Running a salon and spa business is not low-hanging fruit. Competition is fierce. If you want to stay ahead of the competition, you need to be smart about your marketing and advertising strategy.
Email marketing, seasonal deals, discount coupons & paid advertising are some of the most effective ways to attract customers into your salon doors. However, search engine optimization (SEO) will always outshine them as it’ll give you perfect exposure all year round!
SEO for Salon business will bring your shop right in front of your customer where they are looking for your services, i.e., search engines. Majority of purchases these days begin on search engines, and most people performing these searches will never hit the second page of the SERP.
Therefore if you’re a hairstylist or run a hair salon or spa, it is high time you invest in SEO to boost your online visibility and get the top places on the SERP. In this guide, we have outlined the most important aspects of SEO for salons and spas.
Why is SEO for Salons Important?
Digital marketing is a topic that seems to be on the tip of every business owner’s tongue these days to promote their business. However, with all these different digital marketing channels, do you want to know why and how to market a hair salon using SEO? Let’s discuss it in detail!
1. Targets Organic Customers
Internet users are bombarded every day with cold sales emails and come across a plethora of salons every time they scroll on their social media.
While the ROI of email marketing might be high and social media brings more engagement, SEO helps hair salons reach the right customers who are actively looking for a service and are ready to purchase.
2. Better Long-Term Investment
Hair salons and spas are an evergreen business. Every day a bunch of new people will be looking for a manicure or a haircut. This means you have to be on top of the search engines every single day.
Paid media might be one good strategy hair salon can use for bringing in new leads when they are starting out. However, in the long run, it becomes expensive as the average cost-per-click on Google Ads is $1 to $2.
In this case, SEO is a much better investment than paid ads and other traditional marketing methods. You can bring in new customers for months or years with what you do today on search engine optimization!
3. Compliment Other Marketing Efforts
SEO will support other marketing efforts of your company. When you use traditional forms of marketing such as radio, newspaper, and paid ads, the targeted customers have a brief overview of your business.
The next thing they are probably going to do is to search your business on Google. Again, if you have adequately managed your SEO, the results will pop up in the first few places. This brings authority and builds trust with potential customers.
In this way, SEO supports your other marketing efforts. Also, with changing algorithms, when providing SEO for Salons, digital marketers will be creating some unique content about your spa/salon and its services.
The content will be used in off-page and on-page SEO, but by working smartly, you can utilize that in your promotional emails, social media posts, SMS advertising, and other channels.
How To Get Your Salon Business Rank High On Google?
When it comes to ranking high on Google, there are a number of things that influence your salon’s online visibility.
The quality of content on your website, the authority of the other websites that link to your website, your social presence, the technical performance of your website all have a role in determining a business’s Google ranking.
We have created a list of necessary things to ensure that the SEO part of your spa & hair salons marketing campaigns brings the desired results.
1. First Things First – Create A Website:
When starting to create an online presence for your salon or spa, most business owners are tempted to create an Instagram profile. It’s easy and fun! But here’s the problem: If you want to get found on Google, having a stellar website is essential to making that happen.
Your website is not just a location for people to find your business — it’s an opportunity for you to brand yourself, define your image and show what makes you different from the competition. So there is no reason why your salon business should not have a website.
Rather than creating a website from scratch, many salon businesses rely on website builders to develop and maintain their online presence.
These web builders, such as Wix and Divi, allow users to design and publish websites without understanding the ins and outs of SEO or website coding.
However, while this is ideal for creating a basic online presence, the websites created in this manner have their limitations when it comes to SEO optimization and customization.
For excellent hair salon website ideas and SEO optimized websites, look no further than Artemis Digital. Our team of talented web designers and developers understand the importance of a well-designed site.
We have the right expertise to get your salon business’s online presence off the ground with an aesthetically pleasing website highly optimized for search engines.
2. Optimize the Website for Mobile Users
Your website should be mobile-optimized and responsive to ensure that it delivers a seamless and engaging experience for all of your customers, no matter what device they’re using to browse your salon business website.
People are increasingly using search engines from their phones. Around half of all users are now accessing Google on their mobiles. That means your site needs to be ready for them and be easy to use, or you could be hurting your search engine rankings and losing business.
If you’re not sure whether or not your website is optimized, there are a number of SEO tools available that will allow you to check its mobile compatibility — just search your favorite search engine for “mobile-friendly test” (e.g., “Google mobile-friendly test”).
