Keep Your Schedule Booked with SEO
If your med spa can rank well organically on Google and AI search, it can drive more revenue and profitability for your business. The good news is it’s not overly competitive for med spas to rank locally on Google.
A prime example of this is our client, Boss Gal Beauty, whose organic visibility doubled in Columbus, Ohio (24% to 41.52%, according to Semrush) and reached 95.89% visibility in suburbs where they have physical locations.
Using the strategy we implemented with Boss Gal Beauty and our other med spa clients, we will walk you through the importance of SEO for your med spa, what to focus on to improve your rankings and what benchmarks to measure against to ensure you’re on the right track.
Learn more about our agency’s full suite of services for med spas.
Understanding Intent
When someone searches on Google for “MedSpa Near Me” or “Medspa in Columbus,” they have strong intent. This means they are looking for something specific so there’s a high probability of conversion. The beauty of SEO is that when you rank well, it’s an earned placement, so you don’t have to pay per click, which leads to higher profitability vs. clicking on an ad.
76% of people searching for a local business on their phone visit it within 24 hours [source]. The local 3-pack results get 44% of actual clicks on Google’s results page. If your med spa gets local, organic traffic, you have a high chance of converting them into paying customers.
For the same playbook applied to another beauty-vertical business, see our Hair Salon SEO guide.
Importance of Service Pages
Think of your business services like a ladder. “Med Spa” sits at the top of the ladder and summarizes what your business does overall. All of the services are the steps leading up the ladder.
For our clients, we like to prioritize the most important services at the top of the ladder based on revenue, and the least important towards the bottom.
Creating service-specific pages on your med spa website is essential, as this will help you rank for both the med spa query (Med Spa Jacksonville) and specific service queries (“Microblading Jacksonville”).
When you have a well-optimized service page focusing on Microblading that references the local market, you can win a lot of organic traffic.
Local Intent
Med Spas are physical locations in specific cities/suburbs, which makes this a local SEO play. On a local level, you’re primarily competing against other local businesses versus national businesses, which makes it less competitive. This means your website needs to be optimized appropriately for local SEO.
In simple terms, potential clients typically search using phrases like “Med spa in [city/suburb],” “med spa near me,” or “service” in [city/suburb]” when looking for services in their area. This is how you should optimize your website.
The strategy here isn’t black and white. Below are the questions we ask our med spa clients to solidify the strategy based on the business structure.
- How many locations do you have?
- Are you located in a suburb?
- Are enough people in this one suburb to fill your bookings, or do you need to expand beyond this service?
Med Spa Examples: Single vs. Multi-Location SEO Strategy
Single Location Example: Endless Rejuvenation
- This is our client in Jackson, Ohio, a relatively small market.
- This client has only one location.
- We optimized the homepage for “Jackson, Ohio MedSpa” and each service page for the service + city, for example, “Facials in Jackson, Ohio.”
- This is a straightforward strategy: The homepage is optimized for the top-of-the-ladder business term “med spa,” and the service pages are optimized for the service + market.
Multi-Location Example: Boss Gal Beauty
Boss Gal Beauty is a med spa with four locations in Columbus, OH (Easton, Powell, Clintonville and Grandview Heights).
Each med spa is located in a specific suburb, so the goal of the strategy was to rank for Boss Gal Beauty’s services in their primary market (Columbus) and each of its suburbs.
Although med spa as a general term receives the most SEO traffic and volume, we wanted to optimize for their other services, which include hydrafacials, chemical peels and Botox, to capture demand across their full service line.
From a keyword perspective, these are the types of terms we wanted to target at the primary market and suburbs levels:
- Primary Market:
- Columbus MedSpa
- Facials in Columbus
- Suburbs:
- Grandview MedSpa
- Facials in Grandview
To do this, we built out service pages that were optimized for Columbus (the primary market), and location pages that were optimized for the suburbs.
How We Built Boss Gal Beauty’s Service and Location Pages
For each new service page on Boss Gal Beauty’s site, we focused on the Columbus market.
This is because there is nearly 20x more search traffic for a term like ‘Columbus Dermal Fillers’ than for ‘Clintonville Dermal Filler,’ making it a far more advantageous keyword to target in Columbus.
If you check out the optimized Dermal Filler page on Boss Gal Beauty’s site, you’ll notice a theme of non-commercialized content (which is content unique to your business that can’t be replicated by AI or a competitor) with original images, not stock photos. This is key to distinguishing a business in its local market.
Important note: We made the strategic decision not to build out service pages for each suburb because it posed risks of getting flagged by Google for duplicative, low-quality content.
We used the same goal of incorporating non-commoditized content for their location pages, including interviewing experts on their team to gather insights, to improve their SEO visibility.
