’s website that has the anchor text, ‘harvested in Honduras’ then this will NOT help your brand rank for more targeted keywords. The closer that the anchor text aligns to the keywords that you are trying to target then the more likely you are to rank for those keywords.
Do-Follow vs No-Follow Links
Do-Follow Link: A link with no modifiers to its HTML
example that links to Apple.com: <a href="https://apple.com/">Apple</a>
No-Follow Links: Includes the `rel="nofollow"` attribute within the link HTML
example that links to Apple.com: <a href="https://apple.com/" rel="nofollow">Apple</a>
A Do-Follow link is preferable because it conveys more trust in the referred domain. Google would be more likely to assign more trust and PageRank to the referred domain based on its rating. A No-Follow link is still important in a website’s backlink profile, however, Do-Follow backlinks are always preferable for increasing the ranking of your perfume brand’s website.
Final Thoughts on SEO
A holistic perfume advertising strategy needs to encompass a profit-focused SEO strategy in order to create more durable revenue — but it doesn’t happen overnight. Increasing organic traffic is a long-term strategy that takes time and concerted effort to implement effectively. Think marathon, not sprint. However, the rewards of having more targeted website traffic going to your brand’s website, almost 100% passive, should be self-evident. it is essentially free brand awareness when implemented correctly. Perfume brands that neglect their Direct-To-Consumer revenue by not having a SEO strategy in place will continue to face headwinds as their revenue is largely reliant on retail distribution and paid advertising strategies.
We Offer SEO Services for Perfume Brands
We offer SEO services for perfume brands who are looking to bring in more revenue from their brand’s website. This guide was meant to be a broad overview of SEO. We have left out many of the more advanced SEO strategies that we use to rank websites higher.