All Programming Software Development Blog

SEO or search engine optimisation is the process by which you make sure that the content on your website follows search engine friendly standards so that search engines may take note of your website over time and place it in the correct positioning on the search results page when certain words are typed in.

Its a permanent struggle for me to convince hair salons of the value of a website and then to take it a step even further, the value of making sure that website can be found on the internet by search engines. Why is it such a struggle to convince hair salon owners to do this, well I beleive it is for the following reasons:

• hair salon owners are to busy and as a result they themselves use the internet very little, so how can you expect someone who hardly uses the internet to think it will be an excellent business tool?
• no hair salons have emerged in South Africa to prove that SEO optimised websites produce more business and if they do exist they are keeping the secret to themselves.

I hear you asking yourself now why would people search for a hair salon on the internet?

There are few people nowadays that don’t have access to the internet that are not your ideal type of client. These people no longer use the yellow pages, thats t time consuming and difficult, they use a search engine like google to find a hair salon. The trick to recognise is what will a typical client search for to come out to your hair salon. My personal belief is that they will do an area specific search for a hair salon, so for example they may type in ‘Hair salons in waterkloof’, ‘hair dressers in de waterkant’ or something along those lines because it will force the search engines to give a very specific result. They may well type in ‘hair salons’ but they will soon realise that this only brings up many results that they aren’t interested in and then the next step would be to refine the search further by adding the area in.

What is a single client that spends thousands over there lifetime with your business worth in order for your company to list number one for such an area based search?

Advantages of SEO for hair salon websites

• There are no hair salons doing this already, so to get to position number 1 in your area is pretty simple
• Potential clients have an effective way of finding your business quickly with search engines
• Because clients come to your website, you have an opportunity to market to that client without having to actually speak to them
• Depending on the functionality of your website, you can allow clients to book appointments immediately with you.
• Your website becomes a very cheap face for your business that ends up being cheaper than any other marketing campaigns you could have used before to get new clients.
• You can outsource the SEO to companies that are able to manage this process for you on a professional basis.
• As your website becomes more popular it will start ranking well for other terms in your website such as ‘top hair salon in South Africa” for instance

Disadvantages to SEO hair salon websites

• It costs money
• The salon owner needs to see their website and the internet as a business in itself, any business needs constant work and SEO is no different. If you don’t have the time, then outsource the work.

Costs to SEO a website

This varies quite a lot between service providers in the industry. Typically you are charged per search phrase you want your website optimized for. My company All Porgramming offers this service which costs R 100 per phrase per month. Keep in mind that SEO is not a process of creating a clever bunch of words on your website and then leaving it forever. You must work on these words every month, be it linking to other appropriate websites, adding new content, changing the content on your website etc.

How long does SEO on hair salon websites take?

This is a tough question to answer only because it varies depending on the popularity of a search term. So a popular search term will take a very long time to rank well on the search engines with content alone. Fortunately in South Africa area based searches for hair salons are very rare so you should rank well very quickly. Keep in mind that you shouldn’t expect to see any results in the first 3 months that your website start the SEO process. It takes this long before search engines like google consider your website to be staying on the internet to warrant that it comes to index your pages and content.

Conclusion

It takes one new client a month to cover the costs of an SEO campign for hair salons. You then have a business on the internet from which you may make other income overtime. My company All Programming is a specialist software development company in the hair salon and boutique markets. We create hair salons websites, develop hair salon point of sale systems and overall we are professionals in the hair salon software development space. Our top client is Palladium Hair Company. Easily a  top 10 in the country hair salon in style and income.