As the world becomes increasingly digital, growing the online presence of your salon has never been more important. According to Forbes, 91% of consumers use online search to find new information, including new businesses. If you’re not taking the steps to put your business online then you are missing out on a huge potential customer base. Fortunately, with a professional digital marketing team, you can use search engine optimization to draw customers to your website just by publishing good content. Here are four ways to optimize your SEO and maximize your online presence:
1. Use Keywords
Keywords are the basic building blocks of how SEO works, and to effectively use SEO strategy you must understand keywords and how to use them. When thinking of a keyword or phrase, imagine what the consumer would be searching for if they were looking for your service. So, for a salon, you might use the phrase “hair salon” and your geographical location. The placement of keywords is also paramount to the overall success of a webpage. Keyword stuffing, or dumping as many word phrases into the page as you can, may seem like a good strategy but in reality, it can actually be counterproductive. Using keywords in headings is a more effective practice that will make your page easier to find and navigate for people and SEO crawlers alike.
2. Keep Content Up-To-Date
Besides the use of keywords, you want to ensure that the content you are producing is following what your clients want to see at that point in time. So, for example, during peak wedding season when you see an increase in bridal clients, you may post a piece about your bridal styling services to attract brides-to-be to your salon. However, you want to ensure the content is also good for your business. In other words, don’t shoot yourself in the foot by posting a DIY guide for an at-home blow-out if you provide a lot of blow-out services. Lastly, you want to make sure you are regularly publishing new content to encourage engagement. If a potential customer reaches your page and sees you haven’t posted anything in a year, they may just assume you don’t care, or worse – that you’re out of business.
3. Apply Relevant Add-ons
Imagery is important when creating a successful webpage, especially in the beauty industry. Adding images to your website generally increases readability by breaking up huge walls of text into more user-friendly chunks and provides a better understanding of the page content. You want any images you add to be relevant and descriptive to the text topic. Visual aids should also always be accompanied by alt tags, or alternative text descriptions of videos and images to allow SEO crawlers to easily locate them and increase accessibility to users with screen readers. Alt tags should be descriptive and align with the text topic, but also original and not just repeat the text itself.
4. Expand Your Link Library
Links are incredibly important for driving users to your page, both in how you use them on your page and how other pages use links that lead to you. When using hyperlinks on your own page the anchor text you choose should be natural and engaging to the reader. So, for example, if you were searching for SEO help with your salon a link with anchor text about the best SEO blog is going to be much more helpful and descriptive than simply writing click here. Additionally, the use of backlinks is incredibly important, or external web pages that include a link taking readers to your website. An extensive backlink portfolio ranks your site higher on search engines.
All the nuances of SEO best practices can be overwhelming, but it is a great marketing tool for sustaining long-term success. A professional digital marketing agency will help you ascend to the coveted first result in no time.
Image by Positive_Images from Pixabay
