Seo strategies for a more successful salon website

Is your website generating as much traffic and bringing in as many clients as you'd like it to? If not, then you need to think about ways to work on the site's search engines optimisation (SEO), says Philip Evans, managing director of Salon Guru. Here he offers some simple SEO strategies for your salon's website. Don’t forget that Google is just a computer programme Google may be getting more clever all the time and is now starting to make assumptions about who you are and what you do, but it remains a computer programme. Therefore, you need to make sure you give it some very clear signals of who you are and what you do, which means having strong SEO strategies in place. What’s in a name? So often, I hear salon owners saying ‘my salon appears first in Google’. When I ask them what for, they say their name. That’s great for people who already know about you and are actively looking for you, but what about those people who are looking for a hair salon, or more likely a specific service in your town? You need to think a bit more broadly and start to target those keywords too. What do people search for? You might offer a colour correction service in your salon, but is that what people search for when they need their colour rescued? The reality is that they will probably use terms like 'highlights too yellow', 'hair looks brassy', 'hair gone green' or 'dark bands in hair colour'. That’s why it’s worthwhile creating a big colour correction page that covers off these key words. The same is true of all of the key services you offer in your salon. Produce lots of content The more good content you produce, the more chance you have of being found - this is the route of effective SEO strategies. Make sure that content is seasonal and topical and remember nothing is wasted. If you wrote a story about a topic two years ago, it will still be indexed and may help people to find you today. A great example of that is when Helen Mirren dyed her hair pink - it still attracts clients searching for pink hair to one of our salons! Don’t waste time link building Google is changing all the time. A couple of years ago, all of the emphasis was on sites with lots of links so link building was really important. These days it penalises sites that have too many links to irrelevant or low quality sites.  So if you are a salon that paid someone to get you lots of in-bound links you need to start to get rid of some of them. If you create good content, other people will want to link to it or share it, which is a far more valuable link building strategy. Make use of social media Google and other search engines are putting more authority on social signals. So having content shared on Facebook or re-tweeted on Twitter is going to have a knock on effect for how high up your page appears in Google’s rankings.  This means you either need to be active on social media yourself or create content that people won’t be able to resist sharing. Keep an eye on how your site is performing The aim is to get to the top of the rankings for your specific term. Failing that the top three will do. If you are on page two, you might as well have not bothered! We regularly check how our salons are performing against specific terms in their region. At last check one of our salons, Mac & Mohawk, was ranking first for 78 terms in the Wirral. There are programmes that can help you to monitor this, alternatively, just spend a little time typing the relevant terms into a search engine. I recommend keeping an eye on competitor activity in the same way - you can always learn from them. Appearing at the top of the search engine rankings doesn't happen overnight, but if you regularly produce great content with relevant key words, you really will reap  the rewards. Philip Evans is managing director of the Salon Guru who provide web design and on-going website management services to hair salons.