The UK beauty industry contributed £28.3 billion to the UK economy in 2025, according to the British Beauty Council’s Value of Beauty Report 2026. This figure covers products, services and the wider supply chain, not just retail sales, highlighting the scale of the market in which these retailers compete.

The industry has grown and adapted to keep up with each generation’s shopping habits. In recent years, consumers have become accustomed to browsing, comparing and buying beauty and cosmetic products online from the comfort of their homes. However, buying makeup such as foundation is more difficult online, as the shade needs to match the customer’s skin tone. This is one reason why high street and physical stores remain important.

Another key reason consumers have moved online is the high cost of makeup. An online presence allows customers to shop around for the best prices and deals, making it difficult for businesses that rely solely on their brand or customer experience to stand out. A combination of competitive pricing and a strong brand experience is key.

Like most industries, the beauty sector was impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, which accelerated the shift towards online shopping. With physical stores forced to close, the beauty and cosmetics market had to adapt, with many brands investing in technology that allows customers to try products virtually.

L’Oréal publicly pushed its Virtual Try-On technology in 2021 by bringing AR-powered makeup try-ons to Instagram shopping through a platform integration with ModiFace. That’s just one example of how larger beauty brands invested in remote product experiences as online demand accelerated.

During the 2020 lockdowns, many salons closed their doors and shifted towards selling skincare products online, making an already crowded market even more competitive.

This piece revisits the UK beauty ecommerce landscape from an organic search perspective. It covers five retailers, using visibility and traffic data from January 2015 to December 2020, and focuses on three areas: how visibility shifted, how closely traffic followed it, and the technical gaps that held newer entrants back.

Why look back at 2015 to 2020? Beauty ecommerce experienced significant shifts in organic search during this period. Google’s core updates put health-adjacent content under closer scrutiny, catalogues grew, and the pandemic pushed demand online almost overnight. Patterns from those years still help explain how beauty retailers win and lose visibility today.

Five things the data tells us about beauty ecommerce

Five key insights from our research and data into the organic search performance of UK beauty ecommerce brands:

  1. Visibility and traffic don’t always move together. Feelunique’s visibility fell between late 2015 and January 2017, but its organic sessions grew. This shows that ranking for fewer, but more relevant, keywords can be effective.
  2. Every site analysed saw its visibility fluctuate around at least one Google core update. For the beauty industry, core updates represent a recurring risk.
  3. Cult Beauty recorded the largest growth, increasing its market share from 3.7% to 22.2% between January 2015 and January 2020. Its biggest jump, from 512,801 to 1,271,536 sessions in a single month, points to a structural change rather than gradual SEO gains.
  4. December isn’t the peak month for organic traffic, despite beauty products being popular Christmas gifts. Several sites experienced dips in November and December, so gifting content needs to be live and well linked before the season begins.
  5. Newer entrants need to get the basics right first. Just My Look scored 16/100 for mobile page speed, had duplicate product markup and ranked for 27,000 keywords, a fraction of the number targeted by market leaders.

The UK beauty ecommerce websites we analysed

Using third-party tools and data, we conducted some high-level market analysis covering 2015 to 2020 for the UK’s leading beauty and cosmetic ecommerce websites. The analysis identifies those with continued organic success, sites that are gradually declining, and any newcomers.

The five beauty and cosmetic websites we evaluated are:

For the most part, the websites selected offer a wide range of makeup, skincare and hair care products/brands, with some further diversifying by offering fragrances.

When we talk about market share, we mean each site’s share of the combined organic visibility of all five sites, based on keyword rankings. Letters in brackets, like (Label N), refer to the Google updates marked on each chart.

Organic search visibility across the ecommerce beauty industry

Beauty & Cosmetic Marketshare Graph

Using third-party organic visibility data from 2015 to 2020, we have been able to compare five leading beauty and cosmetics websites. Fragrance Direct, Look Fantastic, Feelunique and Cult Beauty were all present in search engine indexes before 2015, whereas Just My Look was a relatively new ecommerce website, entering the online beauty industry in 2018.

