Face Agency is an Adelaide-based makeup training school that specialises in training students how to work in the industry as professional makeup artists and as specialised SFX makeup artists, Face Agency offers a wide range of courses for different levels of experience and desired outcomes, from courses for beginners wanting to learn how to perfect their own makeup to enthusiasts that want to make a career out of their passion for makeup. Our team at Caffeinated Marketing started working with Face Agency after they had recently undergone a complete site rebranding and restructure provided by another company and were experiencing a 100% drop in enquiries.

Initial Website SEO State

When we came on board to work with Face Agency, we started by analysing what had gone wrong between the old website (Through uploading an old site backup to our website and making use of Wayback Machine), which had previously performed quite well with competitive keywords such as “Makeup Courses Adelaide” and “Adelaide Makeup Lessons” etc. And comparing it to the initial state of the website we began to work on, which was ultimately a half-finished website that had not kept the same permalink structure as the original site.

 

Fixing Website Structure

Pages that were previously  /courses had moved to /course, this resulted in the website appearing to Google as if it were a completely different website with 0 of the page authority it had originally had. Within two weeks of correcting these major page structure issues, we found that enquiries were beginning to come back to the website but still not quite at the same level as before. This is why it is incredibly important always to seek a second opinion when considering making major changes to a business’s website, especially if it is currently a quite profitable asset.

 

Providing In-Depth Course Information

Next, to continue our search engine optimisation, we began going to work on building out the existing pages and course pages with more in-depth content to provide the reader with a brief overview of some of the courses and what they could expect to learn at Face Agency, not only does this help to sell the course to a prospective student but having in-depth content shows the expertise of the website to Google, making it more likely to rank higher than it’s competitors. Face Agency is currently still the only Adelaide makeup agency that provides it’s prospective students with in-depth information about what they will learn on it’s course pages. A great example of this is the Professional Makeup Course

 

Creating New Course Pages

We had originally discussed with the client that to improve the overall search engine optimisation for competitive keywords such as “Makeup Courses” in Adelaide, that we would need to add a range of makeup courses to compete with larger training organisations that offer over 20 beauty-related courses. After a brainstorming session with Face Agency, we added course pages for group makeup lessons, lash extensions, gel & acrylic nails and a short course on waxing although we had also discussed the importance of adding a bridal makeup course in the future, further expanding the total amount of keywords that the Face Agency website would be ranking for.

 

High-Quality Blog Content Aimet At Upcoming Makeup Artists

Part of our SEO strategy for all websites that we work on is to create a range of high-quality articles that are directly relevant to potential customers and are not just cheap filler articles for the sake of creating blog content. These types of articles generally are over 2000 words and are quite time intensive to create but provide the end reader with a very helpful article. How To Become A Makeup Artist is an article that our team is extremely proud of, with over 2100 words, the blog article breaks down some of the important factors when someone is considering becoming a makeup artist, such as what type of makeup artistry should they specialise in, what products/brands to buy and how to promote their business and register for insurance and obtain an ABN. This article then became a starting point that we could base other articles around such as “Whether You Should Get Insurance As A Makeup Artist?” These articles all then linked back to a lead-generating page such as a course to lead them to enquire about further study.

Student Makeup Learning Portal & Page Speed Optimisation

Face Agency originally had a learning management system (LMS) plugin on their main website, which would always load content even when someone wasn’t using the LMS. This caused the website to run extremely slow even when there was a low number of users on the website. We rebuilt the LMS portal on it’s own subdomain on a different hosting account, keeping it completely separated from the main website and revamped it with a clean login screen and template design for students to access their course notes easily.

Organic Search Improvements

We were extremely happy with the organic that we saw from the Face Agency website from when we started in February of 2022 right through April of 2023. Some of the most profitable growth was from keyword rankings. “Makeup Courses Adelaide” originally averaged a position of 10, currently ranking in position 2. Similar for “Makeup Courses” which had an average position of 75, which now has an average position of 38 Australia-wide. Generally ranking in the first position in Adelaide