A Step-by-Step SEO Audit You Can Run on Your Salon's Website This Week

This audit is built for salon owners or managers who want to understand why their website isn't generating consistent appointment bookings from Google — and who want a clear picture of the problem before spending money on fixes.

It's particularly useful if any of these situations apply:

• You've had a website for over a year but rarely see new clients mention they found you through Google search.
• You recently changed booking platforms, redesigned your site, or migrated to a new domain.
• A competitor opened nearby and you've noticed fewer walk-ins or organic inquiries.
• Your Google Business Profile gets views, but your website traffic doesn't reflect that.
• You're considering hiring an SEO agency and want to understand your starting point before the conversation.

This is a diagnostic exercise, not a one-time fix. Running it every six months gives you a baseline to measure progress against. Even if you hire someone to handle your SEO, understanding your own audit findings puts you in a much stronger position to evaluate their work and hold them accountable.

One important note: this audit covers general website SEO health. It won't replace a full technical audit by a specialist, especially for sites with custom booking integrations, JavaScript-heavy builds, or complex multi-location structures. If you're running more than two locations, the complexity scales quickly and a professional review is worth the time.

Run your audit in this order. The sequence matters — fixing content issues on a technically broken site wastes effort.

1. Technical Foundation

Start with Google Search Console (free). If you haven't verified your site, do that first. Check the Coverage report for crawl errors, blocked pages, or URLs returning 404s. Then run your homepage through Google's PageSpeed Insights. A score below 50 on mobile is a significant ranking disadvantage. Pay close attention to the Core Web Vitals section — Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) are the two most commonly failing metrics on salon sites.

2. Mobile Experience

Open your site on a phone — not desktop. Walk through the entire booking flow as a client would. Ask: can you find the service menu in under 10 seconds? Does the booking button work without zooming? Do images load within 3 seconds on a standard mobile connection? Many salon sites were built on desktop and never properly tested on the devices their customers actually use.

3. Local On-Page Signals

Every page should include your city and neighborhood name in natural context — not stuffed, but present. Check that your name, address, and phone number appear in text format (not just an image) on your contact page and footer. Verify that your homepage title tag includes your primary service and location. For example: "Balayage & Color Specialist | [Salon Name] | [City]".

4. Service Page Coverage

List every service your salon offers. Now count how many have their own dedicated page. If you offer balayage, highlights, keratin treatments, bridal hair, and kids' cuts — each of those should be a separate URL with its own title, description, pricing context, and photos. A single "Services" page with a bulleted list is almost invisible to Google for competitive service searches.

5. Booking Widget & Conversion Path

Your booking widget is a conversion point, but it's also a technical risk. Widgets from third-party platforms (Vagaro, Square, Booksy) load via JavaScript or iFrames, which can slow your site and sometimes break on certain browsers. Test it across Chrome, Safari, and Firefox on both desktop and mobile. Confirm the widget loads in under 4 seconds and that the confirmation email fires correctly after a test booking.

Use this as a rapid pass/fail checklist. Give yourself one point for each item your site currently handles well. A score of 7 or higher means you have a solid foundation. Below 5 means you likely have multiple issues actively suppressing your rankings.

1. PageSpeed mobile score is 60 or above (test at pagespeed.web.dev)
2. Site is verified in Google Search Console with no crawl errors flagged
3. Your homepage title tag includes your city name and primary service
4. NAP on your website exactly matches your Google Business Profile — same abbreviations, same suite number format
5. At least 3 core services have their own dedicated pages (not just anchors on one page)
6. Your site loads and is usable on mobile without zooming or horizontal scrolling
7. Booking widget completes successfully on mobile in under 4 seconds
8. You have a reviews section or schema markup referencing your Google reviews
9. No broken internal links (test with a free tool like Broken Link Checker)
10. Images have descriptive alt text referencing the service shown, not just "IMG_4821.jpg"

Each item you mark as failing is a specific, fixable task. This turns an abstract concept like "my SEO isn't working" into a prioritized repair list. Start with items 1–4, as they tend to have the highest impact on local rankings for salons operating in competitive metro markets.

Across the audits we've run on salon websites, the same problems appear repeatedly. Knowing them in advance helps you look in the right places.

