SEO, GEO & Speed Work for Skills Combined

Skills Combined project case study screenshot

How Avelize handled technical SEO, Generative Engine Optimization, speed work and debugging for Skills Combined, a Nordic beauty brand selling across five markets on Shopify.

About Skills Combined

Skills Combined® is a Swedish beauty brand built on the premise that makeup should also care for skin, founded by makeup artist Jessica Wahlgren Norman and skin therapist Maria Bühring. The store sells across the Nordics and internationally — Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, and English — from one Shopify storefront.

The challenge

A brand selling into five markets from one storefront lives or dies on its international SEO setup. Get the hreflang annotations wrong and Google serves the Finnish page to Swedish searchers, or treats the market variants as duplicates and picks one arbitrarily. Beauty is also a category where buyers increasingly ask an AI assistant rather than a search engine — which rewards content that states ingredients, formulation, and use clearly enough to be quoted. On top of that, beauty storefronts are image-heavy by nature, and an image-heavy Shopify theme running across five locales will be slow unless loading priority is handled deliberately.

Scope of work

Technical SEO audit across all five market variants
Hreflang architecture for Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, and English
Generative Engine Optimization for AI search and assistant visibility
Core Web Vitals and page speed work on an image-heavy storefront
Structured data implementation and validation
Debugging across theme, apps, and market configuration

The solution

Avelize treated the five markets as one system rather than five sites. The hreflang set is complete and reciprocal across Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, and English, with an x-default for everyone else, so each market gets the right page and none of them compete. On the performance side, the storefront carries a large number of images by necessity — the work was to make loading priority match what the page actually needs: the hero image loads eagerly, the rest defer, so the largest paint is not queued behind product photography below the fold. The GEO work focused on making product and formulation content specific enough to be cited by AI assistants, where vague beauty copy simply is not.

Technical approach

Reciprocal hreflang set across sv, da, fi, no, en with x-default
Canonical and market-variant architecture to prevent cross-market duplication
Loading-priority audit — eager hero, deferred below-fold imagery
Core Web Vitals measurement and LCP/CLS work on revenue templates
Organization and product structured data implementation
Content restructuring for AI citability: ingredients, formulation, use
Theme and app debugging across locale-switching paths

Outcome

Skills Combined runs five market variants from one Shopify storefront with a complete, reciprocal hreflang set and image loading that matches what each page actually needs first. The technical foundation supports both conventional search and the AI assistants beauty buyers increasingly ask before they buy.

Related services

Live product: https://skillscombined.se/

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