The Ultimate Guide to SEO for Salon Owners
If you're a salon owner looking to attract more clients and improve your online visibility, search engine optimisation (SEO) is a must-have strategy in your marketing toolkit. By implementing effective SEO techniques, you can boost your salon's website rankings on search engines like Google, increase organic traffic to your website, and ultimately drive more customers through your salon doors. In this comprehensive guide, we'll walk you through the essential steps of SEO for salon owners to help you dominate the digital landscape.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, which involves optimising your website and online presence to improve its visibility in search engine results. There are 1000’s of SEO techniques that can be used to increase your website's organic (non-paid) traffic. Some of these are known, and some of them Google keeps under lock-and-key as industry secrets. These known ones are what SEO professionals, like ourselves, use to tweak your website and online presence to get Google and the likes to send you more free traffic – helping you attract potential customers who are actively searching for salon services in your area. In this blog post, we’re going to be sharing tips that are specifically applicable to salon owners, to help them boost their website up to page 1 for local searches. Whether you’re looking to DIY your SEO, or just want to be in-the-know to ensure you’re hiring the right professional (and getting bang for your buck!) strap in and let’s get to it!
Conduct an SEO Audit
Before you begin tweaking your SEO, it’s important to know where you’re starting from. By conducting an SEO audit you can learn what keywords you’re already ranking for, what content is sending you traffic, and even take a peak at what keywords your competitors rank for. An SEO audit can also help identify any technical issues or areas for improvement, including broken links, page-load time and whether or not your webpage’s structure is adhering to SEO best practices. We discuss our favourite free SEO tools in this blog post to help you get started.
Do Your Keyword Research
Now, we know when it comes to SEO, it can be easy to get lost in the abyss of jargon terms. So we want to lay it all out, plain and simple for you. Keywords are one of the main factors that will contribute to your site’s ranking on Google. But what are keywords exactly? Think of keywords as anything that your potential clients might be typing in to a search engine to:
Find a salon in their area, e.g. ‘Hairdresser Brisbane’
Find a particular service in their area, e.g. ‘Eyebrow Wax Near Me’
Find out more information about a service, e.g. ‘What is IPL hair removal?’
Get answers to their burning questions, e.g. ‘Does laser pigmentation removal hurt?’,
Seek inspiration for their own beauty transformation, e.g. ‘Best wedding hairstyles 2023’, or
See results related to your products and services, e.g. ‘dermal fillers before and afters’.
In a nutshell, keyword research is all about identifying relevant keywords and key phrases that potential customers might use to search for your salon’s services. Incorporating these keywords naturally throughout your website content, including page titles, headings, page content and product or service descriptions helps to organically boost your content over time.
Want a shortcut to getting your keyword research completed? Let us do it for you!
Track Your Keywords
Once you know what keywords are relevant to your industry, business and services, you’ll want to monitor your keyword rankings using tools like Google Search Console or third-party SEO software. This will help you understand how your salon website is performing in search results and identify areas for improvement.
Use Google Business Page
Google loves when you use their platform, and you’ll earn extra brownie points with them just by creating a Google Business page. Don’t be fooled into thinking your Google page is just a one-and-done thing! Just like your social media platforms, Google loves fresh, updated content. Here’s a few things to ensure that you’re checking are correct, and updating every month or so:
Your operating times – be sure to add in your opening hours, and checking if any upcoming holidays/public holidays need special times to be added in.
Your contact details – if you’ve changed address, phone number or email addresses make sure you’re not just updating these on your website, but your Google business page too!
Photos – be sure to add photos of not just your business premises, but share some of your before and afters, or client results to your Google profile too. This is a great way to stand out from your competitors and show potential customers a glimpse of what’s possible when they choose your salon.
Ask clients for reviews – more on that in a moment, as this topic deserves a section of it’s own.
Claiming and optimising your Google Business page will help your salon appear in local search results, display important information such as your address, phone number, and hours of operation, and allow customers to leave reviews.