At the start of 2015, Feelunique dominated the beauty and cosmetics landscape. Of the five competitors analysed, the company captured 49% of the market.

However, September 2015 marked the point at which Feelunique’s market share peaked. Over the following 18 months, its organic visibility gradually declined before reaching an all-time low in January 2017.

The third-party visibility data we used showed no clear step changes that aligned with known Google algorithm updates during this period.

Our interpretation is that the smoother decline is more consistent with Feelunique deliberately narrowing its keyword targets and no longer ranking for less relevant terms. However, this remains an interpretation rather than a confirmed cause.

Want to run the same check on your own site? Discover how to evaluate your performance against core algorithm updates.

As the gap between Feelunique, Look Fantastic and Fragrance Direct closed, the period from August 2016 to March 2018 became highly competitive. All three sites competed to achieve top positions for keywords such as eyeshadow palette, dewy foundations and colour-treated hair shampoo.

Over those two years, all three retailers increased their market share. Feelunique retained its position as market leader for most of this period, although its lead narrowed.

Between 2015 and 2018, Cult Beauty was an established part of the online beauty industry, but held a much smaller market share than Fragrance Direct, Look Fantastic and Feelunique. In January 2015, Cult Beauty accounted for approximately 3.7% of the market.

By late 2018, Cult Beauty’s organic search strategy was proving highly successful, enabling the company to grow rapidly and catch up with Fragrance Direct, Look Fantastic and Feelunique.

Towards the end of 2018, Cult Beauty had secured a greater market share than Fragrance Direct, making it a direct challenger to Look Fantastic and Feelunique.

From March 2019, Look Fantastic surged ahead of its competitors, capturing a significant share of the market that it still held when this analysis was completed. Meanwhile, Fragrance Direct, Cult Beauty and Feelunique maintained relatively steady organic market shares.

Just My Look is a relatively new entrant to the beauty and cosmetics market, securing its first share of the market in June 2018. Over the following couple of years, its organic strategy enabled the company to gradually increase its market share.

However, as a newer entrant to the beauty market, Just My Look’s organic market share still trailed that of the larger online-only retailers. This reflected its earlier-stage content and technical capabilities rather than a limitation of the business model itself.

Beauty ecommerce trends in organic traffic

Using a third-party tool, we captured organic traffic data for each of the five websites. Although Feelunique’s organic visibility fell between 2015 and 2017, its organic sessions dipped only slightly, with an approximate loss of 140,000 sessions between November and January.

This decline quickly reversed, potentially due to key pages being accidentally removed from search engine indexes or a technical issue, such as incorrect canonical tags being applied to critical pages.

Despite this, Feelunique experienced steady growth in organic sessions throughout the five-year period. However, there were three noticeable dips, all occurring around November and December in 2015, 2016 and 2019, suggesting a possible link to seasonality.

Fragrance Direct and Look Fantastic both experienced similar increases in organic sessions in 2019, although these occurred several months apart.

Later, both retailers saw a sudden decline in sessions around March 2020, followed by gradual month-on-month increases. This could be linked to the first national lockdown in the UK and the gradual easing of restrictions.

Following this initial drop, Look Fantastic’s sessions recovered and continued to increase, whereas Fragrance Direct’s traffic rose for two months before declining again. Its sessions remained lower until August 2020.

Cult Beauty gained organic visitors month on month throughout the five-year period, with a significant spike in sessions between the end of 2017 and the start of 2018.

The company went from receiving 512,801 visitors in December 2017 to 1,271,536 in January 2018. A jump of this size rarely results from gradual SEO work alone. A large catalogue expansion or site merger is a more likely explanation.

December wasn’t the strongest month for organic traffic for these websites either, which is surprising given how often people buy makeup, skincare and perfume as Christmas presents.