For example, each page has professional imagery of team members at that location:
We also included exterior and interior photos so people can get a sense of the experience before setting foot inside.
For location pages, it’s good practice to add an embedded map from Google Maps and ensure your address, hours and contact information are visible. See below for how we created this section for Boss Gal Beauty:
See each of Boss Gal Beauty’s location pages at the links below:
Let’s Take a Look at the Results
Since working with Boss Gal Beauty, we’ve seen their visibility nearly double, from 24% to 41.52% for Columbus-related keywords:
Visibility chart courtesy of SEMrush’s reporting dashboard. Semrush’s visibility metric measures how often a domain appears in Google’s top 100 results for its tracked keywords based on click-through-rate data. So, a 100% visibility score means it holds the #1 spot for every tracked keyword.
Their coveted keywords in Columbus are ranking very well:
- Facial Columbus Ohio: #1 on Google
- Hydrofacial Columbus Ohio: #1 on Google
- Undereye filler Columbus: #1 on Google
When you get more granular and track their SEO rankings at a suburb level based on where they have locations, the numbers become even more striking.
Let’s take a look at Grandview as an example. Boss Gal Beauty has a visibility of 95.89%, which means they are ranking #1 for practically every keyword in this suburb.
Summary: Due to strategic keyword targeting and content optimization at the primary market and suburb level for all services, Boss Gal Beauty is now enjoying comprehensive visibility for its four locations in Columbus.
Authority score, or domain authority, is a metric used by softwares like SEMRush and Moz to grade how powerful your site is in the eyes of Google. They are graded on a scale of 0-100, where 100 is the highest. The more relevant, high-quality links that point back to your site, the more powerful your site is.
If you launch a brand new med spa business, your site will have an authority score of 0 since there are no links pointing back to it yet.
An established med spa like Boss Gal Beauty has an authority score of 34. If you’re above a 10 authority score, this is actually solid for a local business. Once you get into the 20’s, you can achieve strong visibility and if you’re in the 30’s, you should own a lot of market share in your city. The grading scale doesn’t work quite the same as your grades in school!
Backlink Profile
Below is Boss Gal’s backlinks profile. You can see they have links from media outlets such as ABC 6 News and Columbus Underground. They also have a link from Easton, the mall’s website, where they have a location. These are all relevant, local links which boosts authority and credibility in the eyes of Google.
Local SEO & Reviews
One of the easiest SEO wins for your Med Spa is claiming your Google Business Profile, optimizing it and getting reviews. Here are some tips:
- Have a promotional sticker on the window of your med spa asking people to leave a review on Google.
- Have your aestheticians ask patients to leave a review
- Have a software such as Gather Up that automatically follows-up with patients asking them about their experience, and if they had a good one, prompts them to leave a review
The 3-Pack results get 44% of actual clicks on Google’s results page. When you have placement in the local pack, it can be a game-changer for your med spa. In the example below, the three med spas in Tempe are achieving more organic traffic than competitors not listed.
HERE is a Google Business Profile optimization checklist to help you with your optimization. There’s a lot more that goes into ranking well in the local pack aside from reviews.
Other Tips To Improve SEO for Med Spas
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Expert Content
- Google loves expert content. Your aestheticians and experts should be the one providing insight on lip fillers, chemical peels, microblading and each of your services. You don’t want a freelancer (or AI) writing generic content. Even if your experts aren’t great writers, conduct an interview with them, and a proficient writer can take that transcript and turn it into powerful service pages. This will differentiate your content vs. the competition.
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Strong Website & User Experience
- Google is increasingly prioritizing user experience (UX) in its search ranking algorithm. Long gone are the days when you could win with only good content. You want to build a site that will convert visitors into customers. HERE is a list of 13 of the best web design practices to improve user experience.
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Let Your Personality Shine
- Potential customers want to get to know you before walking in the door of your med spa. On your website and Google Business Profile, invest in professional photos and videos. Modern Medical Spa in Dallas does a great job of this.
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Create a Roadmap
- It can be daunting to think about improving 20-30 service pages on your website. SEO doesn’t happen overnight. Create a roadmap of pages you’ll optimize each month and stick to that plan. After 6-12 months, you should start to reap the benefits.
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Don’t Forget to Track
- SEO is a journey you want to document. Be sure to track your keywords versus the competition in a software like SEMRush. Once you optimize a page like hydrofacials, you can see the before and after results with your rankings, which can justify the investment.
- Below is an example of what SEMRush looks like for Boss Gal Beauty. We can see the current rank, date ranges to diagnose upward and downward movement over time, the keyword difficulty and tracking versus the competition.
In Closing
Hopefully this article gives you the necessary information to excel in med spa SEO! We’ve been working with med spas for more than a decade to improve their search engine rankings. If you’d like to schedule a consult with our team, contact us today!