Key Takeaways: This short-and-sweet guide to the best SEO practices for barbers will help you unlock the full potential of your digital marketing strategy, reach new members of your target audience, and take your barbering business to the next level.
The SEO Basics Every Barber Should Know
At NAOB, our main goal is to provide you with the need-to-know info that’s going to take your barbering business to the next level—that’s why we’re often talking about industry trends, marketing strategy, social media building, and other powerful tools that you can use to grow your career.
At the heart of digital marketing and connecting with your dream audience is a little something called search engine optimization (SEO). A while back, we published an intro to SEO that was designed to help you dip your feet into the world of search engine optimization and make you feel a little more well-versed in it.
We recommend checking out that blog to develop a firm foundation of SEO knowledge, then using this guide to truly refine your SEO skills and apply them in practical ways to your barber business.
SEO Tips for Barbers So They Can Show Up For Clients Online
Learn SEO Basics
It’s practically impossible to build a dominant SEO strategy if you’re not familiar with what SEO is. Going back to the basics and expanding your understanding of what SEO is, why SEO matters, and how SEO works in your favor when you do it correctly can be the framework on which you build your effective new strategy.
Research as much as you can about the SEO process. Along the way, try to get a feel for how search engines work and understand not only what they’re looking for, but also why they’re looking for it.
From there, you can broaden your perspective of SEO. Realizing that SEO applies to all of your digital assets – your website, your blog linked through your website, your social media, and more – is essential to approaching SEO in a comprehensive and holistic manner.
Your comprehensive digital footprint can make an enormous difference in your SEO strategy, but first, you have to understand what all of that entails.
Lastly, one of the most crucial and foundational concepts of SEO is this – it’s constantly changing. It’s important to realize that SEO knowledge, skills, and strategy will never be static. In order to be successful with SEO, you must be active, engaged, and willing to adapt.
Plan, Plan, Plan
SEO isn’t just about keyword planning. Don’t get us wrong, keyword planning is still an enormously important part of the process, but your “planning work” should include much more than just putting together a fantastic keyword list.
A comprehensive SEO strategy touches all aspects of your digital footprint, so you need to plan for all of the elements (even the tiny ones!) that should be present on each and every page. If you’re unsure of what all of those elements are, don’t worry; we have you covered.
- Page Titles
- Meta Descriptions
- H1 Tags
- Alt Text Images
- Body Content
- Links (internal and backlinks—more on this later)
- Keywords (short-tail, long-tail, and branded)
- Market research on your target audience
- Research about your competitors and their SEO strategies
That may seem like a long, somewhat intimidating list, but if you want to dominate SEO in the barbering world, it’s one you’ll have to tackle. Thankfully, it’s not as overwhelming as it might seem, especially when you become familiar with what each term means and what purpose it serves.
Create a Comprehensive (and Ever-Evolving) Keyword List
SEO planning is about more than keyword lists, but keyword lists are still important – really important.
Think about keyword lists as the core of your SEO strategy – these words will be present on your site, your blogs, your social posts, and every aspect of your digital media trail. Why are keywords so essential to your SEO strategy? We’re glad you asked.
SEO keywords are the link between what your target audience is searching for and your content. In other words, they are the indicator to search engines that your content fits certain criteria, thus making that search engine more likely to direct people to your website.
Because of this, you need to consider the people you are trying to attract, what search terms they might be using, keep up with trending topics, and incorporate local keywords so people in your geographic location can find your business.
You should review your list of target keywords and goal keywords every single month. Making this a regular part of your marketing plan in order to stay on top of industry trends helps ensure that you are not missing out on valuable connections with potential customers.
Our advice? If this is overwhelming to you (and it’s OK if it is), use marketing software that helps you track keywords to see how they rank over time, what you should change, and what you’re missing out on.
Start Producing High-Quality Content on a Regular Basis
When a search engine suggests a site to a user, it’s typically because it can tell that there’s a ton of high-quality, readable, engaging, and relevant content on the site. In other words, the site is home to content that a user is ACTUALLY going to want to engage with and read.
Creating your own high-quality content as regularly and routinely as possible is incredibly important. Filling your website with amazing content will work wonders for a variety of reasons.
First and foremost, search engines will be more likely to send people your way (arguably the biggest advantage). Additionally, you’ll notice an improved bounce rate on your page, meaning that people are going to want to actually spend time on your barbering site instead of just leaving right after they click onto it.
When it comes to high-quality content, you should focus on things like:
- Producing content people want to read. Don’t STUFF your content with keywords (that’s bad in the SEO world, and search engines will punish you for it)
- Writing long-form content (something longer than a thousand words or so)
- Optimizing all the little-bitty details, like title tags, descriptions, page titles, and photos
- Spit out content REGULARLY—this is key, you need to stay relevant and consistent
- Internal linking keywords in your URLs
- Focusing on link building
Use a Reputable Platform and Optimize Your Speed
Your SEO efforts can fall flat even if you do everything perfectly. Why? Because your website is letting you down!
Websites that load slowly, have limited uptime, or otherwise lack optimization can cause search engines to reduce your rank. In situations where this is the case, all of your hard work with SEO can be for naught.
Thankfully, there are tools you can use to check your website load speeds and steps you can take to improve these important factors. Ensuring that your website is being hosted by a reputable platform and isn’t suffering from poor load speeds could completely revolutionize your SEO rank.
Link Build
A nice network of internal links in your blog content can guide readers to other parts of your site (like this, for example), and you should focus on building yours to maximally benefit from your content. However, creating an external link network is potentially even more important.
"It's practically impossible to build a dominant SEO strategy if you're not familiar with SEO – going back to the basics works in your favor so you can set up the right framework."
Believe it or not, search engines rank your website based on your site’s ability to attract external links. This type of link-building (linking to external sources or having external sources link back to your site) is not easy, but it’s worth the time and effort it takes to build a strong network of external links.
Team up with other brands that also need external link building, organically build external links by producing high-quality content that other sites will want to share and link to, or come up with your own strategy that helps expand that all-important network.
We highly suggest you take a little time every week or so to push this part of your SEO strategy forward.
Measure and Track Your Metrics
If you’re not tracking your progress, your work could all be for naught. That might sound harsh, but without a way to measure your success, you’ll never know what’s working and what isn’t. This makes success hard to recognize and impossible to replicate.
We suggest finding a marketing tool that helps you track your individual pages on your site to see how they’re performing. Run an audit of these things every week or month to see what’s working and what isn’t.
This insight will help you better understand how traffic is being driven to your pages and if it’s helping you convert traffic into leads or leads into customers. You can use that information to refine your SEO approach, drop strategies that aren’t working, and lean into ideas that are leading to success.
Do a Full Digital Asset Audit
Equipped with practical SEO tips that you can use to transform your barbering business for the better, it’s time to do a comprehensive audit of all of your digital assets. Evaluate your digital assets by asking questions like:
- Where are you lacking?
- Where are you doing a good job?
- What could you change to meet your goals?
This type of audit should also be performed monthly to ensure you are remaining consistent and optimizing your assets. If it seems like SEO work never ends, you’re right. However, it will become more intuitive and it will get easier as you become more familiar and comfortable with the process.
Even if it never turns out to be your favorite thing, it will become an incredibly valuable tool for your business!
Love the SEO advice we offer? Looking for more barbering business tips to help you boost your career? The National Association of Barbers has all the information and resources you need to flourish.
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