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How To Boost Your Local SEO by 60%

Patrik Connole

Director Of Organic Marketing, Oozle Media

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Yeah, I’ve been doing SEO specifically for beauty schools for the last six years. Since I’ve been here at Oozle Media, I’ve been doing SEO in general for about seven. And, like Chris said, I love sports. I love ultimate Frisbee, but I’m here for you guys and want to talk about, specifically, local SEO and why that matters so much to you as a beauty school and how you can make it better. Because realistically, this is kind of referencing back to what Parker talked about in that a majority of your good leads that come in that convert at a higher rate, and are more likely to enroll, are the ones that come in through your organic efforts.

So, we’re going to talk about this real quick as we kind of go through this whole process. Hey, BYU-Idaho grad. All right. We’re into that too.

What Is Local SEO?

We’ve got local SEO. So when I’m talking about local SEO, we are talking specifically about the map pack. Meaning those three, sometimes four, if there’s an ad result though, when somebody searches for “beauty school near me”, or something like that. That’s what really drives a lot of your organic traffic to your site, is showing up here.

Beauty schools that are doing the best, as far as like growing their business, are the ones that are able to show up to the game.

This is just a local search from where I’m at. You can see Mandalyn, The Forum Academy, Evans Hairstyling College, and then also a shout out to the paid ads team for Collectiv Academy also showing up there. We’ve seen quite a few changes to this since I last presented last year.

Example of a map pack

They’ve added sorting options. By “they”, I mean Google, and they also have pushed the first Google result down even further and showing the map on a side by side display with the Google Business Profiles there.

Google is going to keep getting more and more localized to the results. They’ve come out and stated as much. The ranking algorithms have really geared themselves towards becoming more local.

“Near me” searches have continued to rise exponentially, even implied “near me” searches are also on the rise. So, they are catering to that with that search results page.

I really think that these first three here are the most important part of your SEO, because that’s what somebody can see first, aside from a paid ad, which again, you should be doing on your end. You’ll get a whole lot more of that talk here later on, so I’ll leave that to the experts.

We’re going to talk about one thing here. If you see on my last result here, kind of a little bit on the green doubt, right below Evans Hairstyling College, there’s a little section called “More Businesses.” How many of you actually click on that for when you’re looking for pretty much anything aside from maybe a specific restaurant? Go ahead and put it in the chat. I’m going to be surprised if a lot of people end up using that, because it’s just not a place that anybody goes to. I put this little GIF on here because it makes sense.

“Beyond the borders, we don’t go there, right?”

Nobody really does that. I see some “Hey, I’m desperate,” or like, “I’m really not seeing exactly what I want,” and so in order for you to even show up and be a part of the game when somebody makes that search, “beauty school”, or “beauty school near me”, or “insert your favorite term here”. You have to be able to show up in those first results. Right?

Optimize Your Google Business Profile

One way to moreso guarantee that placement is with the paid ads. We can talk about that later, but to get in that first three organically, you really have to optimize your Google Business Profile. They just changed the name to this in February, so I’m still getting used to it. They used to call it your Google My Business Profile. Now it’s just Google Business Profile. Dropping the “my” there.

Sixty percent or more of your local SEO rankings are based in your Google Business Profile.

Why? Google likes Google. It’s as simple as that. Google trusts data from Google. Here’s just kind of a quick overview of what your Google Business Profile is. It’s specifically this area kind of highlighted in blue. It shows your reviews, it shows where you’re located, your address, hours, phone number. It has other information on there that Google pulls on there. There’s question and answers. All of that on there.

Nearly everything in here you can have full control of for free and it’s really something awesome that you can do for yourself. I’m going to show you the top neat tricks that you can do right now, today, after you fill out Parker’s survey for the schools. Pro tip, I’m the one that told him he probably won’t get 200 results, so please prove me wrong.

But we know that you can control this area here. You can have full control over that paid ads section up above, and then you can have some of that organic results or the organic SEO area, some control over that as well. You want to control your messaging.

Example of search results

Go Google your brand name. Make sure you like what you see. Do you have a lot of reviews? Do you have a good presence there?

That’s usually your first presence that somebody sees after they’ve seen you on social media or they’ve seen you somewhere else they’re like, “Oh, hey, I want to look up such and such beauty school” and they Google your name. Make sure that looks good. Okay?

What Impacts Your Search Ranking Factors?

So back to how much this matters. Between your Google Business Profile also, like I said, GMB, reviews also shows up on your Google Business Profile, and then behavioral aspects of what people do, like they click on the links, or they view the reviews, or things like that.

Sixty percent or more of that is determined by those things related to that Google Business Profile.

On average, our clients see upwards of 36 to 55% of their organic traffic, just organic traffic, not paid traffic, social media traffic, direct traffic, any of that, exclusively from their Google Business Profile, so it’s extremely important.

