Creating an Effective Website For Your Hair Salon

There are a number of things to consider when creating a website for a hair salon each with vital importance as the website will often be the first chance to impress potential customers.

Choosing Your Domain Name

Be sure to choose a domain name that is short, easy to remember and relevant. You may also want to consider choosing a domain with as many keywords as possible in order to improve the chance of ranking high on results pages for key search terms.

Website Appearance

Your website should align with your brand in order to create a professional image. If your shop is clean and white then your website should be too. Likewise if your shop interior was black and stylish then so should your site.

Features and Content

There isn't anything too advanced that you should include on your website for your hair salon. Visitors may expect to see a photo gallery of images of the salon and will also expect a contact form to submit an enquiry or request an appointment. You should include other key contact information including phone number, address and email address.

Potential customers who are researching you will want to know your price list and wether you do any special offers so make sure this information is included. If you sell any specialist products be sure to include information about these too.

Share and Connect

As more and more people are using social media you may want to allow your customers to interact with your social media presence via your website. Facebook would be the key social media platform to use given the typical target demographic so a Facebook group or page would be ideal. It is important to give your website visitors some incentive to interact with the social media presence in order for them to take action. Rather than having a link with the text "join us on Facebook" you should consider a more appealing tag such as "join us on Facebook for unique special offers".

Optimise for Search Engines

Once you have finished your website you will need to make it visible to potential customers when they use search engines to research local salons. Consider key phrases you expect potential customers to search for when searching for local salons and try to include these phrases in your page title, heading tags and image ALT tags. For example, if you where a salon based in Liverpool your most likely search terms would be "Liverpool Hair Salon" or "Liverpool Hairdressers".

Try to get as many backlinks as you can for these search terms from high-ranking websites. The more backlinks you have and the higher the page rank of those sites the more search engines are going to trust your website and therefore rank you higher when people search for your keywords.

Pay-Per-Click

Pay-per-click (PPC) is an excellent way to instantly drive relevant traffic to your website. PPC campaigns can be setup within minutes and have an excellent management facility to allow you to manage your daily spend, ad text and description as well as the hours your ad appears. Google AdWords is probably the most popular form of PPC advertising. Ads are usually displayed on the top and right hand side of search engine result pages. As different keywords are more competitive than others different keywords have a different cost-per-click which is the fee you are charged when a user clicks the ad to visit your website. The more keywords in your ad and the higher you bid per click the higher up the sponsored ads region your advertisement will appear.

Advice provided by Nick Hatton who has experience of using these methods for Cavern Hair Boutique which is a Liverpool Hair Salon