Phorest TV

How Can People Find My Salon On Google? – Salon Marketing Q&A #7

9 min

How Can People Find My Salon On Google? – Salon Marketing Q&A #7

On this episode of The Salon Marketing Q&A, we look at ensuring that your audience finds your salon on Google.

The Salon Marketing Q&A – How Can People Find My Salon On Google Transcript

Welcome to the Salon Marketing Q and A. My name is Chris Brennan, and this is a show where every single week you ask the questions, and we answer them on Facebook Live. So, if you caught up with any of these episodes before, you’ll know that when people ask us questions, particularly about salon marketing, we’ll answer you with a live video, which then you can catch on our Facebook page afterwards. So, if you can’t literally sit in live and catch every single minute of this, you can catch up later on our Facebook page. And I also upload every single episode to a playlist on YouTube.

So, that’s usually the protocol of how we do things. Today is Halloween. I am dressed in a suit as the marketing team at Phorest went as Madmen, the 60’s TV show. So, one notable exception to this is my sideburns are gone, I don’t have a beard, so I’m kind of looking like a toddler at the moment and I’m kind of freaking myself out looking at that. But, let’s get started shall we?

So, I usually like to kick off being giving you guys a couple of ideas on what we’ve been doing over the past week. And, we have set up a brand new webinar for Valerie Delforge to deliver, it’s part of her management series. So, this next one that’s coming up is on Monday the 6th and it’s called Structure is Key, Time and Operational Management Master Class. So, we gotten tremendous feedback for the last webinar, last masterclass she did so, these are once off, only one showing, one audience participation masterclasses so we won’t be doing another one. So, if you’re free on Monday the 6th, at that time please, please try to show up and you’re going to get a lot of information that’ll help you with time and management operations.

We’ll be dropping a link into the comments box so that you can actually sign up yourself, it’s free and it’ll take about an hour. What I’ll be doing this week is, I found that every single month Zoe, from our marketing blog, our Phorest blog, she writes these amazing monthly marketing articles. And, inside those contain toolkits with just an absurd amount of positive, amazing material for you guys to use. So, that’ll be email templates, email subject lines, SMS templates, social media graphics, some ideas that you guys can really use that particular month.

So, I thought it would be really cool to actually package all of those together and create a unique giveaway. We’re talking about, it’s the year full of salon marketing toolkits. So, I’ll be putting that together this week and I’ll let you guys know when it’s available. So, that’s a really cool thing that I’ll be doing for the rest of the week. Now, let’s get started with today’s question. So, our question comes from Erin of the Envy Bar and she asks, when people look on Google for a salon, how do I get my business to show up?

That is a fantastic question and in fact, it’s an area that we dd cover quite a bit in our online reputation masterclass. We don’t usually do that masterclass anymore but we do have a recorded version of it, when we did, and I’ll drop that link in. So, that’s about an hour or so of a webinar dedicated to getting your business found online and you’ll be able to control the conversation people are having about your business online. So, that’s fantastic, but I’ll give you guys the answer today on Facebook Live.

So, if you are looking to get your business to show up online when people are searching for salons or maybe even searching for yourself, what we’re really talking about is, fundamentally, if somebody is using Google and they’re looking for a salon, how does your business show up? There’s other search engines, but usually if you want to be able to master Google, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today. Facebook is a really good place to show up when people type in hair salon, beauty salon and Yelp as well, is fantastic.

But, if you want to cut to the chase, the king of this search is Google so let’s make sure that you show up when people are typing in their needs. And, in order to do that, what we’re going to need for you is to ensure that you have a Google My Business listing. So, we want to make sure that your business is listed on Google, officially. So, one thing you do for that is, if you find that your business actually isn’t available on Google, this is the first step you have to do. You have to register your business on Google.

I highlighted this before in a previous episode, about day one marketing, so I’ll just briefly recap this part on it’s own. Realistically, what you’re going to be doing, is you’re going to be setting up your business listing. So, that would include your name, your logo, your address, your phone number, your opening hours as well. If you’re going to put photos, make sure they’re really nice photos because, when we were researching for the Online Reputation masterclass, I found that there’s a lot of businesses out there that really… they had photos available but they were of low quality and it didn’t really do the salon and their business justice.

So, what you could do is hire a professional to take photographs, or if you know anybody with a really nice camera, have them come in and take photos for you. Because, a picture says a thousand words kind of thing, really rings true, especially when people are in the their consideration phase, when they’re looking for a salon. Your business comes up, they want all this information, because we have to think about what we look for when we’re Googling something, when we’re searching for something.

So, fundamentally, if we’re looking for a business, we want you to provide this information for us and the information is, where you’re location is. Because, if I’m physically going to your place, I need to know how to get there and on Google I should be able to find it. You also want to check the prices, you have to be quite transparent about this kind of business. So, it’s important that they have your prices there because that’s a consideration phase as well. Take a peek at your salon menu so that they can see the options. Look, at the photos, as I’ve highlighted because it’s very important to let them imagine what it’d be like if they actually booked an appointment with you.

And, also, see what other people think about you because that’s the reviews that are left on Google. This is really important because, studies have found that, nine out of ten people actually Google a business after that business was referred to them by a friend, family member or peer. That’s crazy, nearly everybody, after they’ve been recommended something, still go and Google to check them out.

