Patrik Connole
3 Crucial Local SEO Tactics for Your Beauty School
Director Of Organic Marketing, Oozle Media
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Hey, thanks, Chris. Thanks, Chris. I appreciate that intro. And I definitely love working here at Oozle Media, I’ve been here for five years and yes, I do play a lot of ultimate Frisbee, actually, even have a tournament coming up this week. And so, we’re really excited to play Frisbee, but right now I’m really excited to follow up Winn. Thank you for those wonderful words of wisdom, and it was really awesome to hear that.
And so, what we’re going to talk about today is, I’ve got 10 factors that affect your local SEO, but we’re going to really dive into three of them, very specifically. If I had a full hour and a half, and then we can jam on this all the time. And this is what I love talking about, but this is our big is our big deal here.
What Is Local SEO?
So, we’re going to start out with just a quick intro of “What is local SEO?”. And basically what we’re talking about here is, if we look at this first graph on the right, you can see when you type in a query, you usually have some paid ads of some sort, you’ll have a Google My Business profile that shows up. If you search for somebody’s name, your beauty school’s name, this is ours that looks like, for our agency. And then right below the paid ad, you have organic results.
Now, if you make a search, that’s more like “beauty school near me.” Like for instance, this one here, you will see what we call a map pack, and that’s local SEO. That’s what we’re typically referring to when we talk about that.
So, just kind of a couple of the schools that are near us. So some we’ve worked with, some we haven’t, but we’re real excited about that. Now, ranking in these top three, gives you massive results.
The top three results in the organic SEO, bring in about 60% of all clicks, organically.
All of them across everything. And on the map, it’s even more dramatic because if you aren’t in the top three, you’re in this little view all section, and you won’t even show up, you’re not a part of that conversation even.
So, if you rank higher, you will get more clicks, more leads, and ultimately more enrollments.
I saw a quick note that somebody can’t hear me. Is that the case for everybody? Or are we okay?
Okay, let’s move on. So these are those top factors that I was talking about.
So, number one is your primary Google My Business category. Then number two, keywords in your Google My Business name, how close your physical location is to the person making the search, your physical address, versus the city searched for, additional Google my business categories, links to your website, keywords, and Google reviews, and a high numerical Google review ratings (those kind of go hand in hand), and then the removal of spam listings. I’ll actually get into that one a little bit. And then the completeness of the Google My Business listing.
These 10 came up from a top SEO source, they’re called Whitespark, and a couple of them, you really don’t have much control over how close you are to the person making a search, or what city you are in, because you’re in the city that you’re in, versus what that person may have searched for. Right?
But, six of these top 10, are related to your Google My Business account and are things that you have direct control over. And so, what we’re going to go over is we’re going to go over three of them that are three tactics. Two of them are directly related to Google My Business. And then, the second one that we’ll go over is also the removal of spam listings that push you down and out of that visibility. And really, I want to also focus heavily on the power of Google reviews, and how much that they help you.
1. Your Primary Business Category
So, tip number one, your primary business category on Google. If you haven’t claimed your Google My Business category, or your Google My Business profile, you’ll want to go to business.google.com, and go get a free profile. Anybody can get this. If you’re an owner of any beauty school, you can do that.
The second tip is, because Google cares more about what you are than the closeness you are to anything. For instance, if somebody were to search for a Mexican restaurant, your school showed up, people would stop using Google.
So, you want to put “beauty school” here, almost always, unless you are a barber school primarily, or a massage school, or something along those lines, you want to put “beauty school” here, always.
It may be tempting to put a beauty salon or hair salon on there, because there actually is a lot more search volume for your salon. However, the thing that brings you in the most money is going to be a beauty school, right? Your enrollments are what actually make you a lot of money.
And so, that’s what we want to put in here is that beauty school oriented keywords. You can also put in secondary categories of beauty salon, hair salon, spa, nail salon, makeup artist, any other services that you might have to offer to any person. And those can be from your students, or those can be for your people who may come to you for salon services. Those are all things that you can put in there.
It’s really simple to edit. Once you get into Google My Business background. So again, if you go to business.google.com, you can go in here, and the first thing you’ll see is this little info button. You push that, and then the second thing you push an edit.
And then from there, you’ll see a primary business category you put in beauty school. And then after that, you could put in other things that are related. Spa, beauty salon, massage school, whatever those things are that are most available to you. Okay?
2. Fix Spam Listings
So then the next tip that I have for you is fixing those spam listings. Now, this is a relatively new strategy in the SEO space. It’s something that’s kind of evolved over the last year or two, as more of these have kind of cropped up.
