Free Salon Website Checklist – is your salon’s website bringing you a ton of new clients every month?

by | Sep 27, 2017 | Salon Marketing Online

In the Melbourne suburb of Berwick, Leiza Cester’s Allura Hair Boutique gets more than 120 calls every month from prospective clients finding her in a Google search. In Hobart, Tasmania, Effie Tsopoulos’ Escape Beauty Lounge gets more than 150 calls every month from prospective new clients.

If YOU aren’t getting that kind of response from your website, watch this video…

Download the Salon Website Checklist here. 

Test Your Own Website for Errors here (it’s free.) 

Most salon websites have a series of crucial errors that make it hard for your prospective clients to interact with you. Take a look at your own website, both in a computer browser, and on your phone.

Imagine you’re looking at it from a customer’s point of view. (In other words, forget about the pretty stuff at the moment, and concentrate on function, not form.)

Let’s imagine your prospective new client is sitting on a bus, or on the couch, and they’re browsing the web, looking for a hair salon nearby. Typically, they’ll Google ‘Hair salon’ and the name of the suburb or locality they’re in.

If you’re Search Engine Optimization is working properly, they’ll find your website on the first page of search results.

If your Google My Business Listing is prominent – in the ‘Big Three’ at the top of the search results – she might do one of two things; click on the ‘click to call’ button if she’s on her phone, or click on the website link if she’s on a tablet or laptop.

Let’s say she goes through to your website on her phone or tablet. Is your phone number prominent at the top of the website? Is it ‘hot’ so she can simply touch it and it calls your salon?

If not, that’s a problem. Rule #1 – don’t make it hard for people to find your phone number!

Is your site ‘mobile responsive’?

In other words, when you look at it on your phone, do you get the mobile version of the site, or the full desktop version? If it’s the full desktop version, that’s a problem. Remember, 60% or more people do their initial searching on their phones.

If your salon’s website is almost impossible to read on a tiny phone screen, that’s a FAIL!

Google will eventually punish you for that, dropping your site down in the search rankings. So, Rule #2 – your site MUST be mobile responsive.

What about all the visitors to your site who almost call you…but don’t quite? Somehow, you need to capture their contact details so you can market to them later. One of the best ways to do this is to offer some kind of free gift – say, a $20 Gift Voucher – that they can download in exchange for their name and contact details.

Here’s an example on the home page of a site we manage, www.mcgillshairdressing.co.uk. 

This salon get up to 15 new clients a week filling in that form.

See, they then phone their leads, and book them in. Easy, almost guaranteed way to get new clients.

So, if your website isn’t mobile responsive, and if you don’t have an easy way for people to find you – how on Earth are you meant to book in the new clients?

We discovered most websites have the same 7 – 13 crucial errors. After building hundreds – probably thousands – of websites, we found the consistent them as to why websites for salons aren’t work.

Heck, we even created a new tool for salons to see if their website is stopping them from finding new clients. So, you can run your website test here.

Test Your Own Website for Errors here (it’s free.) 

Stop getting hit on by SEO “Experts”

by | Aug 26, 2016 | Blog, Website Marketing

Barely a day goes by that I don’t get an email from somebody – usually in the backblocks of India, Pakistan or the Philippines – promising to ‘get my website to the top of Google’.

If you run any kind of business, no doubt you get the same kind of emails. Y’know, those spam emails.

These emails last a nano-second in my in-box, before I hit the delete button. Here are just a few reasons why:

Reason #1: These people always start their pitch with “I’ve been studying your website and notice that it has big problems etc etc..”
If you’ve been studying my website, you would’ve noticed it has my phone number prominently displayed. If you want my business, call me on the damn phone. Don’t be lazy.

Reason #2: If you were any good at marketing yourself, and weren’t so damned lazy, you’d figure out that sending an email to somebody you’ve never met, from a company I’ve never heard of, expecting me to leap at your fabulous offer with open arms, is no way to start a business relationship.


Reason #3: if you’ve been studying my website, and you’re so observant, you’d know that we specialize in real, effective, manual-labor search engine optimization, for scores and scores of businesses all over the world. But you didn’t bother looking that hard, did you…you just fired off a lazy email, among thousands of similar emails, to thousands of small business owners, hoping that some of them will be so ill-informed, they’ll leap at your fantastic offer.

You may have picked up that this practice makes me a tad cranky. But I get positively livid when our own long-term members get the same kind of nonsense offers.

One Australian business owner who’s been a Member of Worldwide Salon Marketing for more than a decade called us this week after receiving one of these delightful offers, in this case from Canada. We’ve been driving this Member’s online advertising and organic search results for a long time, so she wanted to see our take on this company’s offer.

“It didn’t take long to do some research on this company,” says our Member Services manager, Peter Doman. “The reviews we found were scathing.”
“These guys are not to be trusted.

Its the same deal, telling you that they can guarantee first page rankings when in fact you are more likely to be blacklisted,” said one reviewer.

And…
“These guys didn’t even know a damn thing about SEO work or how to set up adwords… To top things off they didn’t even have the right ranking data from my website…
Poor form but it can sucker in the unsuspecting,” said another.

(There are plenty more like this, you can read them here.)

Once presented with this information, our Member wrote back:

“Thank you so, so much, Peter.  Based on the reviews, I will give them a miss. Thank god once again for WSM.”

The lessons are clear.
1) There will always be somebody, somewhere, promising a lower price. But in all things, you get what you pay for, by and large.

2) If something sounds like it’s too good to be true, it usually is.

3) Do business with people you trust. They might not be perfect, they might not be the cheapest, they might not get it absolutely right, every time. But people you trust will likely trust you too, and will bend over backwards to put things right, as soon as possible.