A Barbers’ Guide to SEO Best Practices:
Some SEO Basics Every Barber Should Know
A while back, we published our SEO for Barber Pros: 101 Guide on the blog. That intro was designed to help you dip your feet into the world of search engine optimization, and hopefully (if you read it) you feel a little more well-versed in it now.
With that background acting as your firm foundation of knowledge, we wanted to give you something more to help you really take your SEO skills for your barbering biz to the next level.
That’s why we’re presenting you this short-and-sweet best practices guide. It’s our hope that this guide will offer the insight necessary to take your digital marketing strategy from SEO barbering basic to SEO barbering badass.
Our advice? If it’s been a minute since you brushed up on the foundation of SEO, take a moment to read back through that 101 guide to get familiar again.
Once you do, you’ll be more prepared than ever to take on this best practices guide.
Learn SEO Basics
Obviously, it’s impossible to build a dominant SEO strategy if you’re not familiar with what SEO is—so, like we suggested, go back to the basics. But by this, we don’t just mean learn the definition. We want you to have a broader, more applicable understanding of what SEO is, why SEO matters, and how SEO works in your favor when you do it correctly.
Our best advice is to research as much as you can about the process itself—try to get a feel for how search engines work and understand why they’re looking for what they’re looking for. What do search engines consider best practices, anyway (don’t worry, this blog is going to address that).
Further, try to broaden your perspective of SEO. Realize that it applies to all of your digital assets—AKA, your website, your blog linked through your website, your social media, etc. 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. Once you accept and understand that, your SEO strategy knows no bounds or restrictions.
Plan, Plan, Plan
Forget what anyone ever told you—SEO isn’t just about keyword planning. Don’t get us wrong, it’s still an enormously important part of the process, but your “planning work” should entail much more than just figuring out a bomb keyword list.
Nowadays, 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.
This includes aspects like:
- 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
All in all, it can seem like a long freakin’ list, but if you want to dominate SEO in the barbering world, it’s one you’ll have to tackle.
Create a Comprehensive (and Ever-Evolving) Keyword List
We’re not being fickle! We know we literally just said that SEO planning is about more than keyword lists, but like, it is still about keyword lists. Think about keyword lists as the core of your SEO strategy—these words will pepper your site, your blogs, your social posts, and every aspect of your digital media trail.
All we’re trying to convey is that a keyword list—on its own—isn’t the only planning you need to make time for.
Ultimately, you should review your list of target keywords and goal keywords every single month—AKA, make this a regular part of your marketing plan in order to stay on top of industry trends.
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 the Reg
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 a site that a user is ACTUALLY going to want to read. That’s why creating your own high-quality content as regularly and routinely as possible is so important.
Ultimately, amazing content filling your website will do a number of advantageous things. First of all, search engines will be more likely to send people your way (arguably the biggest advantage), but you’ll also notice an improved bounce rate on your page, AKA, people are going to want to actually spend time on your barbering site instead of just bouncing TF off right when they click onto it.
When it comes to high-quality content, you should focus on things like:
- Producing content people want to read that isn’t STUFFED with keywords (that’s bad in the SEO world)
- Writing long-form content (AKA, 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
Link Build
Yep, link building is a legit thing you need to plan for when it comes to SEO. Sure, you’ll want to include internal links (a nice, network of internal links in your blog content can guide readers to other parts of your site—like this one here, for example), but you also want to focus on external links.
Believe it or not, search engines actually rank your website based on your site’s ability to attract external links.
This type of link-building (AKA, linking to external sources or having external sources link back to your site) is definitely not easy, but it’s so worth it! Team up with other brands that also need external link building, organically build external links by producing high-quality content other sites will want to share and link to or come up with your own strategy.
We highly suggest you take a little time every week (or few days) to push this part of your SEO strategy forward.
Measure & Track Your Metrics
If you’re not tracking your progress, your work could all be for naught. Seriously! That might sound harsh, but without a way to measure your success, you’ll never know what’s working and what isn’t.
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—ultimately, this should 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.
Do a FULL Digital Asset Audit
With all of this in mind, do a comprehensive digital audit of all of your digital assets.
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—surprise!—monthly.
It might seem like the SEO work never ends, and to be totally honest, it doesn’t. But, it will get more intuitive and it will get easier. It might not ever turn out to be your favorite thing, but it will eventually 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?
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