5 Keys to Discoverability Every Beauty Salon Boss Should Know

Transcription

1 5 Keys to Discoverability Every Beauty Salon Boss Should Know

2 Your business It s ALL about the client! Not your treatments, services or products. There are three fundamental questions that you should to be able to answer. They are: 1. Who do you serve? 2. How will you serve them? 3. How will you reach them? This introduction to discoverability will give you some starters for 10 on how to answer question 1 and question 3 from an online marketing perspective. Question 2 well that s your department :- ) Key Discoverability Step 1 Searchable vs Discoverable Ok, so are you discoverable online? Have you ever checked? Do you know the difference between being searchable and discoverable? First, let s look at being Searchable... Being searchable is great for customers and clients who already know who you are. They already know your business, its name,

3 its services or products, its staff etc. They might have already used your salon, or they might have been recommended you. These people will either type in your business name or your name. When someone types in your business name or even your name into a search engine online what do they see? Do they find you? Are you showing up? What do they see? Okay, let s try this out then if you re up for it J Try it on google.co.uk and answer these questions 1. What are the exact words you are entering (business name etc.? 2. Does your website come up on first page of Google? 3. What other websites are listing your salon or you as an individual? 4. Are you happy with the words you see in the search engine? Do the words represent your business in a way you are happy with?

4 5. Does your competition show up also? If they do who? If you re not searchable then Houston, we have a problem. The great news is, with a bit of effort, you can become searchable in next to no time. We ll cover the basics in key step 4. But for now, let s push on and look at the most important part of your online presence. That s becoming Discoverable!

5 Ok, where were we? That s right, we were getting to the good stuff. Discoverability. What the heck is that? Well, it s art of aligning your online presence and advertising so that people find you when they are looking for answers to their questions and solutions to their problems. Online presence just means the channels on the internet that you show up on channels such as your website, Facebook, twitter, blog anywhere you are present. It is massively importantly that your online presence matches where your audience / clients / customers hang out. More on that later J Being discoverable means that people who do not know you, don t know your business name, your services, reputation etc. are able to discover you by entering search terms, keywords or sentences into a search engine. They have a problem and they are looking for a solution. They have a question and they are looking for an answer. To be discoverable you must be their solution, their answer. Try it type a sentence into Google and see if you come up. An example would be: I need a salon that does Billion Dollar Brows near me So where do you start? Good question. Start by knowing who your clients are. Sounds like common sense? So many businesses in the beauty industry have no idea who their ideal clients are. Do you?

6 Key Discoverability Step 2 Finding Your Ideal Clients Knowing who your IDEAL clients are is super important. Here s a big clue, your ideal clients aren t EVERYBODY! Some businesses are happy to do business with anybody and everybody, I m sure that isn t you but it s important to make the point here. Your clients and customers will most likely know what you do and how you do it. But your ideal clients are different. They understand your WHY Why you do what you do. Ideal clients are the ones who believe in what you believe. Understanding your why is a big but important task and one that we won t cover in this guide. If you haven t read Simon Sinek s Start With Why Read it! It s available from Amazon, Audible and there s a great video that gives important insights on YouTube: So, to recap, your ideal clients believe in what you believe and understand your why your business why!

7 These clients are worth the effort to attract. They re the ones who will, with great relationship building, become ambassadors for your salon, your services and your brand. Ok, let s break down this step into two sections. Section 1 The Ideal Client Avatar Use the Avatar sheet included in this guide. 1. Think of a customer or client that you believe is an ideal client. If you don t have a person in mind imagine who that person might be. This process will need your imagination!!! 2. Write down their name. 3. Now write down the answers to the following questions about them. If you don t know the factual answer, guess! a. How old are they? b. Male or Female? c. Where do they live? d. Marital status? e. Do they have a family? Kids? f. Level of education? g. What do they do for a living?

8 h. What s their job title? i. How much do they earn? j. Happy in their job? k. What are their interests? l. What are their challenges? m. What are their concerns or pain points? n. What are their goals? o. What are their values? p. What books and magazines do they read? q. Do they go to conferences? Which ones? r. Who are their gurus? Voices of value? s. Do you think they have any barriers to using your salon? t. Where do they hang out on the internet? (Social channels, websites, blogs etc. Repeat this process and get 10 avatars if you can.

9 Section 2 The Before and After Grid Right, so now you should have at least one avatar! Now we need to look at what they look like before they use your salon and what transformation takes place after they have used your services. The old saying People buy from people is true but it s only a small part of the purchase decision. People are buying a TRANSFORMATION. They want a solution to their problem. An answer to their question. A transformation from the person they are to the person they want to be. The Before and After Grid Example Blank Grid included in the workbook. The Baby Bath Product Example BEFORE AFTER HAVE Cold, hard bath Warm, soft bath FEEL AVERAGE DAY Scared, worried, frustrated Bathing the baby is terrible Confident, in control Bath time is enjoyable and easy STATUS Unappreciated Super mum

10 Use the before and grid to get to grips with how you are transforming the life of your clients. You get the idea. Now that you have the avatars make sure that you have set up a channel in the online areas that your ideal clients hang out.

