Unlocking Success: Mastering Local SEO for Hair & Beauty Salons

Even though the salon business requires less capital to start and low recurring costs to sustain, getting new customers every day of the year is tough luck.

First, there’s high local competition from other hair & beauty salons, and second, customers may not find your salon on the internet. Users, today, search online for local businesses first, read a few reviews, and then decide to give it a try.

As per a Brightlocal survey, 21 to 34% of customers used the internet every day to find local business information & 98% of them read online reviews.

It doesn’t matter if you only offer hair makeovers nail styling & other beauty services, it’s vital to build an online presence that gets you a regular flow of customers. To continue this flow, local SEO optimization for your Hair Salon SEO becomes essential.

Wondering what’s local SEO? Let us make it easy for you:

➭ What is Local SEO for Hair & Beauty Salons?

Local Search Engine Optimization is a method to improve your website’s ranking by following a local SEO checklist and implementing a strategic SEO plan. The process involves complying with complex search engine algorithms that signal Google to rank your business listing higher.

The proper utilization of SEO will help increase the visibility of your business for relevant local searches & drive more traffic. Moreover, you can deliver a great user experience through your business listing or website.

Local SEO optimization is a long and complex process and can be overwhelming considering that you have to focus on your salon business.

➭ Why Local SEO is Important for Hair Salons?

What do people do when they are confused about what to order or where to travel for vacation? They just simply Google it.

Similarly, when people search for relevant services your hair & salon business offers, it can maximize exposure for your business. Your business starts to appear in the relevant searches to consistently attract new customers & increase revenue for your business.

Here are a few more things that make local SEO important:

 

• • Local SEO optimization helps decrease other marketing spending.

• • In addition to driving qualified traffic, it helps build brand awareness online.

• • Delivers high ROI for your regional-based SEO optimization.

• • Moreover, local SEO improves rankings for your business listings and website.

Want to know how you can achieve all these for your business? By following the tips listed below:

Tips for local SEO Optimization for Your Hair & Beauty Salon

1. Update Your Google Business Profile

Google Business Profiles is the best tool available for local businesses to attract the most customers living in the vicinity of the area/city you serve. Claim or create a GBP listing for your hair & beauty salon if there isn’t one.

Next, verify your listing and update the information. Here are some tips to optimize Google business listing:

Tips to Update Your Google Business Profile

 

• • Once you have claimed and verified your GBP, the next step is to update your business information so that customers can see accurate listings.

• • Update Name, Address, and Phone Number (NAP) on your GBP and other business listings.

• • Also, update the working hours of your salon & location marker for users to have an idea of when & where to contact you.

• • Assign the right category to your GBP listing to ensure it appears for the right search terms.

• • Offer your customers the best possible service experience to encourage them to leave a review.

2. Build & Optimize Website for Your Hair/Beauty Salon

Having a branded website is important because it helps 85% of consumers to discover local businesses. If you want customers to discover & engage with your salon, build a custom website for your hair & beauty salon business and optimize it to rank for relevant local searches.

Indeed not all hair salon owners will have the resources to build a personalized website. But if you somehow manage to do so, it’ll give your business an edge over others.

Now let’s see some tips on how to optimize your website.

Tips to Optimize Your Website for High Ranking

Keyword Optimization: Keywords form an integral part of the website. It consists of optimizing important elements like title tags, URLs, heading tags, meta descriptions, and others.

Content Optimization: High-quality content is one of the most important local SEO ranking factors. So, create a formidable content marketing strategy that aids your SEO effort.

Technical Optimization: It includes optimizing your website for site security, page load speed, structured data, sitemap, robot.txt, and crawl errors.

Improve Page Experience: Page experience has become one of the vital factors for Google to rank websites. Since the update, Google provided a timeline for webmasters to comply and prepare their website for page experience. Ensure your website complies with necessary page experience metrics such as Core Web Vitals.

3. Research & Find Keywords Specific to Your Niche

As we learned, keyword optimization is important for websites to rank higher on Google search engine result pages (SERP). Based on the level of keyword optimization, Google will do its best to match its SERP results for people looking for salons.

