A Step-by-Step Salon SEO Audit You Can Run This Week

This guide is written for salon owners who already suspect their website isn't performing the way it should. Maybe you're not showing up when someone searches "hair salon near me" in your neighborhood. Maybe you rank for your own name but nothing else. Maybe a new competitor opened down the street and suddenly your booking volume dropped.

You don't need to be technical to complete this audit. You do need about two to three hours, a spreadsheet to track findings, and access to the following free tools:

• Google Search Console — shows indexing status, search queries, and manual actions
• Google PageSpeed Insights — scores your site speed on mobile and desktop
• Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free tier covers up to 500 URLs) — crawls your site for technical errors
• Google Business Profile manager — lets you audit your own GBP listing directly
• Moz Local or BrightLocal — checks citation consistency across directories

Work through the five sections below in order. Each section ends with a simple scoring prompt: Pass, Needs Work, or Critical Issue. By the end, you'll have a prioritized list of what to fix and a realistic sense of whether those fixes are within your reach or require specialist support.

One honest note before you start: this audit reveals problems. Some will be quick wins you can handle in an afternoon. Others — like rebuilding site architecture or recovering from a manual Google penalty — are genuinely complex. Knowing which is which is the whole point of this exercise.

Before Google can rank your salon, it has to be able to crawl and index your pages. Technical errors here block everything downstream, which is why this is the right place to start.

Check 1: Indexing Status

Open Google Search Console and navigate to Coverage → Indexed pages. How many pages are indexed? A five-page salon website should have five to eight pages indexed (home, services, about, contact, maybe a blog). If you see zero or a very low number, your site may have a noindex tag, a robots.txt block, or a crawl budget problem.

Check 2: Mobile Usability

In Search Console, check the Mobile Usability report. Most salon website visitors are on phones — often 70–80% of traffic in this vertical, based on patterns we observe across campaigns. Any mobile usability errors here are high-priority fixes.

Check 3: Page Speed

Run your homepage through Google PageSpeed Insights. Focus on Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). Salon sites with large, uncompressed hero images — common on Squarespace and Wix builds — frequently score poorly here. A score below 50 on mobile is a meaningful ranking disadvantage.

Check 4: HTTPS and Basic Security

Confirm your site loads on https:// and that there are no mixed-content warnings (pages loading some assets over HTTP). This is a baseline trust signal Google has weighted for years.

Scoring Prompt

• Pass: Fully indexed, no mobile errors, PageSpeed above 70 mobile, HTTPS confirmed
• Needs Work: Minor mobile warnings, PageSpeed 50–70, a few non-indexed pages
• Critical Issue: Large indexing gaps, mobile errors present, PageSpeed below 50, HTTP warnings

On-page SEO is about making sure each page on your site clearly communicates its topic to Google. For salons, this means your service pages need to explicitly reference what you offer and where you offer it — not just display a beautiful photo gallery.

Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

Use Screaming Frog to export all your page titles. Look for two problems: missing titles (blank or defaulting to your site platform's generic text) and keyword-absent titles. A title like "Our Services" tells Google almost nothing. A title like "Balayage & Hair Color Services | Lumière Salon | Austin, TX" does real work.

Check every core service page: haircuts, color, extensions, blowouts, treatments. Each should have a unique title tag that includes the service name and your city or neighborhood.

Heading Structure

Each page should have one H1 that matches the page's primary topic. H2s and H3s should support it with related terms. A common mistake on salon sites: the H1 is the salon name on every single page. That's a wasted opportunity on every page that isn't your homepage.

Service Page Depth

Thin service pages — those with fewer than 200 words of actual text — rarely rank competitively. If your color services page is just a price list and two sentences, it's unlikely to outrank competitors who have answered questions like "How long does balayage take?" or "What's the difference between highlights and balayage?" on the same page.

Scoring Prompt

• Pass: Unique, keyword-rich titles on all service pages; one H1 per page; service pages have 300+ words of relevant content
• Needs Work: Some title tags generic or duplicate; thin content on one or two pages
• Critical Issue: Most pages missing keyword-relevant titles; H1s are all the salon name; service pages have under 100 words

For most salons, local SEO is where the highest-use ranking opportunities live. The map pack — those three listings that appear above organic results when someone searches "hair salon near me" — drives a disproportionate share of new client bookings.

Google Business Profile Completeness Check

Open your GBP listing manager and work through this checklist:

• Category: Is your primary category set to "Hair Salon" (or the most accurate match)? Have you added secondary categories for specific services like nail salon, eyebrow threading, or waxing salon if applicable?
• Hours: Are your hours current, including holiday hours when relevant?
• Photos: Do you have at least 10–15 photos covering your interior, exterior, team, and service results? GBP listings with active photo libraries consistently outperform those without in the engagements we've observed.
• Services list: Have you populated the services section with your actual menu — not just a single line item?
• Reviews: What's your current rating and review count? More importantly — are you responding to reviews, both positive and negative?
• Posts: When did you last publish a GBP post? Listings with regular posts (promotions, seasonal offers, new stylists) tend to show stronger engagement signals.

Citation Consistency

Your salon's NAP data (Name, Address, Phone) needs to appear identically across every directory listing — Google, Yelp, Booksy, Vagaro, Facebook, and any local business directories. Even small variations ("St." vs "Street", a missing suite number, an old phone number) can suppress your local rankings.

Run your business name through Moz Local or BrightLocal's citation checker to identify inconsistencies. Flag every mismatch for correction.

Scoring Prompt

• Pass: GBP fully populated, 4.0+ rating with regular responses, NAP consistent across major directories
• Needs Work: GBP missing some services or photos, a few citation mismatches, infrequent review responses
• Critical Issue: GBP unclaimed or incomplete, significant citation conflicts, zero review responses, rating below 3.5

The final step of a practical audit isn't just knowing what's wrong with your site — it's knowing how far behind (or ahead of) your local competitors you actually are. SEO is a relative game. A site with moderate issues can still rank well if competitors have worse ones.

Quick Competitive Snapshot

Search your primary target phrase — something like "hair salon [your city]" or "balayage [your neighborhood]" — in an incognito window. Look at the top three map pack results and the top three organic results. For each, check:

• How many Google reviews do they have, and what's their rating?
• Does their website have dedicated service pages with real content?
• Does their GBP listing look complete and actively maintained?

You're not trying to reverse-engineer their entire strategy in one sitting. You're getting a calibration: are you dealing with well-optimized competitors, or is this a market where basic execution will move the needle quickly?

Consolidate Your Scores

By now you have Pass / Needs Work / Critical Issue scores for four areas: technical health, on-page signals, local presence, and citation consistency. Translate those into a simple priority stack:

• Any Critical Issues: Fix these before anything else. A site that can't be crawled or a GBP that's unclaimed will nullify every other improvement.
• Multiple Needs Work: This is the most common outcome. Prioritize local presence and on-page titles first — these tend to produce ranking changes faster than technical refinements in most salon markets.
• All Passes: If everything scores well but you're still not ranking, the issue is likely authority — backlinks and domain reputation — which requires a longer-term content and PR strategy.

When to Handle It Yourself vs. bring in [professional services](/industry/professional/accountant) help

Rule of thumb: if you have Critical Issues in more than two categories, or if you've attempted fixes before without results, an outside perspective usually pays for itself. The diagnostic complexity compounds quickly — fixing a title tag on a site with crawl issues, for example, produces no visible result until the crawl issue is resolved first.

If you want a second set of eyes on your audit findings, get a professional salon SEO audit and strategy from our team — we'll tell you exactly what's worth fixing and in what order.