11 Key Discoverability Step 3 Intro To Mastering Keywords The days of using a big list of single words at the bottom of your website are gone. In fact, people who do this and some people and SEO experts still do will find that the search engines, particularly Google will now penalise your site and either rank it poorly or disregard entirely. Keywords are still important but they are no longer useful on their own. Google and other search engines want their users the searchers to find their search results to be useful and RELEVANT. Keywords are now expected to be in sentences. Readable, relevant and useful sentences. Very few searches are done using a single keyword these days. People are typing in a search sentence and the search engines want to return results that mirror what the searcher is looking for. Relevancy is very, very important. Your website has to be relevant to searchers. Everybody is trying to rank for single keywords. There is a lot of competition for those words. For example, if you type in the word Manicure into Google, you get about 793,000,000 search results.

12 Trying to be ranked and compete to be top of the page for Manicure would be pretty much impossible and very, very expensive in terms of time and effort. If you were advertising online, getting an advert seen using this keyword would be financially impractical. If you type in Looking for a Manicure near me you get significantly lower search results. Although it will still be a lot of results, you can see how putting keywords into sentences makes it easier for you to rank. There s less competition. And keyword phrases like that are cheaper to rank for and advertise for. However, there s no point trying to rank for words that no- one is looking for. So you have to do your research to find out what words to use. Phrases (readable and relevant) with a string keywords are called Longtail Keywords.

13 Keyword Research There are lots of ways for you to research keywords. You need to make a start though have a list of keywords that you believe represent your business and what it does, how it does it and why it does it. These are single words or sentences that you know from your own knowledge are likely to be the words that people use when trying to DISCOVER you! Use the Avatar sheet and the Before and After grid. That s why you completed them! There will be lots of useful and relevant words on those sheets. Go ahead make a start

14 Now you can enter some or all of these words into tools like: Google Autosuggest (Search Autocomplete) Storybase - SEM Rush Longtail Pro KW Finder - Answer the Public - Your goal is to find the keywords and phrases that have low competitive difficultly and a reasonable search volume result. Now that you have made a start and got a great list of relevant keywords, use you can use them to write your content, write your headlines and headings, create adverts and descriptions etc. By doing this you ll be answering the questions your target audience and ideal clients are asking. Negative Keywords It is super important to have a list of keywords and phrases that you DO NOT want to show up for. This becomes even more important when advertising online. Negative keywords can be found by doing your research thoroughly, by your own knowledge or by running adverts and seeing what search terms you show up for. A good list will have words/ phrases in it.

15 Key Discoverabilty Step 4 Letting Search Engines Know You Are There Let s go back to search-ability. Before you can become truly discoverable, you must be searchable. This step is really all about your website. Places like Facebook deal with search engines directly. That s why it s important to ensure that you optimise your presence on external sites as well as the ones you own. If the search engines don t know your website is there then they won t begin to rank you or treat them as a place of value in their results. For this guide, we ll just look at Google. Basic Checklist The following list are the basic things that you will need to complete. If this all seems to technical, no problem, all this is part of the packages we offer J 1. Google Webmaster Tools (Search Console) Register the site

16 2. Google Analytics Register the site with Analytics and put the tracking code into the website 3. Google Index Ask google via their online form to index the website 4. Robots.txt Make sure you are letting the search engine bots search pages that you want found and disregarding the one you don t 5. Metadata If you re using Wordpress then plugin like Yoast will help you complete the metadata needed on each page. 6. Backlinks use a backlink checker to check for toxic backlinks i.e. third party websites that are linking to your site that are not relevant to the beauty industry or your potential clients 7. Load Speed use a checker like Pingdom to check how quickly your site is loading 8. Google Business / Places register your business on Google My Business

17 Key Discoverability Step 5 Search Marketing for Salons A Brief Introduction Knowing Your Audience We ve covered that already a huge part of successful Search Marketing, as with all other types of marketing, is understanding who you are serving. Successful search marketing results depend on solid audience research. Search Engine Optimisation - SEO Be careful out there there are a lot of so called SEO experts. The way that search engines rank pages has become very complex and every now and then, they change the way they do it. This means that you have to keep on your toes with optimisation and constantly monitor your ranking and look out for potential problems. Using black- hat SEO methods just doesn t work these days. They have the opposite effect. What really matters now is indepth and comprehensive coverage of a topic. You have to become the answer to your client s questions.