So, we want to make sure that you are on Google, we want to make sure that you’re available, that all the relevant information is there. Because, before even getting to book an important, we’d love to see your opening hours, maybe I’m finishing work late, we finish at six p.m so, it’d be great to know if I could actually go in at seven p.m. So, if you have your opening hours there, that already answers a question that I might have so I’d be quicker to book an appointment. If I don’t have that answer, the problem is, Google will share competitors around as well, so, I can’t get that answer about you, I might get that answer about somebody else. That’s how quick you can get replaced on Google in terms of what the audience is drawn to.

So, it’s really fundamentally important to have as much information about your business available, on the Google so you can be located when somebody is searching. The beautiful thing about the reviews are, that the more reviews you actually get, the higher Google will rank you, because if you get fantastic five star reviews, and you build a bank of those, that’s people telling the search engine that there’s value in this business. So, if other people are searching too, please, highlight this business.

So, what you want to do, is you want to get all your information on Google and then start a campaign where you actually drive people to leave a positive five star review for your business on Google. So, this is exactly how we do it. It works in two strands. Either, they’re looking for your business and when it comes up, they get all the information and they see these glowing five star reviews. Or, if they’re looking for, let’s say, beauty salon, Soho, for example, The more reviews you have, the higher you’ll rank on those keywords as well. Google will take that as value and they will rank you higher.

So, the reviews really are the key, the secret weapon to actually getting found on Google. So, that’s really important. How would you think, we are actually going to get these reviews? People won’t really go out of their way to leave a review unless we ask them to right? So, I think it’s important that right away, we start a campaign where we ask our clients to leave us reviews on Google. We can’t really ask every client because, potentially, there might be some people that aren’t exactly satisfied, or they haven’t been wowed enough to leave a five star review.

So, what we want to do, is we want to target top clients. If you have another software besides Phorest, there is probably ways you can create reports and find out who your best clients are, I’m not sure, you’d have to contact your software provider. If you’re pen and paper you might have to do this yourself manually, but understanding who, specifically, would be your top clients.

But, the beautiful thing about Phorest is, we actually wrap this into a feature that can automate this entire process for you. So, the plan that we actually built into the feature is something that could potentially be done manually, but it takes a bit of time and effort but still, the results do speak for themselves. So, what you want to do, is if somebody leaves you a positive review when you ask them for it through your Phorest system, when they get an SMS or email and they give you four out of five or five out of five. If they’ve done that a couple of times, that’s them telling you that they love what you do.

So, with the Phorest feature, it’ll automatically send them a request to leave that review on Google. So, that’s exactly how you do it. You target the right people, the top clients, the people that love you the most and you ask them to leave their opinion of you on the biggest search engine in the world. So, we’ve launched this feature about a year or two ago… not a year or two, the beginning of this year and so far the people who have availed of this feature, have just seen their Google reviews skyrocket. It just totally works.

So, if you’re not a Phorest family member you would have the availability to this service, then potentially you could do this manually. The way you’d want to do it would be to get that list of top clients, that’s the key, the create an email and this email should be respectfully requesting that they share their opinion of you to Google so that other people might be able to avail of the wonderful service that they received. So, you can actually create a link to the Google review right there in the email and that’s what you’re driving them to click, that’s the call to action.

Now, you can do this as just a request, but some salons like to incentivize these top clients by either offering them loyalty points, like Tree Card points. Or, they have a raffle so if you leave your great review or you leave your review, you might be up for a chance to win “insert prize here”. So, that’s a really cool thing, a really innovative way to incentivize your top clients to actually take the time to leave that review.

So, that’s how you do it, that’s kind of, getting found online, in a nutshell. It’s all about Google in this episode, if you want to have a couple of quick jumps, to get found online as well, would be to start creating Facebook boosted posts and some paid campaigns on Facebook. So, that you can actually target your audience, a specific target audience that you build, that is tailored for our area. So, this is people in and around your area that you’re targeting to let them know that you exist. So, that’s another way to be found online.

So, that should be about it, I think that’s a lot for you guys to pack in this week. Again, we will drop the Online Reputation masterclass recording, into the comments box so you can check it out yourself. And, hopefully, we can get the salon reviews rolling in so you can start ranking higher on Google. So, the next time somebody searches for your business, they’re going to get a real engaged, informed, valuable opinion of what people think about you. And, they’re also going to get all the information they require so that they can make a decision about you.

As well as that, we’re actually going to, with these reviews, be able to rank you higher when somebody types in a keyword like hair salon or beauty salon. Or, what happens a lot of times is, find a salon in my area? Enter, Google has been developed in a way that they can actually start tracking real, calculated conversational questions. So, we want to make sure you rank higher with that. If you really want to blast out and get really high up in Google and you want to pay for that, then I’d recommend that you hire a company that really handles ad words and PPC and SEO.

So, that would be the next level of this, but today’s episode is how can you do that. So, if you really wanted to kick it off to another level, then you’d probably want to hire a company to rank higher on Google. Lots of companies do it and you can talk to them about pricing, all that stuff. That wouldn’t be for to tell you about. But, yeah, that would be another way, except that is a paid plan and it’s a bigger strategy. So, today’s episode was more about how you can do it yourself but if you wanted to kick it off and get really big and that would be part of your overall main marketing strategy, then I’d recommend you’d hire professionals who can look into your search engine optimization.

Okay guys, I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s episode, we will be back next week, if you have any questions you’d like us to cover on the Salon Marketing Q and A, please let us know in the comments box. Or, you can email us at letsgrow@phorest.com. My name’s Chris Brennan and I’ll see you next week. Let’s grow.

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