Just My Look: Fast growth held back by technical gaps

Just My Look Organic Marketshare

Of the five beauty and cosmetics websites, Just My Look is the newest competitor to enter the market, with its organic visibility first appearing in May 2018. Its visibility grew steadily until the September 2019 core update (Label P).

At this point, Just My Look’s organic visibility became volatile, resulting in fluctuations in keyword rankings. This explains the numerous spikes and dips that followed the update.

This trend continued until the next core update in January 2020 (Label Q). Beauty and skincare pages can fall within Google’s Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) category, particularly when they make health or wellbeing claims.

For this reason, we look at expertise, experience and clear commercial content before raw keyword counts, particularly following core updates that place greater emphasis on trustworthy pages.

Within a beauty catalogue, the pages most exposed to YMYL considerations are those making skin-health claims, such as acne treatments, SPF products and skincare for sensitive skin. Just My Look needs to demonstrate the clearest evidence of expertise across these pages and ensure the site follows Google’s guidelines.

During our analysis, we identified several areas where Just My Look could improve:

In our PageSpeed Insights tests, Just My Look averaged 16/100 on mobile and 53/100 on desktop. These are weak lab scores, suggesting that work on images, JavaScript and the rendering path should be prioritised before expanding content.

There are several relatively quick fixes that could improve Just My Look’s PageSpeed scores, including deferring offscreen images, serving images in next-generation formats, eliminating render-blocking resources and removing unused JavaScript.

When analysing Just My Look’s PageSpeed performance, we noticed that some of its Core Web Vitals metrics could be improved. We investigated further using Google Chrome DevTools, which revealed that the homepage experiences two layout shifts as the page loads. One way to address this is to reserve white space for the following node:

#text div#js-home-slice-1.home-slice.home-slice-sliceline.home-slice–index-1.no-margin

We then carried out some additional analysis of Just My Look’s mobile-friendliness. We found that the website is mobile-friendly, but there is still room for improvement. Eight scripts were only partially loading, some of which appear to relate to the reviews widget, which is blocked by the robots.txt file.

Google cannot fetch blocked scripts when rendering a page, meaning it may not be able to see the review content at all. This is a common issue with script-heavy beauty website templates.

The final opportunity, based on our top-level analysis, is structured data on product pages. Just My Look’s individual product pages already use it, which helps.

However, structured data should only be implemented once on each product, and we found several products that are marked up twice. This issue makes it harder to provide information about specific products to search engines.

A single, clean Product markup per URL is easier for Google to interpret, less likely to cause conflicts in Google Search Console, and makes it clearer which brand and product each page represents.

Just My Look Product Schema Just My Look Organic Traffic

Just My Look’s ecommerce beauty website started attracting organic users in May 2018. That month, the site received approximately 16,500 sessions. By May 2019, this figure had more than quadrupled to 80,900 organic sessions. In its third year of organic growth, the site gained a further 60,000 visitors.

From May to June 2019, Just My Look achieved 45% organic growth. The March 2019 core algorithm update had rolled out two months earlier, suggesting that it may have gradually increased Just My Look’s market share and organic traffic rather than having an immediate impact.

Despite steady monthly growth, Just My Look’s market share, organic traffic and keyword count remained a fraction of those of Look Fantastic and Cult Beauty, the two sites dominating the beauty ecommerce market.

Just My Look ranked for 27,000 keywords in the third-party data we used. A content-focused strategy built around makeup, beauty and the store’s extensive product ranges could help the site target more high-volume terms and increase the number of keywords it ranks for.

However, websites often perform best once they’re technically sound. In our ecommerce SEO strategy work, large beauty catalogues usually earn more from having technical foundations correct by fixing crawl, speed, mobile render, and Product markup first before any content expansion.

Look Fantastic: A traffic surge after the March 2019 core update

Look Fantastic organic performance

Until the end of 2019, Look Fantastic’s organic visibility grew at a steady rate, with only minor peaks and troughs as keyword rankings naturally fluctuated in the search results. The company’s organic visibility graph shows little evidence of any significant positive or negative impact from Google’s core algorithm updates.

