Salons and spas are a booming business, especially among working people looking to unwind in their free time. If you run one and you have a website setting out your services and packages, as well as an online shop, you will naturally want customers to find your site more easily when they search. Here are some good tips for winning space online alongside using a salon management system to give your business the capability it needs to grow.
Make your website SEO-friendly and publish advertorial content
Online, you do not have a shopfront to promote the way you do in the real world. So customers getting to know your salon or spa is not a matter of luck or of stumbling across you — it is a matter of climbing the rankings through SEO.
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, means improving your site's content and structure so it is friendly to search engines such as Google. That way, when a customer searches for a massage shop, a spa or a salon, they find your website before your competitors'. A good ranking is like having premises on a main road with a train line running past: customers are far more likely to know about you and reach you, which lifts page views and impressions for your site. Doing SEO alongside using a salon or spa management system combines the two into a real advantage for your shop.
The basics you need to cover to make your salon or spa website appealing to SEO are as follows.
- Research the popular keywords relevant to your services.
- Write quality information about your shop, services, packages and promotions, incorporating the relevant keywords your customers are searching for.
- Write lifestyle blog posts, or take the promotions you have set up in your salon management system and write them up in more detail, to add content that makes your website interesting and draws your target customers in to visit and book.
- Make your website load easily and quickly to stop customers clicking away (bounce rate), which costs your site points. It must also work well on smartphones, since most internet users reach websites mainly through their phones.
- Get other websites talking about yours and linking back to your pages, by writing content for backlinks and placing advertorials on relevant websites with links back to your own site.
- Promote your articles, products and services across social media channels at the same time, to build links back to your website and make your shop's online presence as widely known as possible.
Use Local SEO and Google My Business to promote your business to people nearby
This builds on the SEO you do on your own website. You can use Local SEO and Google My Business to publicise your business specifically among people in your area — an approach that lets small and mid-sized spas and salons compete with the big brands.
Local SEO
Getting your website onto page one for the same keywords as the big salon or spa chains may still be too hard, but you can capture people in your area first by using relevant keywords with the name of the province, district or sub-district attached — for example "hair salon Phloen Chit", "spa Thonglor", "salon Lat Phrao".
Google My Business
Google My Business is a Google service where you can enter all sorts of information about your business. When someone searches using a relevant term, your shop's details appear in the search results and on Google Maps, helping people nearby — and even people from further afield — find businesses in the area they are searching. It works like a pin or a signpost left for customers who are close by or about to travel into the neighbourhood.
To use it, sign up for a Gmail business account so you have a Business Profile, then enter your business details in full and drop a pin for your shop on the map. Once that is done, verify the business by phone or by post so Google can be confident your shop really exists.
Take user-generated content seriously
Finally, customers may come to know your shop through what other customers have said, so it is worth taking user-generated content seriously — it can lead people to search for your business name or click through to your website.
User-generated content is content produced by customers or a brand's own target audience — whether that is reviews posted across various channels by real customers, which cost you nothing, or the KOLs you invite to help promote the shop.
To generate user-generated content, you need to encourage customers to review your shop on various sites, write blog posts or recommendation threads, or talk to your shop more on social media. Discount coupons or special privileges can work as an incentive. Once your shop has good reviews across a range of channels, more passing customers will want to search for your website to learn about your services — another way to grow your audience without paying for advertising. And if a customer includes a link to your website, that is better still for your SEO.
What makes a good hair salon or spa comes down mainly to service and to the quality of the products used, which is what gets people recommending you by word of mouth. But these days word of mouth alone may not be enough: you also need a website to be the face of your shop online. So if you want to promote your shop and make it easier for customers to find you, do not forget to make your site SEO-friendly and to build up positive content from people who have genuinely used your services.
On top of that, do not forget to set up your salon and spa payment system to accept a range of payment methods, and to keep customer data and promotions properly organised, so you can put that database to work when you market the business and plan content for the website — while cutting cost and time you can put into developing other parts of your service.
The salon management system for hair and spa businesses from Qashier comes with a POS terminal and an intelligent back office designed specifically for this line of business, adding to your ability to run the shop so your business grows on a solid footing. For more details, get in touch at Line @qashier.th