3. Build Fast Loading Websites:
Having a fast website is crucial. A slow website hurts SEO for hair salons, lowers conversion rates, and drives away customers. When it takes more than three seconds for your site to load, about 40% of visitors will click away.
Not only do consumers expect fast websites, but Google also rewards sites with snappy loading speeds by prioritizing them higher in search results.
However, beauty brands, salons, and spas have a common practice of adding tons of images to their website. And most of the time, these images are too large. This will eventually result in slow loading speeds.
It’s important to slim down salon websites by resizing large images and reducing other elements. On the whole, the simpler your site is, the faster it will be.
Also, try using Google’s Page Speed Insights tool to optimize your website’s performance. The tool evaluates how quickly your site responds to user input and if it can be optimized to help save time by improving load speed.
4. Focus on Meta Titles & Page Descriptions:
Meta titles are like the icing on the cake — defining, explaining, and enticing search engines to take a closer look at your website. They are a critically important component of on-page SEO.
Remember: Meta titles appear in search results and browser tabs, and you have total control over them.
The Meta title should be concise and descriptive, including the most important keywords. This is perhaps one of the most powerful SEO tactics salons have to rank higher.
For example: One of the most common keywords people use to look for hair salons is “hair salons near me.”
If your Meta title only contains your business name and nothing related to your location or doesn’t mention that you are a salon business, then this is a recipe for disaster.
Meta titles are the most convenient way to let Google and other search engines know the answer to “hair salon near me.”
You must include your city/suburb/area name in it, the type of your business, like hair salon, beauty spa, and massage center, followed by your brand name.
Your Meta title should look something like this:
“Business Type” in “Location Name” | “Business Name”
A good practice is to include the salon name at the end of the Meta title. The standard meta title length is between 50 to 60 characters. If it exceeds some of the parts of the title will not be visible to people in search engines.
You can also add a short CTA and other descriptions in your Meta title. Keep it catchy, uncomplicated, and very concise. Also, don’t forget to create a great Meta title for each page of your website.
The Meta description is a short text that is shown just below the title in SERP. It describes what the page is all about. For your salon website homepage, it should include a brief description and strength of your salon business written within 155-160 characters.
To check how well optimized your Meta title is, use online tools like Yoast or Title & Meta Description Checker By cmlabs.
5. Invest Time & Resources In Keyword Research:
There are a lot of factors that go into an SEO hair salon marketing strategy, but it all starts with keyword research. In fact, keyword research is the backbone for most effective SEO campaigns regardless of the industry.
Thorough research using advanced tools like Google Ads Keyword Planner, Google Search Console, SEMrush, and many more will help you determine the keywords that customers are using to search for the services that your salon is offering.
Keyword research also allows you to create content that speaks directly to your customers. However, you must pay attention to the keyword volume as a slight change in terms can drastically affect how often people are using that word to look for your services.
Keywords are the driving force behind traffic; therefore, using the right ones with high volume is essential. It is important to mention here that you must study your competition also to know which keywords are suitable for your salon business.
If you are competing against some big names in your target market who are spending thousands of dollars on SEO campaigns, they will most likely rank higher on the keyword you have chosen. In such a scenario, long-tail keywords come to the rescue.
If a high-volume keyword is hard to compete on, include some specific long-tail keywords in your content to capture a fair share of traffic from that one. The best approach is to include a balanced mix of long and short tail keywords in your content to get the traffic from both of them..
Also, choose your keywords carefully to keep them relevant to your business services, customer experience, personality, and more. A confusing or irrelevant keyword can lead to a frustrating customer experience and can cause them to abandon the website without engaging with it, thus increasing the bounce rate.
For instance, never forcefully include a popular keyword related to hot stone massage or bridal hairstyles when your spa and salon only offers Thai massages and haircuts for mature women.
In short, targeting the right keywords will help salon sites get more traffic and sales, and will also help them avoid manual Google penalties.
Talking about Google penalties, how can we not talk about keyword stuffing? Keyword stuffing or cramming keywords is the practice of using keywords excessively on your web pages.
The search engine algorithms are more advanced today, and they can detect overused keywords. As a result, sites that tried to rank well in Google searches by using keyword stuffing started experiencing unexpected declines.