Around the time Google released its March 2019 core algorithm update (Label N), Look Fantastic’s visibility was already on a steep upward trajectory. This growth continued for nine months before visibility peaked suddenly in December 2019.

Google’s January 2020 core update (Label Q) appears to have negatively affected Look Fantastic. However, it is difficult to attribute this decline solely to the update, as the company’s market share had already dropped sharply earlier that month. The change may therefore have been caused by a combination of factors.

Since then, the site’s market share has continued to decline gradually, potentially because Look Fantastic was negatively affected by the May 2020 core update (Label R).

The pattern is telling: the March 2019 core update coincided with an increase in Look Fantastic’s market share, but subsequent core updates coincided with declines. This reversal suggests that the site may have changed its organic search strategy during the intervening period.

Look Fantastic organic traffic

When comparing Look Fantastic’s organic visibility with its organic traffic, we can see a strong correlation between the two. As the site’s visibility increased significantly, its organic traffic also rose around the same time.

You might expect November and December to be the beauty and cosmetics industry’s strongest months due to the Christmas shopping period. However, Look Fantastic’s organic traffic fell by 76,000 sessions in December 2019.

Look Fantastic’s market share declined in 2019 before plateauing in 2020. In contrast, its organic traffic fluctuated considerably between December 2019 and February 2020, with several spikes and drops in visitor numbers. Traffic recovered in March and April before declining again in May and remaining low throughout June and July.

This suggests that the UK’s first lockdown, introduced on 23 March, had a delayed effect on Look Fantastic. The graph also shows that when the UK’s lockdown restrictions were lifted, Look Fantastic experienced a surge in organic visitors.

In March 2019, Look Fantastic’s market share increased significantly following one of Google’s core algorithm updates. This had a knock-on effect, with the site appearing more frequently in search engine results pages (SERPs), creating greater opportunities to attract customers.

In February 2019, Look Fantastic received 510,261 organic sessions. Four months later, in June 2019, this had increased to 1,004,783, almost doubling its organic traffic.

Fragrance Direct: Steady visibility, but no recovery after January 2020

Fragrance Direct organic performance

Since 2015, Fragrance Direct’s organic visibility has remained relatively steady, with small, regular peaks and troughs as keywords have fluctuated in the search results. Throughout this period, the site’s market share decreased from 22.9% in January 2015 to 20.1% in January 2020.

A decline of almost 3 percentage points over five years suggests stable, if unspectacular, performance.

The graph also shows that Fragrance Direct has occasionally been negatively affected by Google algorithm updates, including the February 2019 ‘unknown Google update’ (Label E), the March 2019 core update (Label N) and the January 2020 core update (Label Q), which caused its most recent significant drop in organic market share.

Each time Google’s algorithm updates negatively affected Fragrance Direct, the site generally recovered. However, its visibility did not return to previous levels following the January 2020 core update.

One possible explanation is a deliberate change in strategy, such as consolidating the website by merging pages or removing those that received little traffic. However, this seems unlikely, as planned consolidation would not necessarily coincide so closely with a core update.

A potential strategy for Fragrance Direct is to add a structured content hub that includes topic-focused supporting pages that reinforce product URLs. This widens the range of relevant keywords the site can target and gives clearer expertise signals than isolated blog posts.

This also gives the site an opportunity to demonstrate its expertise to search engines. This is particularly important because much of Fragrance Direct’s skincare content falls within areas that Google considers under its Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) guidelines.

YMYL covers pages relating to a person’s health, financial stability or safety, which Google holds to a higher standard. Websites publishing this type of content need to demonstrate clear expertise, relevance and trustworthiness.

