Nobody Booked Your Salon Because of the Software

You’re tired of hearing about your salon’s website. I’d be tired of it too, if every third person through my door had a strong opinion about mine and not one of them had ever paid me for a haircut.

Someone told you recently that you ought to be on WordPress. Or that you ought to get off it, which is the same conversation wearing a different jacket.

Either way you nodded, said you’d look into it, and went back to work because a color was processing and the phone was going.

When did a paying client last mention your website to you? Not a supplier rep, and not your nephew who does something with computers. An actual woman in the chair, halfway through a color appointment.

So let me get that argument off your counter in about four paragraphs. Then I want to count what your website is really costing you, in women who meant to call and didn’t.

The platform question, settled

WordPress runs 17.5% of the salon websites I audited, against 36.4% of small business sites everywhere else.

So your trade mostly isn’t on it, and the rest of the field is spread pretty thin. Squarespace takes 14.5%, Wix 12.4% and Weebly 8.3% of the same sites.

Those shares don’t add up to everything, because one website can answer to two of them at once and plenty of sites never announce what they were built with at all.

If the choice ever does land in front of you, I’ve set Weebly and WordPress against each other properly, and even that comparison won’t fill a chair on a Wednesday.

A platform is the kit your website was assembled from, nothing grander than that. Ask a client which kit built the last salon page she booked on, and she’ll give you the look she’d give you for asking which brand of drywall sits behind your mirrors.

No woman has ever picked the salon across the road over yours for that reason. It hasn’t happened and it isn’t going to start this year.

Right. That argument is off your counter, and it can stay off it permanently.

Now count the thing properly

Not in percentages, which have never once filled a chair on a Wednesday. In people who very nearly became clients.

Salons land on 68 out of 100 overall, which puts them 43 of 47.

A score like that is an average of ten separate checks, and an average is wonderfully good at hiding the one thing you needed to see. So take the moments underneath it one at a time, slowly.

The woman who searched for what you actually do

Think about the sign bolted over your door. It names the trade and the street, because a stranger walking past has about three seconds and nothing else to go on.

A web page gets one line that does that same job, marked in the code as the H1, and a search engine reads that line before it reads a word of anything else you wrote.

58.1% of these homepages carry one, the lowest of all 47 trades on that check, where 73.7% of small business homepages do.

The rest of them say Welcome. Or they say the salon name in a decorative script font, laid over a photograph of an empty chair, which looks lovely to you and reads as absolutely nothing to a search engine.

No platform on earth writes that line for you. Roofers on WordPress leave the same boxes sitting empty, and the software will wait years without once mentioning it.

So what does yours say at the moment? Have a guess before you look, and then go and find out whether the guess was anywhere near right.

The cost, counted honestly: the woman two streets away who typed in the thing she wanted done and found someone else offering it.

The woman who wanted to know if you do her hair

16.8% of these sites publish a blog, against 37% of the small businesses I count.

I’m not asking you to write a blog. I’d probably talk you out of it if you offered, because I’ve watched too many owners post twice and then feel guilty about it for four years.

I’m asking whether one single page on your website answers a question you get asked out loud four times a week.

Curly hair. Grey coverage. What a correction costs when a box dye went orange on a Sunday and she’s crying in your chair on the Monday.

What are the four questions you answer out loud every week without even thinking about them? Those are your pages, and you already know them by heart.

The cost: the woman who typed that question in at eleven at night, read another salon’s answer, and booked with the person who bothered to write it down.

The woman who has meant to try you since June

She isn’t searching for anything at all. She already knows your name, she’s walked past the window twice, and what she needs is one small reason to think about you between now and Christmas.

Your website has given her nothing since the day it went up. It has the same four photographs and the same prices, one of which is wrong.

What would actually make her think of you on a Thursday in November?

The cost of that this week is nothing whatsoever, which is exactly why it never gets anybody’s attention. The cost of it over a full calendar year is considerably more than the website ever charged you.

So put a number on it yourself

Four of those a month? Two? One a week through the summer, which is the estimate most owners eventually settle on once they stop arguing with me?

You know what a client is worth to you over five years far better than I ever will. Do that multiplication on the back of an appointment card and the answer is real money.

Not one line of it turns up anywhere you could go and look. A leak like this never arrives as a bad day, it arrives as a Tuesday that was a bit quiet, twelve times a year, and you put it down to the weather.

I don’t ask anyone to take my word for any of it, mostly because I wouldn’t take mine either. The report has an explorer on it with two boxes: set the industry one to Hair Salons, leave the other box alone, and the card it hands back prints the platform mix with the number of websites standing behind every share. I sampled 4,065 salons across 24 markets for this and audited 1,966 of their sites, so every check in this post is sitting in there with its own count beside it.

Why the platform keeps getting the blame

Because the platform is the only part of a website carrying a brand name, and brand names are comfortable to argue about over a coffee.

Nobody at your supplier day is going to lean over and ask whether the biggest line of text on your homepage says what you do. It isn’t a fun question and it doesn’t cost anything to fix, which somehow makes it worse.

Meanwhile the rebuild quote in your inbox is for four thousand dollars and two weeks of your attention. Would that quote have fixed any of the three women above? Read it again and see if it mentions one of them.

I’ve moved salons from one platform onto another and watched absolutely nothing happen to the telephone. I’ve also changed one line of text on a homepage and had an owner ring me in October to ask what I’d done.

An interior designer nearly bought the same move from me last year, and talking her out of it took one honest look at what was actually wrong.

I have not always been that useful. Years ago I sold a salon owner a rebuild she didn’t need, and I still think about the invoice.

The one thing, and only this one

Ignore every number in this post. All of them, including the ones that took me two weeks to collect.

Go and look at the biggest line of text on your own homepage tonight. If it says Welcome, or your business name and nothing else, change it to what you do and the neighborhood you do it in.

Then close the laptop and leave it alone. Not the platform, not the blog, not the photographs, and certainly not the four thousand dollar quote.

When an owner hires me for a salon website, that line is the first thing I change and the cheapest thing I touch all month.

The platform argument will still be waiting for you in the spring. It’ll still be the least interesting thing about your website, and it still won’t have rung your phone once.