Ask for Client Reviews
Positive customer reviews not only build trust but also improve your search engine rankings. While having testimonials on your website is great for those that are perusing your pages, reviews on platforms like Google, Yelp, or Facebook significantly help with your Google ranking. Encourage satisfied clients to leave a review. Make it easy for them to do so by sharing a link with them post-appointment, or popping a reminder at the bottom of each of your eMail newsletters. Satisfied customers love to let you know how much they love your work, so don’t be too embarrassed to ask them.
Create a Social Media Profile
These days most salon business owners know they need a social media presence to attract and engage new potential clients. What you might not know is that posting to your social media can actually help your search engine results rankings. This happens in two ways;
By having a social media profile that is linked to your business, Google knows that you’re a reputable brand and business. In some cases, while your website is dancing up the search engine results pages, your social media pages may appear on page 1 sooner than your website does. Therefore, it’s a great way to begin boosting your visibility while you continue to improve your on-site SEO.
Social media can help you create backlinks to your website. We’ll discuss backlinks in more detail in just a moment, but for the time being you just need to know that sharing that ‘link in bio’ can significantly help boost your website in search results, as it shows search engines that you have content people want to know all about (enough to stop their never-ending scroll on the ‘gram and join you on your website).
Establishing a strong presence on social media platforms relevant to your salon business, and regularly updating your profiles, engaging with your audience, and sharing valuable content can be a great way to drive traffic back to your website and improve your SEO.
Check Your Site Speed
Most people don’t have the time (*ahem* patience) to wait around for a slow website to load. If they’ve found you from a search query, and your site is not loading in optimal time, then chances are they’ll likely hit the ‘back’ button and go searching for another result instead.
Not only does this mean you’ve lost the opportunity to wow this potential client, but it can also mean that search engines, like Google, may penalise you in future search results.
Optimising your website's loading speed to enhance user experience and improve search engine rankings. Reducing your site’s speed means reducing the amount of, or size of, files stored on your site. A great place to start is with the size of your images – many people think they have to have print-quality images on their website. We always use image compressors like compresspng.com to compress images prior to uploading them.
If you’re not sure of your site’s speed, be sure to run your URL through Google’s free tool.
Check for Broken Links
Say you’ve managed to get your website to appear on page 1 of search engine results. Your dream client clicks on your hard-earned top-ranking webpage page. Only to discover a dreaded ‘404 page not found’ error waiting for them on the other side. This is the result of a broken link, and it can happen to anyone. Most often, it occurs when you change the URL of a page, and haven’t made updates to where that page is linked from, or redirected the old URL. But don’t worry, you don’t need to scroll your website daily checking every link – there’s a handy tool you can use instead. Simply type your domain URL into brokenlinkcheck.com and it will do it all for you. If you’re using a handy SEO tracking tool, they’ll likely have this included as part of their auditing process too. Broken links can negatively impact user experience and hinder your SEO efforts. Don’t let them be what’s holding you back from reaching page-1 status.
Create Links Between Pages
When you link one of your website pages to another of your website pages, us SEO nerds call this ‘internal linking’. What internal linking does is help search engines understand the structure and relevance of the content on your website – so you can become known as the go-to source for a particular service, or treatment protocol. It also helps improve navigation and user experience. For example, say you’ve written a brilliant article all about treating adult acne. Linking sentences throughout this article to other pieces of relevant content on your site, such as other articles or treatment pages, not only helps your website visitor find more information on the topic they’re researching, but also increases the amount of time they spend on your site. If they found you through a search engine result, this can have very favourable effects on your search-rankings.
Create Backlinks
Backlinks are links to your website from other reputable websites. When building backlinks, you want to focus on backlinks from high-quality sources, to improve your salon website's authority and credibility in the eyes of search engines.
Creating meaningful backlinks is not an overnight strategy, and can take time and effort to affect your search ranking results. You can start by reaching out to industry-relevant websites, pitching guest articles. If you are a stockist of certain products, ask to be listed on their suppliers page or to leave them a testimonial. If you’re feeling really brave, you can become a source for the media, who will often link back to your website in their article.
