Blogging for Hair Salons – Best Guide 2023

Are you looking to learn a creative way to gain new clients? Blogging for hair salons is an untapped market that you should consider jumping into right now.

Nowadays, there is a blog for everything. This is the not-so-new trendy marketing strategy to gain followers and potential clients. Plus, it is completely possible for hair salon blogs to do well in this.

Blogging is an important marketing method that not all beauty salons are using, and you can be starting it right now. It will help your website traffic and email list grow by becoming easily searchable on Google and can show that you are an expert in your field.

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Why Blogging for Hair Salons?

Online consumers make purchases based on word of mouth, research, and advertising. People typically buy products that they are familiar with. Whether it is based on a recommendation from friends, a video on Youtube, an ad on Instagram, or from a trusted website.

With a blog, you can achieve this and more. The higher your blog post ranks on Google, the further up your business’s website will be shown to people who Google hair salons. This is important for getting discovered by clients who are doing their research on hair services online.

Once you rank (appear on the first page after a search), people will share your hair blog. You can start to gain clients through their research on hair services online. Or through the word of mouth by friends sending your articles to their friends. You can even advertise your blog on social media like Facebook, Instagram, etc. Blogging can provide more reasons for people to want your services.

The Key to Running a Successful Hair Salon Blog

Content (the writing/posts),  SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategies, and the follow-up (email, post, etc) you do after posting a blog post to your website are all essential to running a successful salon blog. Just like how you run your business, consistent hard work is key when it comes to blogging. There are 4 main things to think about when beginning your blog:

1. Content
2. Keywords
3. On-page SEO
4. Off-page SEO

This article will go in-depth on how to complete all these steps, so you can be on your way to creating a loyal audience.

Focus on Salon Content

First things first, great content is absolutely crucial. If you do not create great content, no one will want to read it and if no one will want to read it, you will have no new audience / potential clients.

So how do I write an article that people want to read? 

Great content is something that people would enjoy sharing. Start with thinking about articles that evoke an emotion, provide utility, or give a story. As a hair salon owner, you can definitely think of some excellent stories that people want to hear.

If nothing comes to the top of your head, stick to what you know best. Hair! A hair blog can be as simple as writing about your salon’s or hairdresser’s specialties.

You can even search for hair or salon communities on apps like Reddit to see what is most commonly asked or discussed. You can find endless ideas here. This will be your place to go when you need new content ideas for a blog post that you know people will want to read about. Blogging about your own industry should not be too hard since you already have the knowledge and experience.

Always ask yourself when preparing to write a blog post, “Would anyone want to send this to a friend?” If the answer is no, dig deeper and search for new topics. You should start out by creating a list of about 10 topics you can write about. Then rank them based on how useful they can be for you to generate clients from them.

Keywords for a Salon Blog Post

Since you are starting out with your salon blog, you have not established website credibility. You are not on the same level of presence or authority as beauty businesses like Allure or Cosmopolitan. When people search for something hair-related, big named magazines or popular and well-known websites will pop up on Google first.

You have to write and post about things that people search for frequently. While also not choosing something so broad that Allure magazine’s website will be number one in the search bar.

This is called keyword research.

Blogs, Etsy websites, and even Pinterest pins all need some keyword research.  There are multitudes of ways to conduct this online. The most simple way to do so would be to just type your keyword into the Google search bar and see what it suggests.

You can see here that typing in “hair salon” for a blog post is too broad. The searcher wants to find the ones closest to them. Once you find a keyword that isn’t too extensive like this and shows you pages that aren’t very popular or well-known, you have found your keyword. This is a process you will learn to get better at over time.

Keyword Research Websites

Other websites to check out the best keywords for beauty salons are:

1. Answer The Public: It provides commonly searched questions regarding your keyword.
2. UberSuggest: It provides phrases with the keyword.
3. Google Keyword Planner: This is typically used for those who run Google ads, but you may use it to get some ideas. You can also find out the average monthly search for them.
4. Ahrefs Keyword Difficulty Checker: Here you can see how hard it would be to try and do well in a Google search based on the keywords you would like to use. Keyword difficulty scale: 0-10 Easy (<10 domains), 11-30 Medium (11-36 domains), 31-70 Hard (37-200 domains), 71-100 Superhard (200+ domains).

Please remember to keep in mind the searcher’s intent with any keyword. You want to be sure so you don’t write about something completely different from what people were looking for. If you do this, your website and any blog post will get lost amongst the millions of pages of Google. A great example of this would be the brand Living Proof. If someone is searching for it, chances are they are looking to purchase their products.

You can see that there are some other things that are commonly searched that are not related to the hair brand, and so you can niche down your keyword.

