Welcome to the long-awaited sequel to my original Spa Business Mastery edition on this topic, “Why Your Spa Business Needs SEO Marketing!” 

Monthly, I sit down with my spa marketing manager, Delia, to dish out expert advice pertaining to common challenges and triumphs that spa owners face while attempting to leverage their marketing in the spa industry… as well as tips on how to maximize their strategy’s impact!

Today, we delve into the promised spa SEO checklist: your can’t-skip need-to-do SEO items to make it super easy, super actionable, and super effective to know what needs to happen on your website in order for it (and, in turn, your spa!) to be found by more customers.

WHY SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION IS A CRUCIAL PART OF YOUR SPA DIGITAL MARKETING PLAN

Before we jump in, some spa owners may be questioning why we here at Kirsten Foss Coaching and its sister company, Virtual Spa Business Management, are emphasizing SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as a core part of any spa digital marketing plan.

The answer is that it acts as the backbone of your organic search: versus paying for pay-per-click ads, optimizing your website using SEO is a long-term organic strategy that works by fleshing out your website’s pages with keywords and key phrases that your ideal customers are searching for.

That keeps your content relevant, niche, up to date, and, of course, viable for whichever search engine your customers are using to then rank your website for those keywords and key phrases. The result? Being high up on those search results and being easily visible to any and all of your prospective customers!

“But Kirsten and Delia,” some spa owners may be thinking, “my website already has descriptions of what I offer… but I’m nowhere near page one of any search engine. Does that mean SEO just doesn’t work for my business?”

While it is a common misconception we hear frequently from our digital services clients, no. While certain qualifiers, such as how new your website is, may initially work against your website when it comes to its visibility, correctly and consistently using high-traffic keywords and key phrases related to your niche will guarantee an improvement in your website’s visibility.

Take it from Delia: having been in the spa industry as both an esthetician and a spa owner for twenty-five years, her excitement for spa-specific marketing changed her career trajectory. She now manages seven different spa accounts to execute specialized SEO, email, blogging, and social media marketing. She has seen the power correctly-done SEO has on spa marketing first-hand many times over. 

Seeing the role SEO has played from both the perspective of a business owner and the perspective of a marketer is what inspired Delia to compile these six core components of her spa SEO checklist for you to bookmark for future reference, either for when you are hiring your next SEO specialist or for when you go to try a hand at it yourself. Now, without further ado…

SPA SEO CHECKLIST ITEM #1: KNOW YOUR KEYWORDS

In layman’s terms, your keywords are what your customers are searching for. These keywords are present in your website copy, your website’s titles, your website’s images’ alt. text, your product descriptions… anywhere on your website that you can think of, it’s likely that your keywords are there!

Now, when we talk about keywords, think less about spa terminology and more about user intent, which is more and more what Google and other search engines are gearing themselves towards when it comes to SEO. User intent is what it says on the tin: what customers are searching for when they type keywords into Google. For spas, examples of these searched keywords may look like, “Manicures near me”, “Facial clinic Vancouver”, or “Best anti-aging skin care.”

All three of these examples are long-tail keywords, which are short sentences or phrases loaded with user intent. Single-word keyword examples include “Manicures”, “Facial”, “Skincare”, etc.

Most well-optimized websites will have a blend of long-tail and single-word keywords strategically placed throughout the copy of each page of their website in order to provide their website with visibility without “keyword stuffing”, which is when keywords are overdone on any given page. Keyword stuffing is detrimental to both your SEO ranking and your customers’ enjoyment of your pages. When in doubt, keep it looking natural!

Pro tip: When it comes to naming your services, it is advised to strike that fine line of not being too general and not being too fancy. Make it distinct enough to search without having it have the same name as a gazillion other services offered by spas near yours!

ITEM #2 ON YOUR SPA SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION CHECKLIST: FAMILIARIZE YOURSELF WITH META DESCRIPTIONS

If you realized that, while mentioning where keywords can be found on your website, we purposely missed a core component, congratulations! You’re absolutely right.

