Your website should be your premium marketing tool for attracting new clients into your salon or spa, but often this isn’t the case and you end up missing out on many opportunities to grow your business because of it.
The fact is that websites can no longer be the basic brochure type structure that everyone started out with many years ago.
Today, your website needs to be created and maintained in such a way that it gets found by the search engines such as Google.
If your website is not turning up on the first page after a search, chances are you are losing business to your 1st-page competitors.
This means action needs to be taken if you want to seriously grow your salon or spa.
Now, I’m not an expert on websites or search engine optimisation, but I know someone who is, so I asked Glenn Heaton what he saw as the essential components of a well optimised website.
But first, let me explain about search engine optimisation, how it affects the way your website gets ranked, and in turn how this impacts on your business.
Good SEO ensures your website gets ranked on the first page after an internet search using keywords by the person searching. This is very important because it’s how potential new clients find your website.
Good SEO means more people finding you, and this in turn means more people coming to your business. So that’s the “why” behind having good SEO.
The how is a little more complicated, and you can go from doing some of it yourself (if you have a website where you can access the back-end) right through to paying an expert to do it for you.
However, after speaking to Glenn, it seems that there’s not just the once off website makeover to consider, as fresh regular content is also an important aspect of good SEO.
Google and it’s counterparts want to find the freshest and most up-to-date material for it’s customers and websites that show they are doing this tend to rank highly on the list front page sites.
So let’s take a look at what Glenn says is essential for optimising your website and as a result, gaining more new clients:
#1. Create a blog for your website where you can add short and informative articles each fortnight.
#2. The page titles on each page of your website should include a keyword, including the location of your salon or spa.
#3. The page titles should be different for each page. For instance if the page is about facials he recommends that the title should include both the spa name and something along the lines of “rejuvenating facials from Beautiful You in Top Ryde, Sydney”.
# 4. The image filenames should include a keyword. For example: rejuvenating-facial-from-dayspa-name-top-ryde.jpg
#5. Your images should also have ‘alt’ tags completed with keywords.
#6. ALL the pages on your website should have anchor links to other pages of the site with keywords:
eg… Looking for anti-aging skin treatments in Top Ryde? Click here.
#7. Keywords should be used in the headlines of each page text (h1 or h2 tags).
#8. Keywords should be used throughout the copy on the site.
A little while back, Glenn and I co-hosted a webinar on the topic of what makes a website great, and if you’d like to listen to what Glenn had to say about this, you can click on this link to take you to the recording.
So, if you’ve been a little complacent about your website, now is the perfect time to kick start it all over again.
Your website might just need a few tweaks to get it back on track and make it the best marketing tool for your salon or spa.