Okay. We know that these are really important because these are some of those top 10 factors. This came out from somebody I follow, it’s called Whitespark. These are those top 10 factors. You can take a screenshot of that. You’ll notice that I put out here six of those top 10 rankings are all related to that Google Business Profile.

Top Google ranking factors

Primary Google business category, having a keyword or something along those lines in your business name, Google Business Profile categories, your keywords in your Google reviews, a high numerical rating, and a high number of reviews, and how complete it is.

If you are a beauty school and you do not have yourself listed as a beauty school on Google Business, go fix that. Open up business.google.com, business.google.com, and log in with your Gmail address, go to the info section, step number one, and then step number two, change it to beauty school.

Google Business Profile category

If you’re not a beauty school, maybe you’re primarily a barber school or something along those lines, change it to that.

Be as specific as possible with your primary category, putting something general like college or school doesn’t get you good results. Putting salon on there would get you good results for your salon because Google cares more about what you are than anything else when it comes to your Google Business Profile.

The reason for that is to say I was to search for a taco or Mexican restaurant near me and you were to show me a beauty school, I’d get pretty upset with Google and I’d probably stop using them. So, make sure that you describe accurately what you are. The real cool part about this though is that you can add all of your services, everything that you offer, in this section as well.

If you click on where the number two is, or down below, you’ll see a small section that says services. You can add literally everything that you offer, from your salon offerings, to your school offerings, and everything in between. It’s completely custom.

You can add services, programs, everything that you want. And the reason why that’s important is because Google, at its core, is a data processing robot, right? It just gives data and it says, “make sense of the data” and then tries to interpret that data to give the best result to a potential searcher.

If you give it more data, you’re better off doing that there. Justin, I appreciate you as well, because this is one of my favorite animated series with the Star Wars, so we’re there. How do we kind of get this going? How do we get this to be working really well?

The Importance of Google Reviews

We have to get Google reviews. Google reviews, and just kind of reviews in general, it doesn’t matter the platform, it can be social media, it could be Yelp, it could be wherever you’re at. They are the second most important thing that you can do for your business. Aside from that proper category, this is the thing that will drive leads and eventually enrollments because they benefit you in two ways, rankings and conversions.

Rankings and conversions are impacted by Google reviews

You get higher rankings, because Google likes it that you have more reviews, and people who see that you have a higher rating and more reviews are more likely to convert on your page.

Think of the last time you bought something, anything at all, at whatever price point, and probably the higher the price point the more likely you were to pay attention to this. Did you look at the reviews? You probably did. Put in the chat if you look at reviews before you make a purchase of any sort. I bet you we’ll get a whole bunch of people on there that say so. Are you going to ever buy something that is less than four stars? Probably very rarely, right? Because it’s just kind of that benchmark that a lot of people are looking for.

Same thing applies for beauty schools and potential searches for you.

What Matters With Google Reviews?

What actually matters with your Google reviews? I get this question asked all the time, so I’m just going to review it real quick. Your overall rating, the quantity of reviews, and the consistency and recency of it. A four and a half star is better than four stars, 500 reviews is better than a hundred reviews. Something that you’re getting on a consistent basis is really helpful, and then the recency bias. A review you got yesterday matters more than the one that somebody gave you five years ago, because who among us hasn’t changed in five years, especially with the pandemic happening. They really matter.

These same four principles apply across most any other platform that leaves reviews, but Google is the most important of these because that’s kind of the ubiquitous place that we all go to find information.

Most important factors for Google reviews

How To Get More Reviews

Let’s talk about how you can get more reviews. There’s three distinct ways that you can do this.

How to get more reviews

One, incentivize internally, but not externally, that part’s important. Use a tool to help you ask. We have a great one, it’s called ReviewLead. I’ll talk about that just a little bit. And then teach your students. Another plug for BaaB. BaaB’s got a great training on that for you to use, and then we also, at Oozle Media, offer a custom training. We’ll be flying in somebody to do that.

Incentivizing internally. I’ll briefly talk about this. If you are incentivizing externally and Google catches you, meaning if you are offering a hundred dollars to every single person that leaves you a review, and Google catches that, they can and will, I’ve seen it, take down all of your reviews.

And if you do it fairly frequently, they will ban you from the platform. Be careful with what you kind of offer to students, or even salon guests, on what you do there. There’s often ways to get around it if it’s something small or something easy, but there are a lot easier ways to do this and make sure that you don’t get penalized by Google.

Look at some of these results of what we’ve been able to accomplish. We’ve been working with beauty schools for the last 10 years. The best thing that we’ve seen to give you this nice big spike in SEO results is our Google reviews trainer. The schools that haven’t made this relatively minor investment hasn’t really ever seen as good of results. Just as honest as we can be with that.

