SEO For Hair Salons. How to Get Your Salon Found on Google
Aimee L.
Let’s imagine a scenario.
You’re in a different city, and you need to get your hair done as soon as possible, but you don’t know any good hairstylists there.
The first thing you do is search Google for the best hair salon around.
Now think about this situation, but with someone coming to your city and looking for a salon just like yours.
You definitely want to get it out there, so people will know about you because first comes Google, then a powerful word-of-mouth marketing, and your business is on a roll.
Today, we’re going to see a few tips to get the SEO for your hair salon right.
9 Steps into SEO for Hair Salon
1. Create a website for your business
You might have a website already, but if you’re new to the market, you need to start with this essential SEO tip for your hair salon and build a website.
Even if many of your customers will hear about your salon on social media and perform online bookings directly on Facebook or Instagram, it’s still a good practice to have a trustworthy website, as we’ll see later.
You don’t even have to worry about hiring a developer for this task because many website builders are specially created for people with no programming skills that need to promote their business.
Here are just a few of the easy-to-use website builders:
2. Create and integrate your online booking page
After you have a website, the next essential step is to create a salon online booking page. You can create one in a few minutes in the Goldie app for free. Just download the app from the App Store or Google Play, set up your account, then create a “Book now” button on your website and link it to your online booking page.
If you don’t want to invest much time and effort in building a website from scratch, the Goldie online booking page can be the ideal booking website for your small business. Plus, you can customize the URL to make it SEO friendly. Here’s what it looks like.
3. Create your Google My Business profile
This is another great SEO tip for hair salons, as it will significantly increase your visibility. Plus, listing your business on Google is totally free, so you’re one step closer to reaching your potential clients at no cost.
First, you need to create a Google business account. Then, you have to see if your business is eligible for getting listed.
Once you’re done with these steps, you can start creating your business’s profile.
Google allows you to add information to Google Maps, Search, and other Google services, and you can go through this setup from your desktop browser, Android, or iOS.
When you register your salon, make sure you add all the details and fill in all the required information to take full advantage of the visibility Google can bring you. The information refers to opening hours, contact details, your website, pictures with the salon, a description of your business, and others.
4. Ask for Google reviews and engage
Another great thing about this free SEO technique for your hair salon is that your clients will be able to leave reviews, which will be visible directly in the search results.
Positive feedback from your customers will boost your salon’s online reputation and increase its visibility. These reviews can play a key role in potential customer’s decision-making process, as they are seen as social proof of the quality of your services. It’s important to remember that answering reviews, whether they are positive or negative, shows that you value your customers’ opinions and are dedicated to improving their experience.
Also, Google considers user reviews as a ranking factor in its local search algorithms. So, engaging with Google reviews will not only help improve your customer relations but it will also boost your salon’s SEO performance.
5. Get listed on multiple local business directories
Google is the authoritative figure when it comes to listings. But besides it, there are many other websites where you can advertise your business for free. For example, you can try Yelp, TripAdvisor, The Business Journals, Apple Maps, and more.
These are general directories for listing your business, but you can find more local directories by searching for top local directories together with your location.
Speaking of local directories, Yellow Pages plays a crucial role in enhancing the online visibility of your salon. There, people in your local area can find your services, contact information, and other relevant details. By listing your salon Yellow Pages, you can increase your chances of being discovered by local customers who rely on these platforms to find nearby salons.
6. Check your listings’ accuracy
Not only should you list your business on Google and other local directories, but you have to make sure you give the same information on all the listings so that you get your local NAP SEO right.
NAP is an acronym for Name, Address, and Phone number, and you need to keep it consistent throughout all the listings when optimizing your website.
Google takes into account the consistency of the information you give, so if all the listings say the same thing about your salon, you’ll come off as trustworthy, and Google will display your business in the search queries.
Suppose you don’t use the same information everywhere. In that case, the search engine will find differences in the listings, and it won’t favor your hair salon in the search results since users won’t find reliable information from your NAP.
This means lower rankings.
But you can prevent or fix this.
First of all, give the same NAP everywhere, then make sure you keep track of the places you listed your business and check the information regularly.
7. Optimize your website
Because there are so many salons competing for the same clients, you need to make an extra effort to ensure your salon will perform better in search results. That’s why you should rely on SEO for your hair salon and, more specifically, on keywords.
Let’s see how you can find a few good keywords for your website.
- Find the words that define your business
First of all, you probably already have the keywords in your service descriptions, but make sure they are well written.
Here’s what I mean by that.
Your salon has a few fundamental keywords that describe your services—something like best balayage in New York.