Without knowing the keywords to rank for, optimizing your salon website would become hard. Here are some tips to help you research & find keywords:

Tips to Research & Find Keywords For Your Hair/Beauty Salon

Keywords are terms people use when searching for services you offer. You can pretty much guess the common & basic search terms/keywords people may use to find your business. Below are some examples:

Hair Salon
Barbershop
Hair Stylist
Beautician
Makeup artists

Find keyword modifiers that represent your salon business in a better way. Some examples of keyword modifiers
include:

Best
Trusted
Top
Cheapest

Next is to find words that associate your salon business with a geographic location e.g. [keyword] + [location]. Here are a few examples of the same,

   

4. Identify Content Marketing Ideas that Align with Your Niche

Even the top brands leverage content marketing to achieve their SEO goals and so should you. Unique, high-quality, and relevant content that aligns with your hair salon brand can do wonders for you.

Here are some tips on how you can approach content marketing for your brand:

Tips to Approach Content Marketing

Don’t limit yourself to creating content just around your hair or beauty services. Explore different ideas and content types that residents can resonate with.
Create expert local guides for your customers to navigate through your local area. Publish guides on the best places for them to visit and spend weekends with their family or loved ones.
Doing so will boost the visibility of your local hair/beauty brand.
Create blogs, expert guides, videos, vlogs, and other forms of content on a consistent basis.

5. Form a Link-Building Strategy for Your Hair/Beauty Salon

After creating high-quality and relevant content, the next step is to build as many backlinks as possible. Backlinks are hyperlinked mentions from other relevant websites that point to your hair/beauty salon website.

They act as a vote of confidence for your brand from other industry-relevant websites. However, it’s not exactly a piece of cake to get quality links. Still, here are a few tips to get started:

Tips for Building Links for Your Hair Salon Brand

Find and reach out to relevant industry publishers and guest bloggers to offer them free content in return for the mention of your salon brand.
Do more PR outreach and audit your competitors’ backlink profiles to find more opportunities to build links.
Another way to build links is by creating link-worthy quality content that others can refer to & mention your brand.
Doing so will help build trust for your salon brand in the eyes of clients as well as of search engines like Google.

6. Build Social Proof & Social Presence

Social media platforms have a mammoth number of users and followers, which is why it’s the backbone of many small & local brands’ marketing plans. Being present on these platforms has many advantages such as sharing social proof. Here’s an example from Instagram:

Social proof represents what experience other customers had with your hair and beauty salon brand. Here are some tips on how to optimize your social presence and build social proof.

Tips for Building Social Proof & Social Presence

Getting more social proof starts with offering great customer service. Ask customers to leave a review or testimonial on your Google, Yelp, and other business listings.

For a high ranking of your hair & beauty salon’s listings, make sure customers leave great ratings and positive reviews.
Handle negative reviews and get to the root cause of the same. Also, encourage customers to leave reviews so that your listings can keep having new reviews to show to searchers.
Build your social media presence on platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, etc. for high interactivity & engagement of local users.

Use local hashtags and terms so that local users can easily find and engage with your brand on social platforms.

7. Get More Citations for Your Salon Business

Building citations for your salon business is almost free and an important part of your local SEO strategy. Citations are essentially business listings on reputed platforms that help users navigate through the area and find a suitable local business.

Apart from Google, the best platforms to list your business information include Yelp, Citysearch, Facebook, Apple Maps, Bing Places, Yellow Pages, and many others. Here are a few tips to keep in mind:

Tips to Keep in Mind When Building Citations

 

• • Build citations on quality business review directories with detailed information about your business.

• • Keep your NAP information consistent across all the citations & listings.

• • Create citations only on local or national directories that are relevant and can bring your ranking higher.

• • Drive Your Rankings High for Your Salon Business

• • Every business and industry is transitioning to this digital-driven world, which is making it critical for local businesses to sustain themselves without ranking high on SERPs. However, that’s not going to happen overnight.

Local search engine optimization is a long and complex process that requires the hands of a dexterous team of SEO professionals. IndeedSEO has an ironclad team of highly proficient SEO experts who help small businesses like yours implement strategic SEO for themselves.

Get in touch with us for local SEO optimization of your hair salon SEO and get a cup of coffee in return.