Top 5 SEO Tips for Salons and Spas

Google My Business, GMB, Google Local, Google Maps, Snack Pack, 3 Pack, Google Pack are all names that relate back to your Google My Business Profile. GMB is essential for all local businesses. Claiming or Creating your GMB profile and optimizing it can help boost your business to the top of Google. Below the ads, GMB listings are located at the TOP of the search page. This is why GMB is number 1 on my list. Optimizing your profile is not overly difficult, but there are a lot of features that most business owners overlook and neglect. Our best practices for ranking your GMB profile are:

Citations are business listings across the web such as; Yelp, Yahoo Listing, Foursquare, Bing Listing, Yellow Pages, Mapquest, Citypages, etc. It is important that your business information is included in as many online profiles as possible and that the information included is consistent across all of the platforms. There is software that can do this for you: Yext and Moz Local are two of the most popular citation management platforms. Both platforms have free scans, so go see how your business scores! Each have their limitations, but it is better to utilize one of these if you are currently doing nothing to manage your citations. We use Yext for all of our clients as it is a bit more robust of a platform and includes more citation directory listings. Managing your citations helps increase the position of your website in organic search and, most importantly, your Google My Business listing!

Yelp is the devil! We all know this… but it is a necessary evil in the salon and spa world. The reason that Yelp is on an SEO tips article is because when you search for industry-related terms looking for local salons and spas, 99% of the time Yelp is the NUMBER 1 organic search result. This means that Yelp gets a large percentage of the “organic” search clicks (upwards of 40%). Example: If “hair salon savannah ga” gets searched 1600 times per month and 1000 of those make it to the organic search results, Yelp was able to acquire 400 clicks (or potential new clients) to their page. Once someone visits Yelp, they are more than likely to “trust” that Yelp is delivering them the best salon/spa in the number 1 spot. The number 1 salon on Yelp is more likely to get a lead from that source then the number 5 result is!

If we are saying that Yelp gets 400 clicks from that search term and that 50% of the people visit the number 1 Yelp result, then if you are in the number 1 position on Yelp, you have the opportunity to get in front of 200 potential new clients (Just utilizing Yelp!). The only way to climb the Yelp leader board is to get more reviews. There is an art to getting Yelp reviews and just understand that 50% of those reviews will not “stick” or be recommended to the public. The strategy that my salon used was to incentivize our stylists to be mentioned in 5 star Yelp reviews. It is against Yelps policy to incentivize the person reviewing, but it is not against policy to ask for a review after the appointment. We paid our stylists $10 for every 5 star Yelp review that they were mentioned in over a 4 month period. We payed out cash each month! In 4 months, we went from 30th to 1st on Yelp.

When it comes to kicking off an SEO campaign to optimize your website, the most important part is knowing what keywords you need to rank for. Doing some form of keyword research can help position your website to rank for higher-value terms and beat out your competition. Slight changes in keywords can make a large impact. For example; “hair salon savannah ga” gets searched 1,600 times per month, whereas “beauty salon savannah ga” gets searched only 50 times per month. It is important to know the volume of search because it is much more beneficial to rank higher for the higher volume terms as the new client probability increases exponentially. Some good tools for keyword research are Google Ads Keyword Planner, Keywords Everywhere Browser Extension, and Google Search Console

Your homepage is the most likely to rank on the 1st page of Google search. Due to the terms you will be trying to rank for, which will be ACTIVE search for a new provider, your homepage is the most likely page that Google will rank. Google understands the searcher’s intent when searching for a new salon and Google gives a user’s homepage more “juice” over an interior page. This is true for 99% of small businesses that are trying to capture new business locally. A great tool to use to inspect your homepage is a browser extension called SEO Minion. This will help you find how your content may be coded. A great WordPress plugin to use in conjunction is Yoast SEO. If you’d like to see a more in-depth review of your website as a whole, check out our free website audit tool. Now there are multiple “on-page” ranking techniques and I want to review what we have found to be the most important!