The top five rankings of any Google My Business listing, are realistically, very easy to mass produce. Anyone can create a listing with the “right information.” All you need are categories, a keyword-stuffed name, and a place, a location, somewhere in the right city. Right?
So, just for example, take kind of the same, same here, if both of these listings were spam listings, then you could see that you would be stuck in this “view all” section, you don’t exist as an option, right?
How many people do you think are clicking on this link? Not many. Do you click on that link? Do you kind of just look at these first three that are nearest to you when you’re making a choice? That is really important to note for those things.
So, I want to help you do this on your own. This is something that you can do to help yourself pop up into that, gain those rankings, and have a much better visibility and results and ultimately more leads and enrollments.
So, there’s a couple of tips to spot spam. Number one is, you can see if something doesn’t have a lot of reviews. If they’ve had zero, absolutely no reviews, there’s one of two things. Either: It’s a brand new school or it’s a spam listing. There’s really not a lot of in-between motion. So that’s one.
Number two, you can spot it if it has a fake listing. So you’ll notice on this top example here, all of these listings have nearly the exact same name, or sorry, exact same address. So, that’s kind of fishy, and usually something that can be reported.
You can have a generic keyword stuff name. So if I were doing this for an air conditioning company and you were to see “Katie, West Houston, air conditioning contractor, AC installation, air conditioning installation, HVAC installation,” right? You see how they’re stuffing in those names?
Very similarly, you could try to do that same method with your own school. You could put “beauty school near me,” and “cosmetology school,” and “best number one called cosmetology school,” all are tactics that I’ve actually seen, and they can work for a little bit, but if Google catches you or somebody catches you, you will get immediately bumped out of there and even could get penalized or removed from Google.
Additionally, you can see a competitor here, an SEO company that has very obviously too many locations for the area. There’s just not that many of these companies here in this area, and you know exactly a lot of your competitors around. The beauty school space is not necessarily the biggest space in the world. You know who a lot of your competitors are, and you know whether or not they have 12 locations in a single, small area.
So, it’s usually something that you can find and you can spot yourself.
So, how do you actually fight it? If you go to maps.google.com, don’t just Google somebody’s name. You have to go to the map section of it. maps.google.com. And if you go to maps.google.com, you can then Google the name of that competitor.
If I were a competitor of Oozle’s and I was doing this against Oozle Media, I would put in that Oozle Media name, and then down at the bottom, there’s “suggest an edit.”
And when that, when you click that pops up into two things: change your name or other details, or close and remove.
You’ll want to make sure that you’re doing this accurately, because Google tracks everything, because when you’re logged into Google, you’re logged in with a Gmail. So, that tracks any changes that you suggest from your Gmail account. And so, when you put out a suggestion, if you keep putting in bad suggestions, Google will ban you from making those suggestions. So make sure that you’re making correct suggestions on here.
If it’s just that they stuffed the name, but everything else is right. You can just go in and change the name on that. If you eliminate or, get rid of somebody who’s using spammy tactics, you can immediately move up in rank and gain visibility because you are following the rules.
So, if we go to our example, that we had previously, if you were to, say you were number four on this list, and you were to eliminate both of these spam listings, you would now be number two in that map pack, and have gained valuable rankings and experience for your school.
3. Google Reviews
The last one is Google reviews. Google reviews, we have been teaching since the beginning of Oozle media. This is something that we have touted across the board, and it benefits local SEO in two different ways.
Number one, it’s actually part of Google’s algorithm. It helps with your rankings. And, number two, it’s also a very heavily favored conversion factor. When was the last time that you interacted with any sort of business and you didn’t look at their reviews? Probably been a long time, right? We know that having a higher ranking and having a higher rating on Google helps bring in more conversions.
So, I always get asked this question, “What actually matters the most with Google reviews?”
There’s four primary factors that matter the most in Google reviews:
- Your overall rating. If you have a 4.5 out of 5 stars, you’re going to have a bit more of a rankings boost than if you were to have a 3.5 out of 5. So, that’s one thing that is helpful to you. Getting more four and five star reviews are extremely helpful to you there.
- Quantity of reviews. Someone with a thousand reviews will rank better than somebody that has a hundred reviews. It’s provided that, you know, the overall rating is the same and a bunch of other factors. But, all things equal, if somebody has more ratings, a thousand ratings versus somebody that has a hundred ratings, you’re going to have a better review.
- Consistency in which you receive reviews. So, if you get reviews consistently over time, that shows to Google that you are an active business and that you are somebody who is consistently getting more good ratings about you. And so, that’s something that they put into their equation.
- Recency. The review that you received last week counts a whole lot more than the review you received five years ago.
