This comprehensive, yet simple guide on SEO for Nail Salons will give you the best 14 practices you can immediately take to get your salon to the top of Google search results.
This guide will cover every aspect of SEO from finding phrases and terms that can drive traffic to your website, to creating the perfect meta description and building high-quality links.
With this salon SEO knowledge, you can take actionable practices to gain visibility and drive traffic to your nail salon website.
Getting the Basics Right
What is SEO?
To start, you need to first understand what SEO is. You’ve probably heard this term gets thrown around but never fully understood it.
In short, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is a digital marketing strategy that focuses on optimizing your website to improve search engine rankings.
Well, how does this help my business? Great question.
As a business owner of a salon, you can leverage SEO to get leads, build awareness, and increase website traffic. As a result, you will drive revenue and stand out from the competition.
Why is SEO Important for Your Salon?
Deciding on a new restaurant to eat or which backpacks are good for hiking? What do you do? You google it.
In today’s digital world, everything is at your fingertips. People are constantly searching on their phones, laptops, and computers. On average, Google has over 3.5 billion searches per day. Every second, there are over 40,000 searches. What this means is that your business can reach people across the entire globe.
More importantly, what this means is that your salon has the capability to drive traffic and thus, rank at the top of Google search results. This guide will teach you that and much more.
For those of you that are too busy and want SEO done-for-you, book a consultation with our experts here:
How does SEO work?
You may think that SEO is all about constantly writing new content to catch people’s attention. Although there is some truth to that, there are various factors that influence search ranking. Specifically, according to Moz, eight important factors contribute to organic search results ranking.
In brief, they are:
- Links
- On-page optimization
- Behavioral
- Google My Business
- Citations
- Personalization
- Reviews
- Socials
Understanding Google’s ranking algorithm is critical for SEO success. As a result, we will go into each one in greater detail and provide the best techniques to improve every individual factor.
Let’s get started.
SEO for Nail Salons – Best Practices
-
Make sure NAPs of Your Salon are Consistent
NAP stands for name, address, and phone number. Why is this important?
Google likes it when your business information is correct. It helps build trust that your nail salon is actually where it is located.
On your website, make sure that you have a dedicated contact page where you list your NAP and include it at the bottom of every page on your site.
Also, your NAP must be consistent and accurate on every website and page. This includes your salon website, Facebook page, Google My Business page, and any other sites. Remember to use the exact address and phone number in the same format when listing your contact information on the web.
This is an easy way to improve your salon SEO and rank higher on organic search results.
-
Make sure Your Salon Website is Mobile-Friendly, Fast, and Secure
With more than half of all website traffic coming from mobile devices, it is that much more imperative to make sure that your website is mobile-friendly. Mobile optimization contributes to SEO and ensures that visitors who access your site have a personalized experience.
Fortunately, Google has a Mobile-Friendly Test tool.
Provide a URL of your salon website and Google will give you recommendations to enhance the mobile experience. If Google gives you the green light, then you are all set!
Another way to optimize your website for SEO is to make sure it is fast and secure.
With information at our fingertips, consumers want immediate results. This means that if your website takes longer than three seconds to load, people are less likely to stay on it. In fact, there was a page load time study conducted to see how long people would wait for a page to load before leaving the site. It concluded that 53% of visitors exit the page if it takes longer than 3 seconds.
Other ways to increase your site’s loading speed is to:
- Compress images
- Don’t have too many plugins
- Use a fast theme
When your website has high-resolution images, it takes longer for the images to download. Therefore, you should compress them to optimize loading speed.
Having too many plugins is a potential factor that slows down your website’s loading speed. It is advisable to deactivate them when you are not using them.
Also, you can take a look at the fastest WordPress themes here. Using one of these will help with mobile optimization and SEO.
Your salon website should also be secure. If your website deals with digital transactions and credit cards, having an extra layer of security makes your customers feel safe and comfortable.
-
Make a Google My Business Profile for Your Salon
Registering your nail salon is an easy and essential step toward any SEO strategy. According to Moz, they found that setting up a Google My Business is the #1 ranking factor for appearing in the map pack.
What is the map pack?
The map pack or the local pack is the set of the top 3 results for local search. Here is what it would look like.
As you can already see, having your salon show up here when people are searching is critical to increase traffic to your website and attract more customers to your business.
Luckily, filling out your profile on Google My Business or claiming your salon requires only a few minutes.
As mentioned before, make sure your NAP is accurate and consistent here as well.
Here is an example of a complete Google My Business profile with essential contact information filled.