Now, natural content is what search engines look for—not over-compensated websites or articles attempting to achieve a tier-one ranking. The best way to write naturally is to use your keywords but also include related words, phrases, or synonyms that are likely to appeal to readers.
Today, many experts suggest that anywhere between 0.5% and 2% of your total word count be your keyword(s) – with the most popular being 0.8%. In addition, always spread your chosen keyword all through the website and not just in one section.
Before you start brainstorming keywords, also think about the customers that visit your salon. Where do they live? What parts of town do they frequently visit?
Look into the demographics of your local market and consider adding locations to your target keywords (i.e., Los Angeles massage therapy or more specific ones that include streets, suburbs, neighborhoods according to your salon & spa location).
To sum it up, keyword research for SEO for hair salons & other beauty businesses is an ongoing process. You’ll never find the “perfect phrase” that will provide you with an endless supply of clicks – it’s always a work in progress.
Instead, the best thing you can do is to see how your audience behaves and how your competitors are using keywords effectively. That will help you determine what phrases are the most promising for your own content and SEO strategies.
6. Create Separate Service Pages with User Intent in Mind
User intent is the goal, query, or desire of a user who executes a search on an online search engine. By knowing the user intent, you can go a long way to making sure your website doesn’t deliver poor-quality experiences, which leads to high bounce rates and potential abandons.
People searching for spas rarely type in business names; instead, they perform searches by service. Therefore create pages dedicated to each one of your services and include specific keywords for each page. When users search for a service, they should be able to easily find it.
In addition, Google values on-page signals for local businesses, which means putting your spa/ salon address, phone number, and other contact information on your website on every page is a good SEO for salon practice. Fortunately, there is a simple and effective way to do this: adding a footer to each page that contains your NAP information.
Artemis Digital delivers a full suite of SEO services to help your business become more visible on search engines. From link building and keyword optimization, to local SEO solutions such as citations and geo targeting, we specialize in helping businesses improve their search engine rankings and grow their customer base.
7. Make & Optimize Google My Business Profile:
Google My Business (GMB) is an essential, free tool that any salon business should be taking advantage of. With this platform, businesses can put their best foot forward by taking control of their profile. It appears on the right of the search engine when someone is searching for a local spa or salon business.
GMB lets you manage and edit your business profile and interact with customers directly. With one location to edit all of your business details, you can message clients and enable them to schedule appointments, making it easier than ever for them to reach out to you.
However, creating a GMB profile is not enough. You must ensure that it is full of essential information and completely optimized. Place your salon in the best-suited category, and don’t forget to use relevant keywords in the business description.
Professionally taken photos of the salon interiors and candid photos of your hairstylists in action added to your GMB profile is undoubtedly an excellent hair stylist advertising method for which you don’t even have to pay a penny. Also, update these photos regularly to make sure that your potential customer knows that the salon is operating in full swing.
8. Get Backlinks from Reputable Sources
Link building is the process of creating new relationships between your business’s website and other sites on the internet. This helps to boost your site’s presence on search engines, including Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
It’s the basic theory of how the internet works. Every link leads back to its root page, which leads back to another page…and another until there are many of them on different web pages that all lead back to your site.
If you’re a local beauty salon or hair salon looking to boost trustworthiness and brand reputation on the internet, link building is imperative. Backlinks increase the search rankings of your site and make you look like a more reputable site to all of those Google bots.
Get your backlinks for your beauty salon website from:
- Online directories like Yelp, Yellow Pages, Angie’s List, Superpagess & more.
- Other local business websites.
- Popular news outlets.
- Local bloggers writing about salons and spas.
9. Do Not Ignore Bing Places for Business
There is no doubt that Google is the most powerful search engine right now. However, when search engines first began indexing the web, Yahoo! was the dominant player. Although Yahoo! has fallen by the wayside, Bing is still a force to be reckoned with.
Bing still has a user base of about 10%, and it is important to create a Bing Places account in case anyone using the search engine takes an interest in your hair salon or spa business.
Conclusion
Search engine optimization seems overwhelming at first, but it’s key to getting a steady stream of customers. Furthermore, it is the best digital marketing method to up your game in the digital realm, giving long-term sustainable results for your salon business.
SEO for Salons is the ultimate solution to attract customers looking for hairstylists, salons, or spas near them. Hundreds of customers are waiting to find a salon on search engines. Use this concise list of best SEO tactics for salons & spas to ensure that they will find yours.