(This is a guest article by UK Search Engine Optimisation and Search Engine Marketing consultant Ben Welch-Bolen)
Search Engine Marketing And Optimisation For Beauty Salons
Every beauty salon wants to attract more customers and search engine marketing is a great way of doing that cheaply! In this article I will explain what search engine marketing covers and go over some simple ways you can use it to attract more customers.
First the boring part, search engine marketing describes the process of ranking your website for search terms a person might use to find your service, product, or website. If someone types “Nottingham Beauty Salon” in Google, and your salon website comes up first, they are probably going to check your site out and you might get a new customer! The process of achieving that top ranking in a search engine is what we will describe in this article. For a full description of what search engine marketing covers in real world terms I recommend reading what is search engine marketing over at our blog.
So why is search engine marketing important for a beauty salon? Local search is growing in numbers and more and more people are using it to find nearby services. For a beauty salon it can be a huge factor in attracting new customers. A person in Nottingham might search at home or on their cell phone for a beauty salon, or check on Google Maps to find one nearby. It is important that you get your salon website ranked for relative search keywords before everyone else does.
Salon Search Engine Marketing - Step 1
The first step is to get a website for your beauty salon. I recommend UK2 for web hosting and a domain name, both of those should only run around £60 pounds a year. Try to keep the domain name simple and something like “BrendasSalon.co.uk” or “NottinghamBeautySalon.co.uk”. Next you need a simple web design, you can create it yourself or hire someone to help you build one. There are a lot of free website templates online if you want to avoid extra costs.
Your salon website should have some information about your salon, a map to your location, your phone number, and your address. That is the minimum, and writing more content will help a great deal. If you can create profiles of employees, examples of work done, testimonials, and a blog it will be a lot easier to rank for search terms and will also help convert your visitors to customers.
Salon Search Engine Marketing - Step 2
The next step after you have a basic website is to optimise it. This might be something you can do yourself or you can outsource it to a SEO firm or consultant. This involves a lot of factors such as tweaking the HTML title tag, H1 tags, and other on-site elements, to include keywords you are wanting to rank for.
So if you want to rank for searches for “Nottingham Beauty Salon” your <title> tag in HTML might be “Brenda’s Beauty Salon - A Nottingham Beauty Salon”. This part of the optimisation can get pretty advanced and the above are just some basic suggestions. If you want to see a full list of what some experts view as the most important factors SEOmoz has a great article on the factors involved in ranking your site.
A salon website that has great content will always rank better in the long run when compared to a site that is just a basic description, phone number, and address. If you build a site that has examples of your work, with pictures, customer testimonials and more, you will have an easier time ranking.
If you decide to hire a SEO consultant or firm, make sure they are legitimate and talk to previous customers to make sure they do good work.
Salon Search Engine Marketing - Step 3
Now that you have a salon website that is well optimised you need to start getting some links and attracting attention from other sites! The first step is to sign up for google local for your business. This will help you rank for local searches which are becoming more popular. Local directories are also a good place to get links, or any type of local organisation that might give you a link. For example the local Chamber of Commerce or sites about “Nottingham” (or the city your salon is located in).
The process of building links to your site can be creative as well. Two of my favourite ways to build links are to harness the power of your current customers, and to create great content. You can harness the power of your current customer base by doing things like giving them coupons to give to their friends, with your website and address on it, offering specials to people that sign up for your weekly newsletter, and getting them to link to you from their blog if they have one.
The other method is to create great content and start engaging other sites on the internet with it. Start writing a blog about the latest fashions on your site, or even about the beauty salon business and your experiences. Links will start coming in as you write more, and slowly but surely you will start to rank.
That is a very basic overview of the SEO process but should help you get started!
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