Example of number of reviews and star ratings for beauty schools

There’s immediate benefits to your ranking, to your traffic, your conversions, and all of that is so important. You can contact Chris, you can contact us directly, on how to view some more of those results, but we consider this to be extremely important.

ReviewLead is a great backup to that. This presentation, as Lindsay said, is a great presentation to help teach your students how to get awkward and ask for a review. It can feel awkward. ReviewLead’s a great backup. What this does is it sends out a series of three emails and/or texts to your salon clients, alumni, students, to remind them to leave a review. And it’s a really great little platform because what we do is we send somebody to what we call a “splash page”, meaning you click on the link and then it’ll have a thumbs up and it’ll have a thumbs down.

If somebody has a thumbs up, it’ll immediately direct them to Google, or Facebook, or Yelp, or wherever you want to get more reviews, to ask them to leave a review. If you have a thumbs down experience, it pops them over to a little form where somebody can fill out that form and then say, “Hey, I had a bad experience,” And then that’ll shoot your team an email, and you can stop the bad review before it even happens and you can resolve that customer’s concern.

It’s really important that you’re able to do that. There is a little link at the bottom to make sure you’re compliant with Google’s policies on that so you’re not gating it, but we found that this to be really effective in helping somebody complain and voice their concerns, directly to you, rather than just ranting on the internet to everyone that can see it. That’s what most people do when they leave a bad review. They just want to rant. They just want to make sure that they were heard and it’s so effective. Jared’s actually been using the tool and they’ve had some really good results, and I’m glad that you piped in there. I appreciate that a lot.

Why Review Lead

The other thing that you should also do with reviews as a reminder, is respond to every review that comes in, be courteous, be helpful, respond in kind to somebody, and don’t escalate things if it is a negative review. Try to get it offline. Show that you care. It is part of Google’s ranking algorithm and is something that’s really important for you to do.

Results of Local SEO

So let’s look at a couple results of some of our clients who have been investing into local SEO at various levels. This is one of our clients that’s heavily invested into it. They’re using a lot of Google Business Profile optimization.
This little GIF here will show how things have looked over time. I just barely pulled the most recent results yesterday. So this is what they looked like in late October, then in February, then in March, and then in April.

If you’re in this red area, you’re not even close to being on Google’s radar yet. Yellow means you’re just outside of it. It means you’re in that “more business” section. And then if you’re in the green area, that means you’re in the top three. That means you’re showing up. That means that you’re a part of the area that you see. If you want to get this report for yourself, you can email us right now. Email me, Chris, or Parker if somebody could drop my email in there, and you can get that at just $20 per keyword. So, if you want to see how you’re ranking and in your local area for “cosmetology school”, or “beauty school near me”, or whatever, we can pull that up for you and show you how well you’re doing. Email me right now, because I think that’ll help you out a lot.

This client of ours, that we had, did all three of these things. They incentivized their employees, they taught them how to ask, and they used the tool. They started the tool in December of 2021 and you could see that light orange line is the number of reviews that popped up, and then the darker one is the average rating.

Example of results for a client

You could see when they started it, they had roughly a 2.3 rating, and now they’re all the way up to 4.5. All they had to do was actually ask. Most of your customers, your students, your salon guests, any of those people that are kind of classified in that customer area, will, generally speaking, have pretty good results. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be in business for long. You just need to ask. You need to get somebody else to say it about you. Kind of like what Stephanie said earlier, better to have somebody talking about you than you to say it about yourself.

Here’s another client of ours. Again, not as big of a crazy leap as there has been and with other clients, but this is the same projection. You can see how over time, and again, these say I started I believe it was in October of 2021 and they just bumped up again. Bringing in those reviews, bringing in that, and they’re only using the ReviewLead tool. Really awesome results here.

Another example of results for a client

If you need anything else, we did it, you’ll pretty quickly have more customers than you’ll ever, ever need, but we understand there’s a lot to take care of, and you guys have a lot on your hands.

Think about letting an agency or some sort of strategic partner help alleviate that pain for you. We have a lot of really good solutions to help you with anything related to SEO in particular. Shoot me an email. If you have any questions, go ahead and populate those. Chris, back to you if you want to take over from me.

Chris Linford:

No. Yeah, stay on. Hey, let’s do some Q and A. If you guys have any questions, let us know in the chat. This is your opportunity to talk about anything you just heard or ask questions or even SEO in general. So if you’ve got questions, let us hear it in the chat.

Patrik Connole:

Oh, I have one other thing, actually, Chris. If you’re not sure that you’re on track with your local SEO or your Google Business Profile, or anything like that, Parker’s going to post that link in survey in the chat, and if there’s something there we can talk about it, we can have a short meeting about it, let us know how we can help you.

