Slip, slop, SEO: How Ultra Violette and Naked Sundays find sunscreen buyers online

If there was ever a category overdue for a glow-up, it was sunscreen.

Enter Ultra Violette and Naked Sundays. Both have stand-out branding, a fun tone of voice and plenty of cleverly trade-marked terms (cabanaglow™ and Queen Screen™, anyone?). Both are excelling on social media and in PR.

But I’m an SEO strategist, so I can’t help noticing a big difference in the SEO investment of these two brands. Call me biased, but considering there are still more than 8.5 billion searches on Google daily (Internet Live Stats, 2022), brands who ignore SEO are missing out on thousands of revenue-generating opportunities (especially when there are over 1.1 million sunscreen-related searches every month).

So, when it comes to the next generation of sunscreen, who’s investing wisely in SEO?

Let’s start with their overall SEO positions.

Ultra Violette 

Total keywords – 6712

Page 1 keywords – 26.2%

Branded searches- 9.9k searches per month

Ranking for ‘sunscreen’ – #3

Authority score – 39

Referring domains – 1.3k

Backlinks – 10.9k

Naked Sundays

Total keywords – 756

Page 1 keywords – 15.4.2%

Branded searches- 4.4k searches per month

Ranking for ‘sunscreen’ – not ranking

Authority score – 35

Referring domains – 1.2k

Backlinks – 36.5k

Data: SEMrush

Organic visibility

The stark contrast in branded search volume between Ultra Violette and Naked Sundays reveals a lot about brand awareness and consumer engagement. While ‘Ultra Violette’ gets a robust 9.9k searches per month, ‘Naked Sundays’ lags with 4.4k searches per month. Increasing brand awareness can be done with social media and PR, but showing up at the top of the Google Search results is an underrated brand awareness strategy. 

Despite being a relatively young brand, Ultra Violette has managed to secure the third position for the keyword ‘sunscreen’ (which receives over 18,000 searches per month), ranking just below industry giants like Cancer Council and Chemist Warehouse. Appearing so highly exposes the brand to a considerable number of potential customers and reinforces the association between sunscreen and Ultra Violette. This also increases the likelihood of brand recall. 

Naked Sundays’ more modest keyword presence and lack of rankings for ‘sunscreen’ highlights a potential area for improvement in their SEO approach. While Ultra Violette launched nearly two years before Naked Sundays, giving them a headstart, Naked Sundays has an opportunity to narrow the gap and capitalise on the large number of searches for sunscreen to increase its brand awareness.

Domain differences

Both sites have a similar authority score and slow mobile load times. Interestingly, neither site owns the alternative of their domain name. The .com.au version of Naked Sundays is for sale (I would recommend they buy this domain, but I suspect the owner is asking for a criminal amount of money to sell it). The .com for Ultra Violette is a high-performance electric vehicle brand based in India. The risk for Ultra Violette is the limitations when expanding and operating in international markets where the .com is more common or preferred by consumers. 

On-page & UX

Ultra Violette has a great, optimised title tag and meta description (often the first thing users see), which includes their unique selling propositions and target keywords. By strategically incorporating these, Ultra Violette effectively communicates its brand value and relevance to potential customers, increasing the likelihood of clicks and conversions. 

On its website, it has managed to integrate copy on its product listing pages, a common SEO tactic aimed at increasing the number of relevant keywords on the page.

From a UX perspective, allowing customers to shop based on product type, skin type, and formula makes the shopping experience more intuitive, efficient and personalised. It also has bonus categories in the footer, created to appear for niche search terms, demonstrating an understanding of the target audience’s search behaviour. 

Naked Sundays also included its target keyword and USPs in its title tag and meta description, choosing to highlight the Australian-made aspect of its product. This is a smart move as, according to a study by Roy Morgan, both Australian and US consumers prefer Australian-made products. To make its meta tags even more effective, they could be shortened and updated to be more relevant to the keywords it is trying to target.

Adding copy to its product listing pages would be another quick win for the brand, allowing it to compete for the top spots in the search results.

Content

Ultra Violette’s strategic blend of informational content and brand news on their blog enhances its organic search presence and shows it understands what its customers will want to read. Specifically, the brand’s successful blogs on pregnancy-safe sunscreen and UV index breakdown demonstrate that high-quality, concise content can effectively target informational intent keywords and drive relevant traffic to the website. The common misconception is that blogs need a few thousand words to be relevant. The pregnancy sunscreen blog proves this is not the case, ranking for many relevant keywords with a 550-word interview-style article.

While Naked Sundays also has blogs, it focuses more on PR content. This strategy allows it to showcase the brand and its products directly to customers without solely relying on appearing in search results. It should continue leveraging this approach effectively until it establishes a stronger organic search presence.

Backlinks

While Naked Sundays has a larger number of backlinks, Ultra Violette has a larger number of referring domains, which matters more as it indicates a broader diversity of sources “vouching” for the credibility and relevance of the brand. 

In terms of its backlink profile, the brand has backlinks from sites with similar authority scores. Naked Sundays has backlinks with better authority scores from top-tier sites like Forbes and CNN, which Ultra Violette could try to emulate. But Ultra Violette has more referring domains from beauty and fitness sites in the same industry. 

Backlinks from relevant industry-specific websites signal to Google that the content and offerings of the brand are authoritative and trustworthy within their niche, which can lead to higher rankings in the search results. Backlinks from industry-related websites can also drive highly targeted traffic to the brand’s website. Visitors from these sites are more likely to be interested in the brand’s products or services since they are already engaged with similar content within the same industry. 

Ok, so there’s a clear winner…

Congratulations are in order for Ultra Violette. I’m highly impressed with their SEO approach, which is just one aspect of their overall stellar performance across e-commerce, branding, PR, and social media.

Ultra Violette recently raised $15 million to expand globally, further underscoring the effectiveness of its holistic marketing and brand strategy and proving that investing in SEO can significantly contribute to growth.

Naked Sundays has also built an iconic, sticky brand that is easily recognisable, fun and relatable. It is clever and creative with its strategic activations, PR, and social presence. The natural next step is investing in SEO that improves online visibility while staying true to the brand. If the team is ready to show up online in their Sunday best and a little less naked, they know where to find me.

Remi Audette is an award-winning SEO strategist and founder of Sunday Best Digital.