This is also relevant given that Fragrance Direct was most recently affected by Google’s core algorithm updates, which, according to our initial analysis, appeared to reward E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness). Google has since expanded this framework to E-E-A-T, adding experience as another factor. Supporting content could therefore help reinforce these signals.

Fragrance Direct organic traffic

Fragrance Direct’s organic sessions graph shows stronger growth than its market share data. In January 2015, the site received 148,239 organic sessions. At its peak, in April 2020, this had risen to 1,121,109 sessions.

Sessions declined after the April peak. This could reflect a delayed effect of the Prime Minister’s lockdown announcement, as people initially tried to maintain their usual shopping habits.

The decline in sessions could also be linked to the drop in market share, which is calculated using keyword rankings. If key pages lost their top 10 positions, for example, they may have dropped to the second page of search results, reducing their visibility and potential to attract traffic.

There also appears to be a correlation between an increase in organic sessions and the announcement of the UK’s Eat Out to Help Out scheme. In July, Fragrance Direct’s website saw a 15% increase in sessions.

As mentioned previously, Fragrance Direct could benefit from a content-led strategy built around relevant topics, such as ‘top Mother’s Day gifts’. This content could help strengthen internal linking to specific product pages.

Doing so could increase sales of particular products. It could also provide a practical way to promote surplus stock.

Feelunique: Losing visibility without losing traffic

Feel Unique's organic performance

From 2015 to the beginning of 2019, Feelunique held the largest market share, despite its organic visibility falling by 37% between November 2015 and January 2017.

Feelunique’s declining market share was unlikely to have been caused by Google’s Panda update in July 2015 (Label B). If this had been the cause, the decline would have started much sooner.

However, the graph suggests that Feelunique initially experienced a dip in market share following the Panda update, but quickly recovered.

As the data suggests, the gradual decline in organic market share was not directly linked to known search engine algorithm updates.

A more likely explanation is that Feelunique removed a section of its website, such as a product range it no longer offered.

Alternatively, the company may have deliberately de-optimised a large proportion of its website for potentially high-volume keywords, trading market share for a strategy focused on more relevant, high-intent keywords.

The March 2019 core algorithm update (Label N) appears to have negatively affected the website’s organic search visibility. Feelunique was also affected by Google’s June and September core updates.

Being affected by three consecutive core updates in one year suggests that Google’s systems may have assessed Feelunique’s content less favourably than that of its competitors during 2019.

Core updates aim to improve the quality of search results by promoting helpful, relevant content. Maintaining high-quality content and a strong backlink profile can help websites build resilience against algorithm updates and reduce the risk of losing visibility.

Feel Unique's organic traffic

Despite Feelunique’s market share declining between late 2015 and 2017, there appears to be little correlation between its organic visibility and the number of organic sessions it received.

The graph shows that, between January and September, the website experienced month-on-month growth in organic visitors before traffic suddenly dropped in December and January.

You might not expect a beauty and cosmetics eCommerce website to see a decline in sessions in December, as makeup and skincare products are often bought as Christmas gifts. This suggests that a technical issue may have been responsible for the two-month dip.

Feelunique later experienced a decline in organic sessions between June and November 2016. This appears to coincide with an unknown Google update in July, followed by the release of Google’s Penguin update.

Penguin targeted websites using spammy or manipulative link-building strategies. If Feelunique responded by auditing its backlink profile and adopting more ethical link-building practices, this could help explain the subsequent increase in traffic over the next two years.

As in December 2015, Feelunique also saw a reduction in organic visitors in November and December 2019. This coincided with a decline in the website’s market share and may have been linked to Google’s algorithm updates.

Feelunique’s organic sessions remained relatively stable throughout the 2020 lockdowns. In fact, the website grew from 1,064,434 organic sessions in January 2020 to 1,600,477 in December 2020, representing a 50% increase.

Cult Beauty: From 3.7% to 22.2% market share in five years

Cult Beauty organic performance

Cult Beauty grew faster in organic search than any other website we analysed. In January 2015, it accounted for approximately 3.7% of the market share across the five competitors analysed. By January 2020, this had risen to 22.2%, representing a sixfold increase.

