In this 6-minute read:
- Claim Google and other online listings
- Get and respond to reviews
- Add specific on-page signals to your website
- Get more links to your website
- Engage customers on Google and other social channels
With Google as the top search engine and “modern phone book,” it’s pretty important to make sure your hair or nail salon shows up well there. It’s where most people go when they are searching for a new hairstylist or nail tech. Do a quick Google search for “salon in your town”—is your salon showing up in the local Google map results?
Attract more customers and keep them loyal with reputation management software. Learn more, plus get free reputation monitoring and customer insights when you sign up for Womply Free!
Whether you are showing up well or not, there are a lot of things that you can do to improve or maintain your Google local rankings for your hair or nail salon. We’re here to show some of those to you.
1. Claim and optimize your Google My Business listing
The first step to ranking your hair or nail salon in the Google local rankings is to set up and claim your Google My Business listing. Without that, it’s impossible. Follow our tutorial for claiming your Google listing.
Once you have your listing claimed, you want to make sure that you optimize it. This means adding any relevant information that will be helpful to your customers. Here are the things you should definitely include on your Google My Business listing:
- Name of the business, address, and phone number (also known as NAP)
- Category (to help you show up for relevant searches)
- Hours, including holiday hours
- Website
- Description
- Services and prices
- Lots of photos (customers want to see your portfolio of perfect nails and hair)
Go deeper: The top 5 things every small business should include in their Google listing
2. Get and respond to reviews
Reviews are crucial to ranking well in the local search results, as well as for attracting new customers. You’re much more likely to get someone into your salon if they see that you have tons of positive reviews as opposed to none or several negative reviews. But how can you get more reviews for your salon? Good question!
Here are a few ways you can try to get more positive reviews:
- Provide excellent service and excellent customer service. This may seem obvious, but too many businesses get poor reviews from disrespectful employees even though the service they received was flawless. Happy customers equals good reviews.
- Ask for reviews. A happy customer doesn’t always think to leave a review. When a customer is ecstatic about their beautiful new nails, invite them to share that excitement on your Google listing. (Learn how to get Google reviews)
- Try reputation management software. Sometimes you’re just too busy to manage and track all of your reviews across different sites. So a service that does this for you and allows you to view and respond to all of your reviews in one place could be a good option.
When you do get a new review—whether good or bad—respond to it. Google likes to see that engagement and it’s good for potential customers too. Give all positive reviews a brief thank you message (and personalize it!) and make sure you respond to any negative reviews politely and professionally, even if the customer was totally wrong.
Plus, research from Womply shows businesses that respond regularly to reviews earn up to 49% more annual revenue!
3. Add your salon to more listing sites
There are tons of free listings sites out there that you can add your hair or nail salon to. It’s important to add your NAP (remember, name, address, and phone number) to all of these different listing sites to help create more credibility for yourself. As Google and other search engines crawl these different websites and see your information, this builds your authority with them.
IMPORTANT NOTE: As you are adding your information to these various listing sites, make sure that your name, address, and phone number are the same as they are on Google. Any differences, or having multiple listings on the same site, can hurt you more than it helps. Using “Betty’s Salon” on Yelp when your Google listing says “Betty’s Beauty Salon” can really affect your rankings.
Check out 25 free business listing websites every small or local business should be on for a list to get you started on your free listings.
4. Include these on-page signals on your website
Your website should be consistent with the information you are sharing on your Google My Business listing and other online directory listings. The hours, name, address, and phone number should match up. But there are a few other things that Google watches out for, too.
Here are some more on-page signals you should include on your website to help your hair or nail salon rank better on Google:
- Keywords in page titles and meta descriptions
- Information about your services on your website
- Location pages (if you are located in more than one city)
- Keywords in H1 and H2 tags (headings and subheadings in the content)
These help provide more information to Google about your salon and services, as well as providing your customers with a good customer experience on your website by giving them all of the information they need.
5. Get more links to your website
Getting other websites to point links toward your website is a huge ranking factor on Google in both the organic and local search results. The number and quality of the links that point to your website impact your authority with the search engines. The more links you have and the less “spammy” they are, the better.
We would suggest not going out and buying a bunch of links from any old “link farm” because these tend to be of low value and can hurt you more than they help you.
Here are some ways to get good quality links to your salon’s website:
- Create unique and engaging content on your website. If you create valuable content on your site, it is more likely to get shared on social media and linked to by the people who read it, whether they are your customers or not. How-to articles and tutorials do great here.
- Get involved in the community. When you are involved in local events or sponsor local high school sports teams, those kinds of things are often shared on the event host’s and schools’ websites. Ask for any mentions of your salon to be linked back to your website.
- Find mentions of your salon in news articles. Did the local news do an article on their website when your salon opened up? Find that article and ask them to link it back to your website. The writers and editors are usually more than happy to help you out here.
Go deeper: 15 free tips to improve local search rankings
6. Engage customers on Google and other social channels
Google, Facebook, Yelp, TripAdvisor, they all love engagement on their platforms. And the more you engage with your customers on Google and other social media websites, the more you can improve your salon’s local Google rankings. This means responding to reviews, commenting when someone shares one of your articles, answering questions posted to you, responding to messages, etc.
The more that you can do to enhance each of these tips that we’ve mentioned, the better your salon will rank on Google and the more appointments and customers you will receive.
If you need any help managing and monitoring your reviews across the various listing sites that we’ve mentioned, you might be interested in Womply’s reputation management solution. It saves you time so you can focus on running your salon while our automated system keeps you up to date on new reviews as they come in, all in one place. Learn more, plus get free reputation monitoring and customer insights when you sign up for Womply Free!