Using Data To Find Niche Salon Services That People Want
As a marketing company, we use data to help us serve our clients. One of the areas that we specialise in is using Google search data to see what kinds of things people are really searching for, so that we can help our clients better serve those people.
Digging into search data can uncover all sorts of useful insights which you can use to help you grow your business. So for this post I thought I would look at what kind of things people are looking for around them. A popular search term these days is “<something> near me”.
Searcher Intent
Whenever somebody goes to a search engine and types something in, they are looking for something. Most of the time they are simply looking for information about a topic. Some for example, they might type in “summer hair trends for short hair” and clearly they are just looking for inspiration at this point. They aren’t necessarily ready to make a booking.
However when that person goes on to type in “hair salon near me”, that is known as a transactional keyword; in other words, they are looking to make a transaction from the result of that search. Incidentally that phrase is searched for on average 49,500 times a month! Hair is big business as I’m sure you already know!
Transactional keywords are valuable to target because the person typing them in is a step closer to the buying process. So in the case of hair they have done their research, they know what kind of cut / style / service they want and now they are just looking for a salon near them that can do it.
Niche services being searched for
Here are some hair related keywords that I found, in descending order of popularity
- hair braiding near me
- afro hair salon near me
- curly hair salon near me
- clip in hair extensions near me
- keratin hair treatment near me
- hair colourist near me
- hair toppers near me
- permanent hair straightening near me
- korean hair salon near me
- hair botox near me
- wedding hair and makeup near me
- hair tinsel near me
- balayage hair near me
- prom hair and makeup near me
There are thousands more keywords like this. By keeping on top of this kind of data so you can see what people are actually looking for.
How to target ‘Near me’ keywords
Years ago SEO was pretty simple, you’d just put your target keywords in prominent places on your web page and you were done. These days it’s not so straightforward as Google has become a lot more intelligent.
However, the good news is that for targeting these kinds of local searches, you really don’t have to worry about it all that much. There are many variations to the ‘near me’ keyword suffix such as ‘around me’, ‘nearby’, ‘close to me’ and so on and if you were to actually try and insert all these variations into your website copy it would end up being very spammy indeed.
Thankfully you don’t have to do any of that. Google is clever enough to figure out the searcher intent in these cases and it knows to look for businesses within the same immediate geo-location as the person doing the search.
As long as Google knows where your business is physically located (known as Local SEO), you don’t have to worry about it at all. Target the service part of the keywords but ignore the ‘near me’ part entirely.
How to do Local SEO?
This could be a whole blog post of it’s own and perhaps we’ll put out a post on the topic at some point but for now here are the highlights:
- Ensure you have a Google My Business profile for each physical location
- Do the same for Bing Places
- Add your business to prominent business database websites such as Crunchbase, Clutch, Foursquare etc
- Have a page on your website for each physical location
- Ensure that your business Name, Address and Phone number are consistent across all of these properties
The alternative of course is to use a marketing company who specialise in local seo and know exactly how to get your business ranking at the top of Google and the map results in your area.
With over salon 200 clients in the Hair & Beauty industry, Salon Guru are indeed experts in this area. We can help you define who your target audience is, research keywords to target for your salon, build the website for you, create content for your blog and social media on a regular basis and many other things to help your salon business grow.