Worried your salon isn’t doing as well as you could be online? Complete the form below and we’ll do a comprehensive “Stress Test” on your website, Google Business Listing and search engine ranking for you.
Getting your business visible in search engines like Google isn’t about luck.
It’s about getting all your technical ducks in line, so it’s easier for Google to show your business to people searching for what you sell.
And you might be surprised – even shocked – at the kind of places and websites you’re mentioned or listed.
All of these have to be checked, along with any technical errors on your website – and for most owners of small local businesses, that’s pretty much impossible without a LOT of time and some technical expertise.
In this video, I walk you through some of the processes we go through when we set out to analyse a business’s online presence.
Integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into Google's search algorithms has fundamentally reshaped the digital landscape. As Google strives to deliver more accurate, personalised, and contextually relevant search results, website owners and digital marketers must...
Just recently I ran a Google search for a client's business, just to see how and where the business showed up online. Just in the first two pages of search results, I found the business mentioned in 28 different places. I told this client - he had no idea! Worse, on...
Why Was My Google Business Profile Suspended?What you need to Know? In today's dynamic digital landscape, maintaining a robust Google presence is essential for businesses striving to succeed online. One invaluable tool in this pursuit is the Google Business Profile,...
Want help with your digital advertising? Click here for more info!You can post like a man (or woman) possessed in social media. You can network like crazy, you can post videos on Tik Toc till you're blue in the face. You can run yourself ragged using all these 'free'...
In my home town, Dunsborough, a coastal holiday destination in the south-west of WA, there's great community concern about developers and their plans to build multi-storey blocks of million dollar apartments. Both the townspeople and the local council are against it....
I don’t email much these days, mainly because people get enough junk trying to sell them something. And to be fair, some of it is good stuff. But sometimes I’m compelled to write when something as egregious as this pops up in my own online world. I suppose there...
In this video, how to check that your lovely looking website is also doing its job – in other words, getting in front of people searching for the services you sell!
One of the key ways to help Google help your website up to the top of search results is making sure your photos are ‘optimized’ for best results.
It’s something that few website developers pay any attention to.
But it’s a vital part of what’s called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.
(You’ve heard of that, right? It’s the dark and detailed art of making sure people find you, ahead of your competitors.)
Take a look, and once you’ve watched this video, do a check on your own website.
Want a FREE “Health Check” of your website and Google Business Listing? Just fill in the form below, we’ll do the complete audit for you, and send your report within 48 hours, complete with suggestions on how to improve your ranking, get more leads, and make more sales…
Integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into Google's search algorithms has fundamentally reshaped the digital landscape. As Google strives to deliver more accurate, personalised, and contextually relevant search results, website owners and digital marketers must...
Just recently I ran a Google search for a client's business, just to see how and where the business showed up online. Just in the first two pages of search results, I found the business mentioned in 28 different places. I told this client - he had no idea! Worse, on...
Why Was My Google Business Profile Suspended?What you need to Know? In today's dynamic digital landscape, maintaining a robust Google presence is essential for businesses striving to succeed online. One invaluable tool in this pursuit is the Google Business Profile,...
Want help with your digital advertising? Click here for more info!You can post like a man (or woman) possessed in social media. You can network like crazy, you can post videos on Tik Toc till you're blue in the face. You can run yourself ragged using all these 'free'...
In my home town, Dunsborough, a coastal holiday destination in the south-west of WA, there's great community concern about developers and their plans to build multi-storey blocks of million dollar apartments. Both the townspeople and the local council are against it....
I don’t email much these days, mainly because people get enough junk trying to sell them something. And to be fair, some of it is good stuff. But sometimes I’m compelled to write when something as egregious as this pops up in my own online world. I suppose there...
For most businesses, the “most wanted response” is a phone call to book an appointment, for example. But what about people who visit your website and DON’T make a phone call? Is there anything on your site that gives them an incentive to hand over their contact details, so you can phone them or email them with an offer? On most websites, sadly there isn’t.
On all the websites we build at Worldwide Salon Marketing, we install a clever, simple, and powerfully effective tool to generate new leads for the salon. In most cases, this is a New Client Gift Voucher, like the one on this new website we’ve just built for a salon client.
See what I mean?
Here’s another one, a website we built for a day spa in Dromana, Victoria. Note the simple New Client Voucher form on the right hand side of the site.
This simple tool has generated more than EIGHT HUNDRED new prospective clients in 12 months, and the salon has turned many of these into regular clients.
NEED HELP WITH THIS? Talk to one of our salon website design specialists, +61-8-94439327.
HOW DO YOU WANT YOUR PROSPECTIVE CLIENTS TO FIND YOU?
Google is the new Yellow Pages. So a website is absolutely essential as part of your overall salon marketing.
Any kid with a laptop can build a basic website these days. Or you can build one yourself using online services such as Wix. (But beware! You don’t ‘own’ your Wix website. Wix owns it. You only own your Wix account.)
That’s the easy part.
You can have the prettiest website on the planet – but if it can’t be found by people searching for hair or beauty services in your local area, then it’s about useless as a fashion boutique in the middle of the desert.