18 To rank well for a search query, you really need to answer all aspects of a query, covering all sorts of related queries as well. Basically, you need to be the best resource to answer that query. Google uses a technique called latent semantic indexing to discover what a page is about from its contents. Google can then display results, even if the search query doesn t match exactly the keywords used, because Google knows what the page is about, not just the keywords used. So you see, the search engines are matching the current trend. People don t want to be bombarded with noise anymore, they re sick of it! They want answers. But more importantly they want those answers in a readable or (and this is the biggie) VIEWABLE format. Oh, and they want the answer immediately. Consider humans first. Never go SEO crazy and start creating content only a search spider could stomach. Always consider user experience. It s all about conversation. You won't see results from SEO overnight. In fact, the changes you make today could take months to pay dividends. SEO is a long- term strategy. SEO isn't reliable. Google is always tweaking its algorithm and your search traffic will go up and down as competition ebbs and flows in your niche.

19 Examples of SEO techniques: Longtail Keywords Keywords Metadata Readability URL structure Search Console Sitemap Robots.txt Backlinking Page speed Title Tag Headings Tag Image Optimisation Image tag Decrease bounce rate The list goes on! Pay Per Click Advertising - PPC As part of an overall strategy to be searchable and discoverable, PPC definitely plays its part. Those who spend the most wins This is true in online advertising as most of the advertising channels use a bidding system to decide whether to show your ad or not.

20 However, having optimised, relevant adverts that lead to compelling landing pages will score you highly. You ll spend less on ads and be shown more often. We call this Ad Scent. So, it s not all about the money! Two main platforms for advertising are Google Adwords and Facebook Ads. This subject is another workshop entirely! Readability and Content Ok, so, readability is really, really important for your content and copy. Not just online but offline too! The Felsch score is a great tool for grading how easy it is to read your copy and webpages. Use a site like readable.io to help you score your content or a plugin like Yoast if you are using WordPress. The scoring chart looks like this: Score School Level Notes Primary Very easy to read. Easily understood by an average 11- year-old student.

21 Primary + Easy to read. Conversational English for consumers Primary - Secondary Fairly easy to read Secondary Plain English. Easily understood by 13- to 15-year-old students Secondary to University Fairly difficult to read University Difficult to read University Graduate Very difficult to read. Best understood by university graduates. Google LOVES easy to ready text!! Brand Journalism This area of search marketing is dedicated to getting your business found by a wider audience outside of the local area in which you work. It involves writing PR articles that are NEWSWORTHY and submitting them to channels around the world that are recognised by the search engines as sites of authority. An example of an authority site is BBC News (online). The power of brand journalism, when done correctly, to get you found quickly and usually on page one of search results is massive.

22 It works by giving news rich content to readers in the UK and around the world tick! It gives citations (your name, address, business name, url and telephone number to multiple authority sites tick! Those urls in the copy links back to your site are backlinks and because the PR is submitted to authority sites they are not treated by the search engines as toxic links that are not relevant to the reader! Brand Monitoring Savvy businesses now dedicate time to listening out for mentions of their business online. It is very important to answer reviews, good or bad. Be involved in discussions around your brand wherever those discussions are taking place. Google Reviews Get loads of them simple! The more reviews you have the better the rank from Google in search. Social Media Social media, love it or hate it, plays an important role in search marketing.

23 Your presence on the social media channels will connect you with potential, new and existing clients. But only if they hang out there! Social media is a great platform for advertising, getting free referrals, building client relations and receiving and sending messages. What s not to like? Local Pack If you are a local business serving local people then it absolutely has to be your goal to get into the top 3 on Google s page one of search results. There s a lot to this and we can tell you all about it when we work together J Position Tracking Everybody wants to be on page one of the search results. Very few searchers will go beyond 3 pages of results to find what they need. When you have a list of the top 100 keywords or phrases that you absolutely want to rank for, you can use online tools such as SEMRush to monitor where you are placed in the search results (SERP). With work and effort, you should be on page 1.

24 Video Lastly, on this brief tour, we want to talk about the power of video. The world has changed in terms of information consumption. People love video! Especially the younger generation but recent stats show that people of all ages are more likely to engage with pages and channels that have video on it. But it has to be good video. Engaging, compelling, interesting etc. A webpage with video will outperform a page with too much text (a bit like this guide lol)! Thank you for reading this guide any questions? Fire away! team@thesearchmarketers.co.uk

25 Super Duper Help AVATAR

26 BEFORE AND AFTER

27 SOME USEFUL DIGITAL MARKETING RESOURCES 1. Reviewing the latest developments in the beauty industry There still isn t a better alternative than Google Alerts for reviewing mentions of your brand name, competitor or sector names by entering keywords, so it s widely used. We recommend Feedly since it's the most popular so you can see by the 'voice of the crowd' which posts are most popular. 2. Managing social media updates We ve used Hootsuite for posting updates to social networks and reviewing what others are saying for years. 3. Understanding customer search behaviour We use SEMRush for all our research. Google Insights for search has now been folded into Google Trends - great for understanding seasonal search behaviour trends in different countries. 4. Competitor site benchmarking SEM Rush is a great tool but you have to pay for it! A cheaper, but great alternative tool for benchmarking is Similar Web 5. Off- page backlink analysis for SEO SEMRush, Majestic and Moz Open Site Explorer are the must use tools.

28 Contact Details: The Search Marketing Consultancy