So, keep in mind those four factors when you look at that. There’s no exact formula per se, that says, “Oh, if you have 4,000 reviews, 400 reviews and a 4.5 rating, and somebody else has 200 reviews and a 5.0 rating, you will automatically go bigger or one is better than the other.” There’s a lot more to it than just that, but getting more reviews and, if you have a better overall rating, you have more quantity, more consistency, and more recency, you will see a lot of reviews over time that come to you.
Our Google Reviews Training
Finally, as part of this, that we offer is a Google reviews training. You can kind of see some of the schools that we’ve worked with that have popped up. You can see anywhere from some of these new schools that have gotten 150 reviews in a pretty short timeframe, versus 1500, 1600 reviews of some of the schools that we’ve worked with, and we will teach you how to do that.
We’ve been working with beauty schools for over 10 years. And the best thing that we’ve seen, that gives long-term results in SEO is our Google reviews training. The schools that haven’t made this minor investment just haven’t seen as good results, even if they’ve been working with us with other things that we’ve been doing, and schools that do this on their own just see better results. It’s one of the best things you can do for yourself.
There are immediate benefits to your rankings, traffic, overall conversions.
Our partner, BaaB, has a write-up on some of these results. And, Chris, who is emceeing today is actually the person who gives a lot of these reviews [training]. And so you can reach out to him directly, and he’ll get ahold of you.
I’m also going to put into the chat right now, a link that you can go in and look at some of the results that we have had over time to see these things. This is something that we highly recommend and that we think everybody can benefit from.
Let’s Recap
So, just a quick recap. Number one, make sure that your primary Google My Business category is correct. This is something, like you noticed, somebody can change, can suggest an edit, that’s something that could get cross source changed.
I would highly recommend that you go onto your Google My Business page right now, even while I’m talking to you, I know you’re on a computer, most likely, you can go into business.google.com and make sure that your categories are correct. It takes literally two to five minutes to do this. I highly recommend doing that on a semi-regular basis just to keep an eye on it and make sure that you have the right things there.
Number two is look for spam. Look for those opportunities. I know that they exist, that they’re out there in your market. If you see them, do yourself a favor, report them to Google and make sure that they get cleared out. The more you do it, the more likely that Google is to respond quickly, and favorably to you.
Since we’ve been doing it quite a bit for our clients, we have seen that, when we interact with it, we’re more likely to get us results that way. So the more you do it, the better off you’ll be. And then finally, get reviews. If you learn nothing else from today, just get more Google reviews. It is a powerful, powerful aspect that is really underutilized, in almost all businesses, that help you have higher rankings. And if you do that, I promise that you’ll be able to see the results from schools.
So, I’m going to open it up for a little bit of Q and A. I did see a couple of things that happened in the chat. If we have time, Chris, tell me if we don’t have enough time. I’m not a hundred percent sure where we’re at, but, and then if you want a free hour of SEO consulting, just shoot me an email.
My email is pconnole@oozlemedia.com. If you don’t remember that, just put info@oozlemedia.com and we’ll see it, and get you to the right space.
Chris:
Cool. Thanks, Pat. Yeah, do you want to answer some of the questions that came in? We got two minutes.
Patrik:
Yeah. So I’ll ask about, so the “350 reviews at 3.5 rating rank higher than a 4.5 rating with a hundred views” question. So, the answer is that, it’s complicated, and that’s really the answer for a lot of SEO things.
And, it will depend on some of those other factors. It’s not all just hundred percent Google reviews. There’s some other factors that play into it. So, a lot of times when we look at rankings, we look at a generic map and we look at positions overall. So, we can see whether or not you do super well over time or not. So that’s something that’s important.
Another question about the algorithm for reviews. “It seems like no matter how many new 5-star reviews we get, we never moved from a 4.5.” Yeah, so the algorithm for Google, it’s actually a fairly complicated math equation. That, essentially, it weights things. Without getting too heavy into the math, because there’s probably not a lot of really nerdy math people here. My wife’s actually a math teacher, so she was actually able to help explain it to me when I showed her the speculative formula. It’s like Google’s secret formula. They don’t necessarily put it out to everyone.
But essentially the theory is, that because of the things that, I’m actually going to pull up one of my slides, because of the things that we talked about here, with the overall rating, quantity, consistency, and recency, that the bias tends towards the recency and the quantity a lot. And so, you should see that come by, but it’s basically, there’s a specific word for it’s called a Bayesian logic that they use, which sounds really complicated, but that’s kind of what they use in order to get a Google review algorithm into there. And it’s only a small part of the overall algorithm, right? It’s just one part of many.
So I don’t see anything else. So, Chris, I’ll hand the proverbial mic back over to you.