There’s art and science to designing, constructing and optimizing websites so they appear on the first page of search results. Want to find out how your website rates?
Try this:
Open Google Chrome on your computer.
Mouse over the little head and shoulders icon in the top right corner.
Click ‘Guest’ (So Google doesn’t know it’s you doing the search, otherwise it’ll throw up results it thinks you want to see.)
Now, do a Google search like this: “hair salon (your town or suburb)”
(And don’t make the mistake of simply searching for the name of your business. You want to see what people find when they don’t know the name of your business!)
If your business comes up on Page one for that or similar searches, you’re doing okay.
BUT – if you can’t see it anywhere, it needs work.
The salon that gets more than 100 New Client calls every month
In the Melbourne suburb of Berwick, Allura Hairdressing gets at least 100 calls a month from people who find the business by searching for a hair salon in Berwick.
Here’s what Google throws up when you search ‘hair salon berwick’:
Allura ranks 1st in the Google Business Listings, and first in the organic listings.
How do we know they get that many calls? Because we built their website, and manage their Google Business Listing – so we have access to the ‘back end’ and we can check figures.
Here’s the call log – just from people touching ‘click to call’ on their phones on the Google Business Listing – for the last 30 days:
Worldwide Salon Marketing specializes in designing, constructing and ‘search engine optimizing’ websites for the salon & spa industry. Over the years, we’ve built hundreds of them.
Click on the images below and check a couple of them out.
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…
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.
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.
As the owner of a company which builds and maintains websites and online marketing systems for hundreds of salon & spa businesses, I get a LOT of questions thrown at me from salon & spa owners totally confused about what matters online.
And that’s understandable. Online marketing is part science, part alchemy, practised in a long, dark tunnel populated by geeks who communicate with each other – and with those who pay them – in convoluted technocrat-ese almost entirely incomprehensible to normal people.
I employ such people, and over the years have learned some of their language. So, in my role as interpreter, I offer the following, in plain English.
What’s Your ‘Most-Wanted Response’?
Okay, so you have a website. For many business owners, that’s where their ‘online marketing’ strategy starts and ends. And it’s a long, long way short of what’s required. You need to ask yourself some ‘non-techie’ questions, and have some clear-headed answers, to questions such as:
1) What’s your website for? If its purpose is purely to look nice and impress your customers, that’s fine. If its purpose is to attract customers, that’s a different story. There is absolutely zero point in spending money building a flash looking website your prospective customers can’t find in a Google search. (And don’t make the mistake of deluding yourself into thinking ‘they’ll easily find it when they search the name of my business.’ They’re not looking for the name of your business, they’re searching for the product or service you’re selling!)
That brings me to one of the darkest arts, SEO or ‘search engine optimization’. It’s largely a manual, tedious, time-consuming (therefore expensive) and highly-specialised process involving technical expertise and up-to-date knowledge. And Google’s rules change all the time. It’s like trying to change a wheel on a moving car.
(And a warning: if anybody approaches you and promises to ‘get you top ranking on Google, guaranteed’, run a mile. Nobody can guarantee that, except Google.)
2) Is your website mobile responsive? 90% of people these days use their smart phones to search for products and services. If they find your website and it’s not configured to fit a small phone screen, it’ll be too hard to read, and they’ll go elsewhere.
3) Can they easily find your phone number? Let’s face it, for most businesses, the most wanted response is an old-fashioned phone call. Yet when I visit many business websites, I gouge my own eyes out with a sharp spoon in frustration at trying to find the damn phone number. It’s often (stupidly) buried in the depths of a ‘Contact Us’ page. Put your phone number – preferably ‘hot’ so it’s click-to-call – right at the top of every page on your site. Don’t make it hard for people to call you.
4) What about all the people who visit the site and don’t pick up the phone? Unless you have a way of capturing their contact details so you can market to them later, you’re wasting an awful lot of hard-earned traffic. The best way is offering some kind of free download – a guide, special report, gift voucher, video or what have you – in exchange for their contact details. Even better, make sure those details go straight into your database, with an automated series of follow-up emails.
(Despite my constant nagging, a former Perth consulting client of mine continued to spend tens of thousands of dollars a month on TV advertising to drive traffic to his website, with absolutely no means of capturing the details of any of those potential customers. Dumb.)
In the real world, a website has only two basic uses: a) to sell stuff, and b) to capture leads and build your database.
That’s absolutely basic, Online Marketing 101 stuff. It’s the tip of a very large iceberg, involving the integration of social media, YouTube, database management, online advertising, mobile apps, SMS and more.
Resource: Many, many of our Member salons have websites designed, built, maintained and search engine optimised by WSM. To find out more, go to www.salon-website-design.com
Check out these salon business building resources from Worldwide Salon Marketing.
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![[VIDEO] How to check your salon’s website images are set up the right way](https://worldwidesalonmarketing.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/How-to-check-your-website-pictures-are-correct.jpg)
by Greg Milner, CEO Worldwide Salon Marketing