Using Ahrefs’ keyword difficulty checker, we see that Living Proof isn’t too hard of a keyword to tap into. It can be possible to rank on the first page of Google if you were to write a blog post about their products.

A great example of this would be to write a blog post about the 3 Best Living Proof Products. Here you have niched it down by adding the word products. It is now completely clear that the searcher’s intent is to find out about the hair care brand.

Strangely enough, titles with odd numbers in them are liked by Google.

This kind of post would be the best for your blog on hair since the searcher’s intent is satisfied. Also, if you sell Living Proof products at your beauty salon, you can link your affiliate code/page where you sell their products on your post.

Another good marketing method to start using is to think locally. You are blogging for hair salons in hopes to convert readers into clients for your business. Since you want local clients who will become regulars, you can niche your blogs down to them as well. Let’s say you offer Brazilian blowouts and are located in Irvine, California.

When typing this into Google you notice that the top 3 search results are all businesses from Yelp. You don’t even see an actual salon’s page until the 5th spot! This is your opportunity to write some great content all about Brazilian blowouts in Irvine.

You can use this method with anything you offer at your beauty salon. Try searching for Service-City or Industry-Service-City to be more specific. Once you find a lot of underutilized keywords to write about, you can use your SEO skills to help rank them further and track how well they are doing.

SEO for a Hair Salon

What is SEO?

As mentioned earlier, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It means using different marketing strategies to make your salon blog the best it can be for Google to rank it on its first page. You can also use Chrome extensions to help out with this.

On-Page SEO for Blogging

There are countless ways to optimize blogging for a hair salon directly on those pages. This is what the on-page part of on-page SEO means. That being said, it can get pretty complicated. However, unless you are an SEO pro there is no need to stress too much about it. The basics of it, which have been strategies from the beginning of this type of marketing, will be just fine.

Start by making sure that whatever keyword you are using is included in your URL, title, headline, and in your content. With the URL structure, the closer the keyword is to the root, the better.

1. hairsalon.com/services/hair-extensions
2. hairsalon.com/weddings

The hair extensions URL example shows how it should look if you put it under the services section of your website. The wedding example is how your URL should look if you want to put it under your main page. Weddings are major in the hair industry, so it is understandable to put this under your main page so you can rank for it.

Remember that Google is smart and has spent endless amounts of money on their bots being the best. So even if you weren’t optimizing your article for a variation of your keyword, Google will know and will sort it by relevance. There is some flexibility in keyword targeting.

This blog has tags of keywords displayed below their publish date for all of their blogs. Tags are another way for Google to register your keywords but you will learn that they are not super important overall in your success. If you were to search up “fall wedding hair trends New Hampshire” or “New Hampshire fall wedding hair” they will show up on the first page of Google. They successfully picked a popular topic to write about, and Google does the work of showing their blog post for variations of their keyword. You can do the same for your salon business.

Your salon business blog should not be super short. Word count does matter, so if it is too short it won’t do too well. At least 1,000 words is a good start.

Although 1,000+ words may seem like a lot and will bore people, that is not the true issue. If your content is great, no one will mind reading the entire blog post. However, it must be readable even if it is 3,000 words. Most people skim when reading an article, so it is important that you break it all down by using:

1. Headings / Subheadings
2. Lists
3. Quality images
4. Short paragraphs

If it doesn’t look good, no one will want to read it so keep your paragraphs to a couple of sentences. As for the headline part of making a hair blog look nice, make it intriguing and eye-catching.

It is the first thing readers (potential clients) will see so make it count. Pique their curiosity, include a question, or use a negative superlative. There are tons of research on the psychology of headlines and ways to approach them. Read this and decide what you like best.

Off-page SEO and Social Media Marketing

When it comes to blogging for hair salons, your off-page SEO will be based on

1. Backlinks
2. Social Media, Email, and other Outreach
3. Guest blogging

These are all key to getting your blog out there and reaching a new audience.

What are Backlinks and How to Get them to your Blog?

Backlinks are links referring back to your page. If someone writes an article about the best salons in Irvine, and links to your salon’s blog post, that’s a backlink. A link from another website linking back to your website or post.

These are in the top 3 of Google’s ranking signals. Additionally, most SEO professionals believe that you cannot rank on Google without them. This is where a lot of time and dedication will be spent when optimizing your hair salon owner blog/hairdresser blog.

The good news is that this is a beginner’s guide. The topics you should be writing about are low in competition. If you were to use the Brazilian blowouts Irvine example, it is entirely possible to rank without any backlinks. There is not much competition and the other websites may not have any backlinks either.

Here a page discussing hair salon blogs has been typed into Ahrefs backlink checker website to see if it is any competition.