-
Get Reviews and Respond to All Customers
This is another important factor that goes into determining the local search results ranking and improving local SEO. Reviews can improve your online reputation and therefore, attract more customers. It can also make your salon a reputable business that people can trust. Remember Google likes all this!
With access to information, most people look at reviews and ratings before purchasing a product or service. In fact, over 80% of people do this.
Now, how can you get reviews for your salon? First, you need to ask customers to leave reviews. Second, you need to make this process simple and quick.
How can you go about that? An easy way is to create and share a Google Review Link.
Here is the easiest way to do this:
- Head to Google Place ID and enter the name of your salon.
- Copy the Place ID of your business to the end of this link
- https://search.google.com/local/writereview?placeid=
Not only should you focus on getting reviews, but you should also respond to all of them.
Whether the review is positive, negative, or neutral, it is in your best interest to respond to every single review. This will show people that you care about their feedback and want to improve for the future. They are more likely to view your business as trustworthy and caring.
Even replying to negative reviews can help improve your local SEO.
You want your customers to write reviews that are not only positive but also include targeted keywords. This is a great way to bring more traffic to your website and rank higher on the targeted keywords.
-
Choose Targeted Keywords that People Search
Your keywords are a collection of words that you want to focus on to bring more visibility to your nail salon. In terms of SEO, these are the words that people will enter into Google search engines.
For example, you own a salon in Irvine. A good keyword to focus on would be “salons in irvine.” A general keyword structure to follow is the “service” in “location.”
You can try different variations for “nail salons” such as “nail shop” or “salons.” You may be wondering what the difference between “salons” and “salons near me” is. This is commonly asked and the answer is that people who are searching for “salons near me” have a higher intent to convert.
Let me tell you what this means. Here is a picture of the marketing funnel.
This shows that people further down the funnel are more likely to visit your salon. People who search for “salon” may be interested in it but have no intention to become an immediate customer.
A helpful tool for brainstorming keywords is Google Keyword Planner. It tells you how popular keywords are and which one to best target.
Short-tail keywords are search terms under three words. These keywords cover a broad range of topics. As a result, they produce a high search volume and are competitive to rank.
On the other hand, long-tail keywords are search terms over three words. They tend to be more specific. As a result, they produce less search traffic. However, they have a higher conversion rate because people searching these terms are more likely to buy a product or service.
A suggested SEO strategy is to balance the amount of targeted short-tail and long-tail keywords. You should research to see what short-tail keywords are overly competitive and focus on those that you have a chance to rank for.
-
Pick Specific Keywords Per Page
After finding what keywords to focus on, you can now strategically place them throughout your website. You want to start with lower-volume keywords and create content that is relevant to it.
For every page of your website, focus on a specific keyword. This SEO strategy is going to give you a good boost in terms of organic search result rankings. Additionally, it makes you an authority among the competition because it shows how knowledgeable you are about different topics within the nail industry.
If you want to consult our experts on your keyword research, don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We would be more than happy to help you out!
-
Provide Unique Landing Pages for Each Salon Service
Similar to the last point, you want to show Google that you are a trustworthy and reputable business within the nail industry.
To do this, you can go into further details of each service offered at your salon.
This can include microblading, cuticle trimming, acrylic nails, gel nails, manicures, pedicures, and so on. The list is endless!
The main point is to have a dedicated page for every service offered. This will increase visibility and traffic to your salon. By optimizing for a user-focused experience, you are also optimizing for SEO capacity.
Here is an example of a salon service menu.
As you can see, there are a lot of special treatments offered. These are all opportunities for you to create a page. By covering all these subcategories, you are expanding your exposure and attracting more customers.
-
Optimize Title Tags for SEO
Each page of your website must have a unique title tag. It is equally important to have your keywords appear here. Following these steps will help you to best enhance your nail salon SEO.
A tip is to add modifiers to your title tags such as “top” or “best.” Numbers and dates work as well. The reason these have a higher click-through rate is that they are specific and stand out from the other titles. They are also great to rank for long-tail keywords.
Note: Look at the title I am using for this article!
-
Skyrocket Click-through Rate with Meta Descriptions
On a search engine result page, the meta description is what appears under the title and URL. It is critical for on-page SEO because, besides the title tag, the meta description is the last opportunity for you to grab people’s attention. Therefore, you want to make it enticing and compelling for people to click on.
Think of this as an advertising copy and brainstorm ways to capture the eyes of people.
A thing to note is that you want to include the targeted keyword because it will be bolded when people search on Google.
Furthermore, you want to highlight the benefits of your salon and explain how it can solve the customer’s problem.
For example, you can mention that your nail technicians are professionally trained and licensed. Another idea is to include discounts and deals for new clients or loyal customers. One more is to state your service is 100% satisfaction guarantee.
