Mala McAlpin For many spa, salon and clinic owners, marketing and exposure is a key area of focus, and normally top of the priorities list. Despite this, it often remains an area that is misunderstood, under-utilised, or left in the ‘too-hard basket’.
One of the most common minefields when it comes to small business marketing is the business’ website, or more specifically, ensuring that it ranks well on search engines and that new customers are landing on your homepage in the first place. In a lot of cases, business owners assume that investing in Google Adwords is the best bet, but there are some simple tips for improving traffic to your site that doesn’t require you to be a website marketing wiz. Here are our top four tips to bumping up your website:
Google services
Ensure you have your Google My Business page published and up to date. Google will of course give priority to sites that use its linked apps and services, particularly Google My Business – since it’s linked with Google Maps and customers are searching for businesses based on their location. Don’t forget to update your trading hours over periods where they might change, like public holidays.
Regular website updates
Google loves new content, so try to update your website on a regular basis – perhaps every couple of weeks. Google is known to be a particularly big fan of new photos, so consider adding a gallery and adding new pics frequently. This also applies to your Google My Business page.
Keywords
Really try and get into the minds of your prospective customers for this activity. What are they typing into Google when they search for you? It could be as simple as ‘day spa Sydney’ or as specific as ‘microblading Prahran’. When customers search for these terms, Google will shoot out websites referencing those keywords multiple times, so you need to ensure your key search terms of choice are recurrent throughout your site, as many times as possible.
Reviews
Businesses with a lot of reviews often pop up front and centre of Google searches. You should already be encouraging customer reviews to build your business credibility and word of mouth exposure, so you’ll be killing two birds with one stone. Some spas and salons request post-treatment client reviews via text or email. If you’re opting for this, provide links to multiple review platforms to give clients their pick of the bunch. Just remember to make one of these the link to your Google Reviews, as this goes back to Google’s aforementioned high ranking of its linked services.