This link is just a quick little survey that will kind of say, “Hey, what can we help you out with?” I think it will help you out a lot. If you haven’t had a chance to fill that out yet, go ahead and do that. There’s not just SEO on there. There’s some other things that we’re speaking on today, but I think that’s a great spot for you to start too.

What Keywords Should You Focus On for SEO?

It looks like we have one question that came in. “For a new school that’s building SEO, what keywords would you want to focus on?” That’s a great question. I would say that the biggest thing that you need to focus on are what I’m going to call your “money keywords” or your “primary keywords”. The biggest thing that you can do is focus on those. Those primary keywords are going to be “beauty school”, “cosmetology school”, or any other type of program that you offer. Focus on that.

There’s free keyword research tools out there that can show you the volume for where you’re at and we can help you with that. If you go to Moz, moz.com and just put in your website, or put in something that is close to what you are like beauty school, or cosmetology school, or something like that, then that could show you other keywords that are useful to that.

Those are where I’d focus on. We tend to also focus on what we call foundational topics. “What is beauty school?”, “Why should you pick beauty school?”, “How can I get financial aid for my beauty school experience?” Things like that. Those are really important topics that you guys know a lot about and can write towards, and those are things that we put up on the blog and that helps you gain that authority and gain those rankings for Google over time.

Chris Linford:

Yeah. So I mean, reviews certainly super important for a Google Business Profile for any school. We’ve had a lot of good discussion on that. Maybe we can talk about a couple other pro tips for the Google Business Profile and how to increase your rankings there. Because like you said, if you’re not in that three, if you’re not showing on the first page, it’s a good chance you’re not going to be very visible and be getting clicks.

Now we know that whoever has not only the highest star rating, but the most reviews quantity does matter, but be careful, you have to be consistent with reviews. You don’t want to get a lot and then just none. That could actually hurt you.

Patrik Connole:

Yeah. If you get a giant spike in something and then it falls off, Google might see that as fishy and it kind of put in an investigation on you. Audit you for lack of a better term. That’s the other really cool part about our ReviewLead tool and then also using a course and teaching your staff about it and maybe even incentivizing it internally a little bit, is that allows you to have that consistency and volume at the same time.

Chris Linford:

Yeah. So I think some other pro tips, Patrik, the internet is a game of inches and the Google Business Profile you have to pay attention to several different things. I know that there are features on there, like Q and A. You can post photos. And then not just post a photo, but put keywords behind that photo.

Patrik Connole:

Geotag it. Yup. You can do all of that stuff. The more you feed Google, the happier it’ll be. That goes for blogging, like Cole’s asking in the chat there. Blogging feeds into that data machine because Google can read content. It can read written content and decipher that, and that’s what keywords are based off of.

Don’t go overly keyword spammy. It used to work where you just put in the keyword a whole bunch of times. That’s so 2011, we’re in 2022. Google’s a heck of a lot smarter than that and so just write naturally. Write to what you are and use it naturally and it’s really, really helpful for us.

Another great question here is that when you’re building your site, you’re doing SEO, you should be able to post with your blogs. I always get this question as well, with blogs in particular, how many blogs should I do every month or every year or whatever. It doesn’t matter how many, it actually matters more the quality of it. When we do a blog here at Oozle Media, we shoot for 800 to 1200 words on that blog around a dedicated, very specific topic that’s answering a question. That has proven extremely reliable for us over the past 10 years that we’ve been working with beauty schools to build up that as you go.

Tie your social media into your site, because it does have an effect. If somebody finds you on social media, say that they saw you in a TikTok, or they saw you on an Instagram ad or something like that and then they Google your name, guess what? That all feeds into your SEO.

More times that somebody is searching for you and finding you, and then getting to your site and staying on your site goes like, “Oh, this is a good site. I should show it more often.” I make Google into this personified person. It’s a robot, y’all. It’s not anything more than that, but it can use dedicated metrics like that to find out more about that.

It’s just a lot easier to personify Google a lot of times and just say, “Hey, oh, I like that,” or “This is good” because we’re human, we’re trying to make that it was more of a human thing as well.

Chris Linford:

Awesome. Yeah. So again, Patrik, you said if they’re not really sure where they’re at with their SEO, they can fill out a quick survey. Whoops, I posted the wrong one. Do you want to post that in the chat Parker?

Patrik Connole:

Parker’s got it. You can also go to Moz. That’ll super help you out with any keyword digging or finding any questions to answer. That’s what I usually love doing is I go to Moz. I put in my keyword, find this something that’s a question, and I answer that question directly. But, go ahead and fill out that survey. It’ll be super helpful to you. Super helps us. We can have a realistic conversation real quickly about how you can do better.

Chris Linford:

Okay. Awesome. Everybody give it up in the chat to thank Patrik and Parker, my sidekick here.