• There are 0 backlinks which means you could rank if you write about the same topic
• There are 0 referring domains
• The domain rating is 10. (This is a scale of how strong the website’s backlinks are in total)

As said earlier, start with your content. If you have good blogging content it will generate backlinks, but you still need some outreach as well to give you a boost.

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Outreach in Blogging for Hair Salons (Through Email + Social Media)

Outreach begins after you publish your blog post. This is when you start to send it out in your salon’s weekly/monthly newsletter to your email subscribers and post it on your social media accounts: Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, etc.

It is super important that you utilize all of your options for sending your content out for free. Your email list should be number one, and after that any social media you have.

There are other ways to get in contact with a new audience. You can start by joining forums surrounding beauty salons or hair topics. It can be about hair care, being a hair salon owner, being a hairstylist, etc. Basically, all forums have to deal with any services your salon may offer. Non-traditional social media platforms like Reddit, Quora, and public Slack channels are great places to start.

This does require more work than just plugging your link anytime you post something new. In fact, most of these forums hate self-promo. You need to establish credibility in all forums you have joined. You can do this by being an active member of their community. Answer questions that have been posted and make insightful comments. This will get you noticed by the moderators and other community members, so they won’t block you once you plug your blog.

You can start to gain a following on these forums and retain loyal readers, and clients if they are in your area. Remember to only post a link to your blog if it is necessary to further explain one of your comments. Do not spam every single question related to any of your blog posts with links.

Other Outreach for your Blog

If you mention anyone or any place in your blog, let them know! Don’t directly ask them to post a link to your blog. Tell them why you decided it would be best to bring them up in your article. When reaching out, keep it all about them and less about you.

This is called ego baiting. For example, if you used a photographer’s photo, you should compliment them and let them know why it was perfect for your article. Tell them that their article about something you linked to was super comprehensive. People love hearing compliments. Since you have already created good content (thanks to this guide) and have told them you appreciate their work, they will be much more inclined to share it with their social media.

Another option is to reach out to people who have published articles on your current blog topic. Hair bloggers who write about their experiences with products and treatments are great people to reach out to. If one of them were to write a blog about their experience receiving a keratin treatment, and you have an article about the science behind it and how it all works, you can offer them that new perspective.

Guest Blogging for a Salon

The last method of outreach would be asking to publish guest blogs. Mommy bloggers would be a great start for a beauty salon. They are constantly talking about self-care and ways to save time getting ready. There are many ways you can use your hair knowledge to create a relevant blog post for your audience.

Some of them even have a side of their website where they allow guest bloggers to email them and pitch them an article. You can also cold-email them and tell them you have an amazing article that will be great for their audience. Even if you are turned down, the important thing to remember is that you got your name out there and now you are on their radar.

Extras for a Beauty Salon Blog

Business Goals

There are some other things to take into consideration when blogging and doing SEO for hair salons. Your goal at the end of this should not be short-term traffic. There is no reason to focus on having a big spike when you first publish your article. You need to focus on acquiring consistent passive traffic.

If you start to follow all the techniques in this guide, your hair salon business blog should achieve this. However, an absolutely perfect marketing method for ranking on Google’s first page is not possible. There is no magic advice anyone can give you to always rank number one. So if you aren’t getting that traffic, update the article and repromote it as if it were new based on whatever information you added.

You should also repurpose the information in another way. Let’s say you already made a Youtube video explaining the blog post. This time you should make it into a tips newsletter. Explain a little about your blog post to reel in your email subscribers. Then link the blog post to get them to finish it all. You can even decide to promote it as a Podcast to make your piece more conversational and easier for people to digest. Find other forms of social media to post it on, and go for it.

Paid Promo and Marketing through Google or Facebook Ads

If needed, paid promotion always works. For most people, it can be hard to justify paying for ads on your salon blog. You should think about all the “free” strategies that were offered here. Nothing is truly free. Especially, when you take into account all the time it takes to create a successful hair salon owner blog.

Think of how much you are worth being paid per hour by doing this work and how many hours you have put into this blog. You may learn that it is more expensive doing all this work compared to running a Facebook or Google ad.

It is important to go check out how much Google ads or Facebook ads would cost you in comparison. You also have the advantage of being able to advertise to locals near your salon. These ads will allow your blog to grow in a non-organic way.

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Go Start Your Blog Today!

Lastly, it is important to recall that building anything takes time. If you are just beginning your hair blog, you should expect to put in the hours and work necessary to make it work for you. The end goal of this is to grow and generate clients from your blog posts. You won’t have thousands of new people reading your blog overnight and there is no magical step to speed this process up. Post quality content regularly, optimize your content, and follow up on all social media, and you will gain your following.

Also, get started on it today. There is no need to wait until a blog post is absolutely perfect, just jump right in. Good luck!