Google’s unknown algorithm update in July 2016 appears to have given Cult Beauty’s market share its first boost, followed by a slight decline in organic visibility after Google released another unknown update in February 2017.

From April 2017, Cult Beauty’s market share began to grow exponentially. Within a year, it had increased by 206%. The website reached its highest organic market share in December 2018, shortly after Google released its Medic update in August 2018 (Label M).

Google also released a broad core algorithm update at the end of April 2018 (Label J). The rollout typically took around two weeks to complete across Google’s data centres. The graph shows that Cult Beauty’s organic visibility began to decline in early May, with the downward trend continuing until it stabilised in mid-July.

On several occasions, Cult Beauty’s market share began to rise a few days before Google announced an update. As Google does not always announce updates on the day they begin rolling out, changes in visibility can appear before an official announcement.

Although Cult Beauty’s market share increased following Google’s June 2019 core update (Label O), the January 2020 core update (Label Q), seven months later, appears to have had the opposite effect.

The pattern then reversed again. In the months following the May 2020 core update (Label R), Cult Beauty’s market share began to rise.

A website that experiences significant fluctuations following successive core updates may be one whose performance Google’s systems are reassessing. Cult Beauty would benefit from reviewing its content and backlink profile to identify anything that may be thin, low-quality, spammy or irrelevant.

Cult Beauty organic traffic

In January 2015, Cult Beauty received 37,999 organic visitors. Five years later, this had grown to more than 1.9 million.

This rapid growth suggests a significant structural change, such as a website merger or a major expansion of its product catalogue. Organic sessions increased from 512,801 in December 2017 to 1,271,536 the following month, a 148% jump in just one month. This is far beyond what content or link building alone would typically deliver.

From January 2018, Cult Beauty’s organic sessions continued to grow. In that year alone, the website gained an additional 600,000 visitors. This coincided with the continued rapid growth in its organic market share throughout 2018.

However, from February 2019, Cult Beauty’s organic traffic declined for around four months, resulting in a loss of approximately half a million visitors. This appears to coincide with the website being negatively affected by Google’s March 2019 core update.

One possible explanation is that Cult Beauty had adopted a link-building approach that prioritised quantity over quality. If a large proportion of its new backlinks were considered low-quality or manipulative, a core update may have exposed weaknesses in its backlink profile.

Cult Beauty experienced a similar pattern around January 2020, when Google released another core update. Both its organic market share and traffic declined over the following three months.

Takeaway lessons for beauty industry ecommerce brands

Five years of data from five retailers suggest that organic search rewards trust and technical quality more than catalogue size in beauty eCommerce. The UK’s beauty and cosmetics eCommerce industry grew between 2015 and 2020. By the start of 2021, Cult Beauty was well placed to continue improving its organic performance and close the gap on Look Fantastic.

Just My Look, meanwhile, could close the gap more quickly by addressing its website performance, particularly across different aspects of user experience. Google’s Page Experience update, which began rolling out in 2021, placed greater emphasis on these user experience signals.

Most of the websites we reviewed were affected by at least one core algorithm update. High-quality content and a solid technical foundation won’t make a website immune to fluctuations, but they can help it maintain and recover its organic performance.

If we were advising a beauty retailer today, we’d start with three priorities:

  1. Review every page that makes skin health claims to ensure it demonstrates clear expertise and is supported by reliable evidence.
  2. Resolve rendering issues and duplicate product markup before scaling content production.
  3. Monitor organic visibility around core update rollouts to identify and investigate performance drops promptly.

Clear expertise, accurate product data and pages that search engines can access and render effectively also help determine which beauty retailers are cited by AI-powered search tools today.

Working out where your brand sits in the beauty ecommerce market? Our team can help with beauty and cosmetics SEO to build the technical and content foundations that hold up through core updates.