SEO for Hairdressers & Beauty Salons – 5 Top Tips

Whether you’re a mobile hairdresser or manage several staff members in your own beauty salon, getting new customers in the door is crucial for your business. This SEO guide for hairdressers and beauty salons will simplify what SEO is and how you can get your business booming!

Throughout this guide,  you’ll pick up tips on improving your search engine ranking to reach and acquire brand new clientele.

The term SEO refers to Search Engine Optimisation. It means to heighten your website’s ability to be seen online, particularly how it appears in search engine results.  

This can be done by using significant keywords surrounding your subject matter. 

Whenever possible customers search where they can get their ‘new look’ or their ‘new do’, SEO means your salon more likely to be clicked on. You’ll end up more booked up than ever! 

Regardless of being in a bustling city or a quaint village, the number of local hairdressers and beauty salons likely means stiff competition. A search like “salons in …” or “hairdressers in…” could display hundreds of varied websites. 

This underscores the significance of SEO for your venture. It provides the edge. The beauty sector’s competitiveness is common knowledge. Fine-tuning your website can potentially result in increased bookings. 

Search platforms, including Google, utilize various parameters to generate a list of top-ranking websites for user queries. The better your salon measures up on these criteria, the more prominent your website will be. 

In truth, over 25% of users click on the number 1 search result. After this the click-through-rate drops the further down the page you are. Your website is almost completely invisible by results page 2. 

SEO will help you optimise your performance on ranking factors, so you can move towards the number 1 spot. Or at least within the first search page, which receive the most clicks! 

For hairdressers and beauty parlors, local SEO is paramount. It’s about tailoring a website to show up for location-specific searches – crucial for established salons, or mobile hairdressers seeking nearby customers.

Always append your address at your website’s bottom. This inclusion boosts relevance for geographic terms. 

Additionally, marking your presence on Google Maps via Google My Business is a key component of local SEO. 

Consistently refreshing your Google My Business account, showcasing photos of your handiwork or items, and accumulating glowing reviews, is pivotal to appear in local searches – a must for stylists or any entrepreneur aiming to highlight their skillset and novel offerings! 

Salon bookings are increasingly driven by discovery, and AI tools are becoming a key part of how people find somewhere new. Whether someone is looking for a specific treatment or just the best-reviewed salon in their area, Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity are all now part of that decision-making process.

Google AI Overviews now show for a very high percentage of searches, especially for informational queries such as “how much does a balayage cost in the UK?” or “best hair salons in Leeds for curly hair.” To appear here, you need to:

For LLMs, reviews and local presence are everything. Consistent five-star reviews, listings on platforms like Treatwell and Fresha, and mentions in local lifestyle publications all help AI tools surface your salon as a top local recommendation.

Salons with a solid review base and well-organised website are already ahead of the game when it comes to AEO and GEO. A few targeted content additions can make a significant difference to how often you appear in AI-generated answers.

To get started, here are some key tips to start your SEO journey: 

Grasping the keywords your potential customers use online is essential. Search engines position your website based on detected keywords.

Grasping the keywords your potential customers use online is essential. Search engines position your website based on detected keywords. 

Besides geographically relevant terms, ponder over other terms clients might use when scouting for beauty services. 

Keyword research is typically executed using tools like Google Keyword Planner and rival assessments. Yet, if you lack a Search Engine Optimisation expert, these might be unreachable. 

Below are some keyword inspirations for hairdressers or beauty parlours for website enhancement: 

Such keywords will likely be big draws for your business, so make sure to include these kinds of keywords in your text and meta title/descriptions… 

Undeniably, SEO can appear daunting, especially for salon professionals preoccupied with clients. Your keyword investigation should spotlight an array of pertinent search phrases. 

Regardless of the intricacy, the golden rule is: begin modestly. Start optimising for a select group of keywords, then progress as you familiarise with SEO. 

Begin with the meta descriptions and meta titles. 

Making sure that each page title and meta description is individual and contains targeted words/phrases gives potential client a brief idea of your services and products.

This will further optimise the page for these specific words. To edit your meta info and page titles, you’ll need to enter your site’s CMS (content management system). Popular website platform like Shopify and WordPress have simple meta fields for you fill in without needing any coding skills. 

Nonetheless, keyword enhancement is only a small part of SEO. For a stellar user experience, technical SEO must be flawless. 

To do this, fine-tune your site’s technical anatomy, ensuring it is speedy, accessible, and clear. Quicker websites rank significantly higher on search engines and it’s becoming more and more important. Here are some other technical SEO considerations: 

Implementing technical SEO is crucial when you’re trying to bring in clicks.  As well as helping Search Engine Optimisation, creating a highly functional site is also a great way to convert those casual browsers into your clients. 

There are many free technical SEO audit tools such as Google’s Page Speed Insights, but it might be difficult to make sense of the results without the help of an SEO specialist. Spending money on a SEO audit is a great pathway to start to identify and fix your site’s technical SEO.  

Content crafting is a potent weapon in the SEO arsenal. 

Though not overtly sales-oriented, amplifying site traffic through content can address customer inquiries, potentially leading to more bookings. 

While fabricating content – FAQs, tutorials, videos, etc., consider the broader audience. What are clients seeking? Whether it’s trending beauty advice or the latest hair fashion, they need professionals to fulfil these requests. 

Draft engaging pieces on current fads or beauty shortcuts. Who knows, this could attract clientele in droves. 

When creating content like FAQs, help pages, videos and more, think about your broader audience. What does your potential client want from your salon and what is your audience searching for? People searching for new beauty tips, and the newest haircut trend, need someone to provide the makeup or recreate that 80’s mullet! 

Here are some more blog content ideas for Hairdressers and Beauty Salons: 

Remember, it’s a way to rank for a much broader set of keywords (referred to as long-tail keywords) and to therefore boost your SEO. 

Don’t forget to include ‘book now’ buttons with a link to your booking page. The ease and simplicity could encourage your future clients to choose you instead of your competitors! 

After the initial four pointers are implemented or were previously in place, it’s time to progress to higher level SEO methods.  

This concluding advice is invaluable for salons in crowded markets. 

A dominant factor in Google’s rankings is the volume and quality of external links that lead back to your website.

For this, cultivate connections with reputable sites for link building. This fosters trust and boosts traffic. 

The optimal long-term strategy is producing premium content other sites wish to link to, but also being active in reaching out to other websites for links. Here are some options for link-building to consider: 

A great pathway to growing strong links is by using targeted content marketing, creating quality content that other sites will want to link to, although you may want to speed up the process using the strategies below: 

Whilst SEO can take months to see results, PPC (Pay-Per-Click) or Google Adwords can rocket to you the top of the search result pages straight away! 

That’s because, paid ads usually take up the top search engine results before the ‘organic’ or non-paid results. 

For service-based business such as hairdressers and beauty professionals, you will probably want to focus on text-based ads (Search ads) that focus on people searching for your target keywords in close proximity to your business (e.g. ‘men’s barber in [location]’. You can even pay to have your Google Maps result highlighted at the top of the list! 

To set up these ads effectively, it will cost you both the click through Google and the set-up of the ad through an agency. While it has become simpler to set up google ads alone, setting it up yourself may lead to incorrect targeting and overspending on the wrong terms so it’s best to get the help of a PPC expert!