How Local SEO Can Help Your Beauty And Aesthetics Marketing

As a beauty business, whether you offer lip fillers, facelifts or hair removal, you want to push appointment bookings and bring clients through the door. A great way of doing this is by optimising for local SEO. This blog will show you how to do just that to make your beauty and aesthetics marketing the real showstopper.
It is more important than ever to boost your online presence, essentially in the local community with 97% of people learning about a company online compared to anywhere else. This means it’s important to optimise your website and stay relevant so you don’t miss out on any potential local clients.  So let’s have a look at some

Four ways to use local SEO to improve your beauty marketing:

1. Google My Business

When it comes to promoting local, Google is your best friend. Having your own Google My Business (GMB) listing will help attract local traffic. Your listing will be visible alongside search results and it also makes your business eligible to be part of the local pack.

Here’s some ways you can make sure that your listing is optimised for local SEO: 

‘NAP’ – that’s your name, address and phone number

It’s extremely important to make sure these are all correct and consistent across your website, social media channels and any other directory listing you create. This includes abbreviations of the word ‘Road’, where ‘Rd’ is in its place, these all need to be consistent across all of your listings. 

Your address and phone number can be accessed by customers from your GMB listing so it’s important they are correct. If you can offer mobile services in the surrounding areas, it’s important to add them too, so Google knows to list your business in a range of ‘near me’ searches for those particular services. So if you’re based in Portsmouth but offer remote services in the surrounding area, then this needs to be highlighted in your listing. 

If you do not have a physical salon for customers to visit then you can tell Google that you are a service-area business, make sure you list all the local areas you work in.

Description

The description section on GMB listings is a short 150-200 word summary of your business that works great with a call to action at the end encouraging customers to get in touch or visit your site. Try using this as a template:

{Name of your company} is a {the service you offer} in {City}. {Give some information on why you are a great company and what makes your customers love you}. Give us a call today!

Categories 

It’s important to add categories to your profile that best describes your services and the industry you operate in. Try to list at least three to make sure you are getting the best results. Beauty salon and Cosmetics are both verified categories – Google offers a full list of verified categories that might help you.

Photos

Images are a great way to attract new customers.  Google has reported that businesses with photos have 42% more requests for directions and 35% more click-through rates. You can read about the best ways to use images for your GMB page here.

 2. Build links and citations

Building links and citations to your website or social media is a great way to increase your SERP rankings and amplify your customer reach. You can do this by launching a digital PR campaign.

You can start by adding your businesses to directories. These create backlinks to you that search engines love as they corroborate a “sign of confidence between one site to another”. It also shows that you are a genuine and trustworthy site. An important factor to remember is all your information needs to be consistent throughout each directory to get the best results. This is because of Google’s AI system which can easily spot inconsistencies and errors in local citations. Customers that are early on in the decision-making process may also become frustrated with inconsistent or broken links. 

There are generalised directories such as Yell, Bing, Yahoo, and of course Google, or you can join a beauty industry-specific directory like Cosmetic Index.  

Although considered a social media platform, Facebook has become a directory with the launch of its People, Pages, and Place section. Facebook is a great way to connect with customers and other local businesses through posting engaging content and advertisement.  You can find out about how Tillison Consulting can help you with paid promotion to boost your brand on Facebook here. 

GMB and Facebook help customers call or get directions at the click of a button so once again it’s important to make sure all your information is up to date so potential customers are able to reach you. 

3. Don’t forget mobiles

Statista states that 50.8% of all Google searches are made from a mobile device. With the increase of ‘near me’ searches rising 250% since 2015. Customers want it and they want it now. There is a substantial rise in ‘open now, near me’ searches and 50% of those searches are said to result in a conversion. This is why it’s so important that you have a responsive and quick website that is optimised for mobiles.

You may not be an expert in websites but there are some things you could be checking to know what to do next, here are a few suggestions: 

• Test your website on Google’s mobile-friendly test tool. This will tell you how mobile-friendly your website is, focussing on how responsive it is, as well as giving you a preview of how your website will look. If your website is not mobile-friendly, it will give you suggestions on how to make it so.

• Improve your site loading speed: having a fast and responsive website will lower how many people leave your page straight away when the page takes too long to load (also known as a ‘bounce rate’)  and improve how customers interact with your site. A good way to do this is by compressing your images as larger files can slow down how long it takes for your page to load. You can shrink them without affecting their quality. There are several tools and plugins you can use to do this. You can also design mobile-friendly pop-ups for your site that do not affect loading speed. Don’t worry!  You can book a free consultation with our specialist team at Tillison Consulting to help with all your mobile optimisation needs.

4. Reviews

There are so many advantages of customer reviews for your website, as well as social media and your Google my Business. Here are a few:

• Reviews aren’t just great for your business, they also tell Google you are a genuine and trustworthy business. 
• Positive reviews and ratings help Google work out that your product or service is of good quality and therefore it will rank you higher.
• Reviews earn you rich snippets! When Google finds valid reviews or ratings, it may show rich snippets that include stars and other summary info from reviews or ratings which would look great for your customers and your salon.

• Whether it’s a good or bad review, you can interact with the reviews left on your website. This shows that you really care about your customers and is great for your business reputation.

Summary

Local SEO can be great to increase your appointments and attract new customers in your local area. Having a GMB listing helps customers contact you at a click of a button as well as gives you a more prominent appearance in the SERPs. 

Citations and links from external websites help Google tell you are a genuine and trusted Business as well as reach and engage new customers. It’s also important to optimise your website for mobiles. It’s a great way to attract local customers that are searching for businesses on the go or ‘near me’. Finally, reviews are a great way to engage with customers and build great relationships. It’s also free advertising! 

To find out how we can help you generate appointments and customers, visit our Beauty marketing page. Book a free consultation today!