The #1 Ranking Among Hair Salons [Case Study]

JustIdea: an SEO case study based on our work with a hair salon

1. Introduction

Anyone who has had even a little experience with SEO knows that search engine optimisation is more of a marathon than a sprint. It's a long-term process that can stretch on for years, with the results of decisions only becoming visible several months after they're implemented.

Because of this, clients sometimes feel a strategy isn't working, and may even start to think the company running their SEO is misleading them. To avoid situations like this, it's worth talking to clients and clearly explaining what the SEO process looks like, how it's progressing at a given moment, and how long it takes. That's exactly what we do at JustIdea: we don't shut our clients out of the work, we let them take part as much as they want to. We can collaborate at every stage, or work independently and report on the results periodically.

There's a second way, though, one aimed mainly at people who are still deciding whether to start working with a company. That's a case study: a public report on the results of the campaigns we've run. Using real data and charts, we show the results we've achieved, and in this case, that was reaching the #1 spot among hair salons across the whole of Poland.

2. The start of the partnership and our strategy

We started the partnership in October 2020. We saw results very quickly, within just six months, and thanks to the strategy we applied, we reached a peak that we've managed to hold on to ever since.

As with all new clients, our first step was to create a comprehensive audit, containing suggested keywords, technical changes, on-page SEO fixes and proposed blog posts.

On this point, though, the audit called for a complete rebuild of the site, which was to be split into individual pages matching each salon's location. This opened us up to local SEO keywords for Warsaw, Kraków, Gdańsk, Łódź and the districts of these cities. We added pricing to these pages, and for the Warsaw salon, we changed the URL to /fryzjer-warszawa to optimise it better for that keyword. Besides the location pages, we also added pages matching the treatments offered at the salon, and filled them with content built around keywords.

We expanded the site with a page for the Academy, and an online shop will be launched soon too. The site keeps being developed and updated as new ideas and solutions come up.

So far, our work has covered:

• finding and fixing technical errors on the site,
• optimising on-site elements,
• running a link-building campaign,
• adapting the site for better local SEO,
• filling every page with SEO-optimised content,
• running a content marketing campaign,
• optimising the Google Business Profiles for most of the salons,
• monthly link building on external sites, preceded by a link analysis.

We ran a range of activities to keep the site in the best possible position, even as competition kept growing on every front. Despite achieving strong SEO results, we haven't stopped working to stay at #1.

3. Results

Organic traffic

As you can see on the chart above, since we started our SEO campaign, traffic to the salon's site has doubled. This is down to properly optimising the site. The dip at the end of the chart is because the results for that period cover an incomplete month.

TOP 3 keywords

The chart above shows the number of keywords ranking in the TOP 3 search results, and how that number changed over two years of our partnership. The figure nearly tripled, and we still haven't reached the limit of what's possible.

Traffic on the site

The chart above comes from Google Analytics. Over time, the number of users landing on the site from organic results started to grow, at times reaching as many as 8,000 in a single month.

Total site clicks and impressions

This data covers clicks and impressions in search results over the past year, based on a 6-month comparison. Compared with the previous 6 months, the most recent half-year performs better on both metrics. Total clicks on the site differ by 10,000, while impressions differ by over 100,000.

The table below shows the main keywords the site is targeting, and its current position in the search results. This figure keeps changing.

Google Business Profiles

The results from the Google Business Profile statistics cover the most recent quarter.

4. Summary

Working with such a fast-growing hair salon gave us a huge amount of knowledge and experience, and it's given us the confidence to take on partnerships across different industries. How much our SEO campaign contributed to the work on site optimisation is clear from the results shown above, where you can see a steady rise in organic site visits, the number of keywords where the salon ranks in Google's TOP 3, and the traffic generated on the salon's Google Business Profiles in various cities across Poland.

We reached the #1 spot among hair salons and tripled the number of keywords ranking in the TOP 3 organic search results.

Despite these satisfying results, we still have plenty of further work planned that will help us achieve even better results.

We're delighted to share such good results with you, and we'd love to hear from you about improving the visibility of your own website. You'll find the details of our offer on our site.