Top of the Heap: Crawling Your Way Up Google Spa Search Results
July 14th, 2008 • Posted by Spa Kat • Permalink
You've built a Dynamic Website for your spa. It is live and you want spa goers to find your website and buy lots of gift certificates for your spa. What's next? Optimize your site baby–it's called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The big engine is Google and they pretty much rule when it comes to searches. The good news is that even a small spa can win in this game, but you've got to play smart.
Ask yourself, are you in this to win? All right then, take a healthy shot of ego and jump in…
Keywords are well, key to the search.
What will a person logically enter when they are looking out there for your spa? (Let's just toss out of the equation the 5% of the population that is positively nuts when it comes to formulating logical searches.) Imagine a customer at home or work, sitting down at their computer. They plan to search the web for the perfect spa experience. Let's say they live in Austin and want to try something new. What do you think they are going to enter as their search in the Google search box? Austin, day spa.
To help improve the ranking for a spa in Austin, a website will want to have "Austin" and "day spa" written naturally in the content on the home page. Maybe something like, "Rejuvenation day spa in Austin is located in the heart of…" You get the point. Don't go overboard, Google is sensitive and it doesn't want you to throw keywords in its search engine face so 2-3 times should suffice. Make it natural!
Now take your keyword strategy a step further. If you have a specialty or focus at your spa add those as keywords to make sure target customers find you. You might not be able to rank at the top of the list for "Austin day spa" but perhaps for "Austin Reiki" or "Austin Reflexology." Someone interested in a specific treatment or bodywork may be adding those specific terms to his or her search.
Tag you're it.
Each website page has a title tag, which is where the text in the top line of the Web browser comes from. The title tag for this page is "Online marketing for spas, salons and massage therapists — SpaBoom Blog — …" The title tag is also used by many search engines as the title of search listings, and it is what a customer sees when they look at the search results for your spa. Make sure the title (and and description tags) include your city or geographic identifier and are clear, logical and describe your spa.
Popularity counts so get linked.
Super popular spas know they want to be on the first page of search results for their specific keywords, because most searchers consider the top search results most relevant. It bites not to be popular enough for the first page so make sure your SEO campaign focuses on establishing relevant website links to your website.
Imagine that a spa owner sends out a press release to the Austin Chamber of Commerce about their business, Rejuvenation spa. The Chamber of Commerce takes the information, adds Rejuvenation spa to their official website and then creates a link to the spa's website. Score, Rejuvenation Spa has just added an inbound link and it is relevant. To Google, that is important because it says that your site is important and relevant enough for another site to reference it. So get out there and make friends. It might be time to bake some cookies and initiate a campaign to get noticed online.
Blog on and on and on…
Make Mom proud and blog about your spa. Make sure it is relevant; you don't want customers to feel like they know you too well when they read your blog so keep it spa/business specific. If your spa is committed to a non-profit cause, talk about it on your blog. If you are bringing in a new piece of equipment that will take 10 years off a client's face, talk about it.
Building a reputation as a spa knowledge leader in your community will bring financial rewards to your spa and give Mom naches.
Posted in Spa Search Engine Optimization (SEO), General • Share • Trackback
July 14th, 2008 at 5:54 pm
Anyway to automate the linking process between SpaBoomers already? Not sure if it would help or hurt by linking in with other local spas that use SpaBoom in the same area. Any thoughts?
July 14th, 2008 at 5:56 pm
Here's our blog… The Diary of Sènsé Nail Spa. Email me if you want to trade links =]
July 15th, 2008 at 10:40 am
I couldn't agree more. It's a long process, but it pays. Work at it a little every day. Just a tiny bit gets you a long way. Now if you Google Fort Lauderdale Massage (which is what we do most of), we rank #1 on Google Local and #3 in the "organic" results. Google Fort Lauderdale Spa or Broward Massage and we still hit on the third page.
July 17th, 2008 at 11:36 am
I'm glad link trading is being discussed. None of you will be surprised that I have a strong opinion. Here it is: DO NOT TRADE LINKS!
Here's why…
Each web page is ranked for importance (and relevance). If a highly ranked and relevant site links to you, your site's page rank goes up. That's because the search engines figure that if a highly ranked site references another site the content on the referenced site must be valuable or the highly ranked site would not point to it. The concept, BTW, comes from academic papers. The more a paper gets cite by other papers the more important it must be. If you want to see one, check this out. Boring!
So think of page rank as currency. You have X page rank currency to give to each outbound link. If you only link out, you deplete your currency. Each good inbound link ups your rank a bit. The best a link exchange can get you is a wash (unless you exchange with CNN). However, if you are clearly participating in a link trading operation the major search engines will punish you. The best approach is to have great content (that people will link to) and request inbound links from local directories and spa/salon centric sites. If you have an SEO or web "guy" telling you different, get a new one.
July 24th, 2008 at 7:05 pm
Hi,
Does anyone have any good referrals to a SEO company or person?
Sean