Find all of them and include them in your service descriptions. Also, make sure you don’t use just balayage, as it may be too broad and won’t help you when it comes to search results.
Then, you can add long-tail keywords to be even more specific. And it can be something like the best affordable balayage in New York.
Mix and match a few of these, and you’ve got yourself some powerful keywords.
- See Google’s suggestions
Then, you can type in the Google search bar the type of service you offer and see what Google suggests to you.
For example, I typed hair salon blonde, as I wanted to see the salons offering the best services for dying blonde hair.
And Google suggested these.
You can do the same with the services you offer, see the search results, and then include these keywords in your website descriptions.
If you don’t get any suggestions, it means you typed something really specific, and people don’t actually search for those services.
Also, some keywords may look impossible to use in a sentence, but you don’t have to use them exactly as they appear in Google searches.
For example, if you see good hair salons blonde, you can use it correctly and write it as good hair salons for blonde hair.
If we talk about keywords, you can go the extra mile and start a blog for your business. You have plenty of room to include keywords, tips, and other industry-related topics that will help you with your ranking.
If you need to find topics for your blog, you can start by using this free tool and see which are the hot questions in your industry.
- Look into related searches
After I typed hair salon blonde in the Google search bar, I clicked enter, and I went straight to the bottom of the page, where you can find the Related searches section.
You can gather some more keywords from there to include on your website.
- See the images results as well
Once you search for something, you can also go to the images section and look at the bar right beneath the search bar.
You can use more specific keywords in your SEO for a hair salon.
Where to place your keywords
Now that you know how to find keywords to optimize your website let’s see where you can include them.
- Home Page
It’s crucial to have your main keywords inserted in a few descriptions or service summaries on the home page, as they will nudge Google in the right direction and help your website rank higher in search results.
- Page Titles
Page titles or title tags are the clickable titles of a web page, which you see in the SERP (search engine results page).
Although setting up a title page may require a bit of HTML code, there are website builders that allow you to set it up.
These are not to be overlooked, as title tags tell people the topic of your web page and show search engineers how relevant your page is, helping it to be displayed after a search query performed by a user.
Because of this, title tags, or page titles, should be as accurate and relevant to the page’s content as possible.
When writing your page title, you need to pay attention to how many characters you use. Google will display 60-70 characters of the title in the results, so you should make sure you write them short and to the point.
- Page meta descriptions
You should also include a main keyword in the meta description as well.
A meta description is a short summary of your webpage, which will also be visible in the Google search results, right under the page title.
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You can write the meta descriptions in a website builder, so make sure the one you choose to build your business page with has this option.
As a little tip, before launching the website, you can go to this SERP snippet optimization tool, enter your page title and meta description and see how it will look on Google.
- Headers
You can include keywords in the headers you use on your home page as well. This will help your page to be more visible on Google.
- Image alt text
The images you upload to your website can be of great importance, and they can help your website with a better ranking.
You can use a very short summary with keywords included in the alternative image description to help Google understand what the image is all about.
You will be able to set up the alt text and optimize your images when you upload them into your website builder.
- Internal linking
You will often want to suggest your clients visit another page from your website, and you can do this in a subtle manner by including internal linking.
When you create your internal links, you should use relevant keywords that are relevant to the page you’re linking to. For example, if you want to place a link to a page about hair treatment, you will write a sentence that has the words hair treatment and place the link on them.
8. Make your website fast and secure
The loading screen shouldn’t take longer than three seconds. Because, as Google’s research shows, if your page loads slower than that, the chance of users leaving the website increases by 32%.
Because of this, you should ensure your website loads fast, and you won’t lose your clients.
Also, Google will promote websites that load faster, as they offer a more valuable user experience.
If you find that your website is slow, and you know it’s not because of the internet provider, you can check your website hosting or the size of the images, which can be too large.
Another important aspect valued by Google is your site’s security.
You can request a security certificate to ensure your website and your client’s safety, free of charge.
If a website is secure, the web address will start with “https://” instead of “https://,” or they will have a padlock next to the web address.
9. Make your website responsive
People consume digital information on desktops, tablets, or smartphones, and you should make sure your website is responsive and looks professional on all devices.
Also, if Google sees that your website is mobile-friendly, it will promote your salon’s website in the search result.
A reliable website builder has website responsiveness built-in, so you won’t have to worry about that. Just make sure you pick a professional tool to build your business page.
Wrapping Up
As you’ve seen, these are simple ways to make sure your hair salon is visible and attracts the clients it needs. Apply these easy SEO tips for hair salons and help your business grow organically.