A crucial area where your keywords need to be found is in each page’s meta description. A meta description is, in short, a blurb generated by a search engine that is then shown as a preview to anyone scrolling down a list of search results. The standard length of a meta description is 300 characters, which gives spa owners the opportunity to succinctly grab a customer’s attention while simultaneously integrating at least one mention of the page’s primary keyword in order to bolster the page’s overall SEO.

This spa SEO checklist item has the added benefit of also displaying whenever a given page is shared to social media: the page’s featured image, title, and meta description will automatically generate whenever your page’s link is shared. 

Pro tip: In my private spa owners-only group, Spa Business Mastery, we’ve chatted before about how, if your Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest is popping up for customers are your spa’s top results, it means that your website needs some TLC! While social media is phenomenal for curating brand visibility and customer relations, your website is where customers need to be going to book their services and purchase your products.

ITEM #3, THE MOST OVERLOOKED SEO CHECKLIST ITEM FOR SPAS: LEVERAGING ALT. TEXT

While we have mentioned alt. text before both in this blog and our previous blog, “Why Your Spa Business Needs SEO Marketing”, it is important enough to be emphasized as its own checklist item.

Alt. text is a blurb attached to an image on any page of a website that provides the search engine with the context it needs to index it and have it count towards your SEO ranking. The more relevant your image and accompanying alt. text is, the better: it is also completely invisible to any customers visiting your site, so there are no aesthetic downsides to adding it in!

Pro tip: Trust us when we say that this is the most overlooked checklist item on this SEO checklist list.

SPA SEO CHECKLIST ITEM #4: REEVALUATE YOUR TITLE TAGS

“XYZ Spa and Services.”

“Meet the XYZ Spa Team at [Location].”

“XYZ Spa Skin Care Blog.”

All of these are examples of title tags, which are an easily-optimized opportunity to integrate your keyword and location while still being short and sweet for your customers.

An ideal title tag should incorporate:

• The page’s primary keyword

• Your location (if relevant)

• A benefit or main descriptor that is also located in the page’s main copy

Pro tip: Duplicating title tags will immediately count against your SEO ranking. Keep your spa website’s ranking in good health by ensuring that each title tag is unique.

SECOND-TO-LAST SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION CHECKLIST ITEM FOR SPAS: KNOW HOW YOUR WEBSITE’S SECURITY MAY BE LOWERING YOUR SEO SCORE

If any customer who attempts to enter your website is met with a flashing, “This website may not be secure” error message, they are likely to click away.

Moreso, this lack of security will count against your SEO ranking and will cause your website’s visibility to fall.

The solution? Ensure that your website’s security is up-to-date. 

Pro tip: If your website’s prefix isn’t HTTPS or SSL, you may be coming across this error message. Contact us at Kirsten Foss Coaching today to help determine if this is a hurdle you may (unknowingly!) be coming up against. If your website is new, please note that this is unlikely to be a concern for you due to better security options being built-in. 

LAST BUT CERTAINLY NOT LEAST ON THE SPA SEO CHECKLIST: DOING INTERNAL LINKING RIGHT

This is one I myself was guilty of before I brought Delia on!

I had fallen into a common website-related pitfall for those in the spa industry, which was that my website’s home page was too informational. Instead of spreading out informational nuggets and can’t-skip educational advice, all visitors had to do was linger on my home page… and then leave!

This caused my website's Bounce Rate, which is defined as the number of customers abandoning a session on your website, to spike because they had no reason to stick around.

This is where internal linking comes in: strategically linking to other pages on your website not only helps people stay longer on your page and also helps you to seamlessly build keywords into your page’s content. I do it with my blog on spa marketing topics all the time!

Pro tip: We hope you enjoyed reading this spa SEO checklist as much as Delia and I enjoyed putting it together. Contact us today to learn how to optimize your existing website… or to have any lingering questions you may have answered!