The main takeaway here is that you emphasize the values your salon has to offer and why people want to choose yours over another nail shop. Provide incentives!
-
Optimize Images for SEO
According to Moz, 27% of web searches happen on Google Images.
Besides Google searches, Google Images is the 2nd biggest contributor to searches.
What does this mean for your salon?
It means you take full advantage of this information and boost your SEO.
A way to do this is to customize the image file names. When it comes to SEO, adding descriptive, keyword-rich text is a must. Typically by default, file names look something like DLK8903.jpg. This has no purpose and does not increase the visibility of your images. However, renaming it to include different nail service keywords will improve your SEO value.
Another way is to write alt text or alt tags that are SEO-friendly. Alt tags are written in an HTML code to appear when a browser can’t load the image. From an SEO perspective, adding descriptive alt tags can be beneficial in achieving higher rankings in the organic search results.
A final way to optimize images for SEO is to compress your images. This allows your website to achieve a faster loading speed.
-
Get Internal Links
Internal links are links that direct one page on your website to another page on your website. It helps users navigate through your website and find relevant content.
It is especially crucial to establish relationships and connections between different pages of your website. From an SEO standpoint, it shares the link value with other pages. What this means for you is that as more links pass their value to each other, you will increase your chances of ranking on the 1st page of Google search results.
-
Get Outbound Links
Outbound links or external links are links that point from one website to another. Although they do not have a high impact on SEO, they strengthen the signals of the pages on your website and provide further context to Google about your business.
Providing outbound links to websites high in authority demonstrates expertise in your field and increases the trustworthiness of your website.
Since external links are easy to access, they serve as a stable metric to determine the popularity and relevance of a given web page.
To sum this practice up, adding external links to your website is an easy and simple way to boost on-page SEO.
-
Get Quality Backlinks to Your Salon
Backlinks are links created when one website links to another. Backlinks are considered to be one of the most important factors in determining search results ranking as there is a strong correlation between the number of backlinks and search engine rankings. They are extremely valuable for SEO because they are essentially upvotes that suggest the content is worth sharing. Having backlinks to your website means that other websites vouch for the quality of content that you have.
Okay, so how do I get backlinks then? There are various ways to do this but the first thing to remember is that you need to create content worthy of a link.
After that, there are multiple strategies to obtain backlinks. The first strategy is to post and share your content on different social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. From there, you want to establish yourself as an expert in the nail industry and continue building a presence. This can be combined with joining forums and groups where people share similar interests.
Another method is guest blogging. This is an effective way to expand your audience base and showcase your content in front of new people. Some search queries you can use to find websites that accept guest posting are:
- [your topic] + “write for us”
- [your topic] + “guest post”
- [your topic] + “become a contributor”
Furthermore, you can reach out to companies and people through social media and email. Hubspot provides great email templates to use when reaching out.
Or you can use the email template below:
Subject: “I’d Love To Contribute to Your Site as a Writer!”
Hi [Insert Name],
My name is [Your Name], I am the owner of a local salon.
I was reading one of your pieces of work when I noticed you accept guest posts.
If you still do, please let me know – I’d love to put together a draft for you to review!
Thanks for the consideration,
[Your Name]
[include link to your website]
Although this process can be time-consuming, link building is an essential component of any SEO strategy.
-
Timely Make Local Content
Remember how links are the #1 factor that contributes to organic search results ranking? Well, that’s what we’re going to continue to focus on.
Localized content is a great way to gain exposure in your community and boost local SEO. If local events such as festivals and sports competitions are happening, you can write about them on your website from the lens of a salon business owner. That way, you are offering a unique perspective.
Creating relevant content at the right time will increase the likelihood of getting your business seen. This helps to establish yourself as a local community leader and to promote your business to the community.
Extra Marketing Tools for Your Salon
Thank you for making it to this point. I know that was a lot of information to digest. I wanted to include a few content marketing/SEO tools that I have personally found useful.
- Ubersuggest: This is a free keyword tool (with limits) that allows you to check the SEO rating of your website and examine how your target keywords are doing.
- Keyword.com: This is a tool that lets you track your Google ranks and backlinks.
- Ahrefs Backlink Checker: The name says it all.
Recap of SEO for Nail Salons
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can seem like a difficult concept to grasp, but with time and investment in learning, you will be able to utilize all these SEO practices to advance your salon to the next level.
It is not going to happen overnight, but by implementing these SEO strategies, your SEO efforts will lead to increases in website traffic, customers, and conversions.
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to contact us at our website or schedule a free strategy session to discuss how you can get more customers.
Other SEO Articles from YoYoFuMedia