Be warned, not all backlinks are created equal. There are plenty of spammy sites that may link to your website, and these could be dragging your site down. Be sure to check your ‘referrers’ in your Google Analytics console to know who’s referring to your site.
Use Your Location
Most of your salon’s website traffic will be coming from people in your local area, who are searching for someone like you nearby. With technological advances such as location services, search engines are able to show results based on a user's location, even if they haven’t typed in your suburb or ‘near me’.
Therefore, optimising your website content with location-specific keywords is a great way to get your content in front of potential customers in your area. Incorporate your city, suburb or region in your page titles, URL’s, meta descriptions headings, and content to really maximise your ranking in local salon search results.
Have a Page for Each Service
One big mistake we see on many websites is having all your possible services listed on a single page. While this can make a great landing page, giving the website user an opportunity to dive deeper, it limits your ability to rank for each service offering.
Google likes to know what your website’s information is all about – and if there are too many topics on the one page, it can get confused, pushing you down the search results.
Start by creating individual pages on your website for each service your salon offers. This allows you to optimise each page with relevant keywords, so that search engines can index and rank these pages separately, increasing your chances of appearing in relevant search results.
Include Social Proof
The keywords ‘{service} before and afters’ or ‘{service} results’ will be in the top 100 keywords for most of your services, making the addition of a ‘Before and Afters’ section to each of your services pages a must-have for all salons.
Not only does this help boost your likelihood of showing up on page 1, but it allows you to showcase your salon's expertise and transformation abilities. This can help attract potential clients and improve your website's engagement metrics.
Be sure to label this section with the keywords mentioned above, and name your before and after images with keywords too for maximum traction in image search results.
Images are returned for 27.3% of search queries on Google.
– Moz, 2020
Include FAQs
As naturally inquisitive people, we love to use Google to answer our questions. Question-based searches have become so popular that Google presents a ‘People Also Ask’ box, with related questions on 70% of desktop searches.
By incorporating questions into your content, you can directly answer your customers’ main questions, which not only helps you be seen as a source of knowledge for them, but can really boost your rankings within search engine results.
Consider adding a ‘frequently asked questions’ (FAQs) section to each of your service pages, to address common queries and provide valuable information to potential customers, improving user experience and helping search engines understand your content better.
Ensure your website is mobile-friendly
These days, with search-engines in our pockets, most searches are conducted using mobile devices, with some industries reporting as high as 72% of searches originating from mobile. In 2018, Google announced it would begin featuring websites that were optimised for mobile higher in mobile search results than those that weren’t.
According to SEMRush:
89% of URLs and 37% of URLs in positions 1-20 rank differently on mobile and desktop.
– SEMRush
What does this mean for your website? Well it means you can’t ignore making your website mobile optimised. Just say your competitor, or a nearby salon is ranking in the top 3 results for salons in your area. If their website is not mobile optimised, this leaves an open opportunity for you to rank higher, just by tweaking a few design features. This is one of the reasons we love using Squarespace for salon websites, as it easily allows you to check and optimise the mobile version of your site – no web-developer or experience required.
Write New SEO-Optimised Blog Content Frequently
Once you’ve identified your keywords, and you’ve created your service pages that highlight these keywords, it’s time to turn your eye to creating fresh new content.
Regularly publishing fresh and informative blog content that incorporates relevant keywords and addresses topics of interest to your target audience can boost your website's visibility. Not only does this content help engage users, and establish your salon as an authority in the industry, it gives you more opportunity to put keywords across multiple areas of your site, and create those important internal links we mentioned earlier.
Once you’ve started writing blogs for your salon’s website you can use this content across multiple platforms, including Pinterest, sharing it with your eMail community and breaking it up into smaller content pieces for social media – helping you work smarter, not harder!
By following these SEO strategies, salon owners can improve their online presence, attract more clients, and gain a competitive edge in the digital landscape. Remember, SEO is an ongoing process that requires regular monitoring, fresh content creation and tweaking of your existing website. Once you’ve begun to master the game of SEO, your website can become an ongoing source of organic traffic and new clients for your salon business.
Ready to turn your website into a client-winning machine? Download our FREE SEO Checklist today!