1. Slow Image Loading From Uncompressed Portfolio Photos

Salons naturally want to showcase their work with high-quality photography. The problem is that uncompressed images — often uploaded directly from a phone or camera — can be 4–8MB each. A gallery page with 12 of these images can push load time past 10 seconds on mobile. Compress every image to under 200KB using a tool like Squoosh or TinyPNG before uploading. This single fix often has a measurable impact on Core Web Vitals scores.

2. Generic "About" Pages With No Local Relevance

Your About page is one of the highest-value local SEO assets on your site, and most salons waste it. A page that says "We are a passionate team of stylists dedicated to your beauty journey" tells Google nothing about where you are or what you specialize in. Rewrite it to include your neighborhood, the types of clients you serve, the techniques your team has trained in, and how long you've been operating in the area.

3. No Schema Markup for Local Business

Schema markup is structured data that tells Google exactly what type of business you are, your hours, your location, and your services. Most salon websites built on Squarespace, Wix, or basic WordPress themes either have incomplete or missing LocalBusiness schema. You can check your current schema at schema.org/docs/gs.html using Google's Rich Results Test. Adding or correcting this takes less than an hour with a plugin or by editing your site's JSON-LD block.

4. Booking Flow That Breaks on iOS Safari

iOS Safari handles JavaScript and cookie permissions differently from Chrome. Third-party booking widgets frequently fail silently on Safari — the button appears, but the widget doesn't load. In our experience, this is one of the most underdiagnosed conversion problems on salon sites. Test your full booking flow on an iPhone using Safari specifically, and report any issues directly to your booking platform's support team.

You don't need to spend money to diagnose most SEO issues on a salon website. These tools cover the full scope of a self-directed audit:

• Google Search Console (free) — Crawl coverage, performance data, Core Web Vitals, manual actions. This is your most important tool. Set it up if you haven't already.
• Google PageSpeed Insights (free) — Mobile and desktop performance scores with specific recommendations. Use the mobile tab first.
• Google's Rich Results Test (free) — Check whether your LocalBusiness schema is valid and complete.
• Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free up to 500 URLs) — Crawls your site like Google does, surfacing broken links, missing title tags, duplicate content, and redirect chains.
• Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (free with site verification) — Backlink profile, organic keyword visibility, and site health score. Useful for understanding your current authority relative to competitors.
• BrightLocal's Local Search Results Checker (limited free use) — Shows how your site appears in local search results from your actual city, not your home IP address. Useful for verifying whether your GBP and website are appearing together.

A realistic timeline for a solo audit using these tools: plan for 2–3 hours for a standard single-location salon site, longer if your booking system is complex or if Search Console surfaces many errors. Document every finding in a simple spreadsheet with columns for issue, location (URL), severity (high/medium/low), and fix required. This becomes your working task list — or the brief you hand to a specialist.

If you complete the audit and the findings feel overwhelming, or if you're seeing technical errors you don't know how to fix, that's a reasonable signal to bring in a professional for a focused diagnostic rather than attempting repairs without a clear understanding of root causes.

Most salon owners can handle content-level fixes without any technical background: rewriting service pages, adding location context to the About page, compressing images, updating NAP consistency. These are high-value tasks that don't require developer access.

The line where professional help becomes worthwhile:

• Your site has more than 200 pages and Screaming Frog is surfacing dozens of crawl errors or redirect chains.
• Your booking widget is embedded via custom code and you're not sure how it interacts with your site's caching layer.
• Your Search Console shows a manual action or a significant traffic drop that coincides with a Google core algorithm update.
• You've fixed the obvious issues and rankings still haven't moved after 90 days — at that point, the problem is likely in your authority or backlink profile, not your on-page setup.
• You're running a multi-location salon group where each location needs its own properly structured local SEO setup.

A professional audit doesn't replace the self-audit — it goes deeper. Where a self-audit tells you what's broken, a professional diagnostic explains why it's broken in the context of your specific market, competitors, and domain history. For salons in highly competitive urban markets, that context often determines which fixes are worth prioritizing first.

If you're at the stage where a professional review makes sense, get a professional salon SEO audit and walk in knowing exactly what questions to ask.