Online marketing and website design for tanning salons and other local businesses?
Click Here to Contact A Member of Our Sales Team
Many small businesses have yet to realize the potential business that they are losing by not having a web presence. When it comes to finding a new business, majority of today’s consumers rely on the internet as their main source of information. Lacking a presence all-together will cause you to lose potential customers to your competitors. Having an unprofessional website will have them same effect as consumers now expect to see high-quality websites. In highly competitive markets such as tanning where there may be upwards of 20 different salons in a city, it is very important that your site not only exist, but also show up in the search results. You can have a beautifully designed site, but if nobody ever finds it, then it might as well not exist. Focusing on Google is the best strategy as over 80% of all online searches occur through Google. There are three areas of search that a tanning salon should focus on.
Three areas of search for tanning salons and other local businesses to focus on:
- Natural (organic) Results
- Google Local Business Results
- Pay-per-click advertising
Organic Search Results
The free search results that appear directly under the search bar in Google are known as “organic” or “natural” results. They are “naturally” generated by Google based on a few factors. The ultimate goal of Google is to make its users experience as good as possible so that users will make Google their only online search provider. Getting your website to appear in these results can be tricky since you will be competing against every other website out there. Google closely guards the secrets behind its method for ranking sites, but an entire industry is based upon improving people’s ranking. This field of work is known as Search Engine Optimization or SEO. Through trial and error it various people and companies have found a way to manipulate the search results and increase the ranking of a particular site. For a tanning salon with a limited budget it is important to focus on three things.
Three most important aspects of SEO for a limited budget tanning salon:
- Having enough content on your site regarding tanning and the cities you serve
- Placing your address on every page of your site
- Having a professional code your site and label pictures and pages correctly
All of these things should be done by a professional web company like Thought Mechanics Web Design. If you try and do SEO work on your own without a real understanding for the process you may end up doing more damage than good and getting your website permanently blocked from Google.
Google Local
In order to make searching for local businesses easier, Google introduced a section known as “Google Local” a few years back. The goal was to display local businesses when people searched for services in a specific area such as “Tanning in New York City”. Using a variety of metrics Google then shows the user 10 businesses at the top of the search results. This is great if you are near the top, but terrible if you are nowhere to be found. Solving this problem is the same as with the organic search results. You will need to hire a professional company like Thought Mechanics to help get you so that you show up in Google Local search results.
Pay-per-click Advertising
Google makes 99% of its money off of advertising and recent numbers show that they control over 90% of online advertising. Just as with natural results Google has tweaked their paid advertising section to maximize the revenue it creates. A big part of this is delivering relevant results that consumers find useful. They understand that if consumers continually click on the paid search results and land on irrelevant or low-quality sites they will not do so in the future and they will lose revenue. Getting started with a pay-per-click advertising campaign is very easy with Google using their product known as Adwords. The difficult part is creating successful ads and having the clicks turn into business. Seek the help of a professional when setting up your paid advertising account so that your website is set up to convert the clicks. One good way to do this is to have a custom landing page for each ad that you may run. It is also important that you offer some kind of “hook” to get customers interested in your site.