How the Booked-Out Med Spas Use Their Website

You already know which med spa in your city never has a free Saturday, don’t you?

So do I, more or less. I can pick a few of them out before I’ve read a word of anybody’s marketing, and it’s almost never the clinic with the prettiest photographs.

The awkward part is what I can’t use to find her. 92.0% of the med spas I sampled have a website, 4 of 47 trades.

Nearly every clinic that could take your customer this afternoon has one. You aren’t competing with a business that has no website, you’re competing with fourteen that do.

Calgary owners get the same news from me, everybody on the street already has one, which turns the whole question into what your next quote is actually buying.

So the website itself stopped being the advantage a long time ago, and what replaced it is a handful of ordinary habits that nobody photographs for a portfolio.

Every one of them is a smaller job than you’re hoping for, which is either good news or annoying news depending on how much you’ve already spent.

1) They point at the work they did last week

Your customer has one question before she books anything involving a needle, and it isn’t whether your brand is elegant.

Is this place good at it now? This month, on a face like hers, by the person who’ll actually be holding the syringe?

A website can’t answer that. It reads the same on launch day and three years later, which is why nobody trusts one on its own.

Your feed can answer it. It’s dated, it’s honest in a slightly unflattering way, and it’s the only proof anywhere that you were working on Thursday.

74.7% of these sites link out to a social profile, well clear of the 66% I get across everything I audit, so your trade has mostly worked that out already.

The busy ones go a step further, and the step is small. The link sits on the first screen instead of hiding down in the footer, the handle matches the one on the business cards, and the newest thing on it went up this week.

I don’t mean bolting the feed itself onto your homepage, either, because that costs you speed you can’t spare.

Phone speed is the weakest check your trade holds anywhere I look, and the gallery is usually the thing to resize rather than the website. A link is enough.

Can a stranger get from your homepage to your last handful of results in one tap? Take your phone out and try it, because I’d bet a nice lunch it takes three.

2) They answer the question she typed at eleven at night

She isn’t searching for a med spa. She’s searching for whether the thing she wants will hurt, how long it lasts, and how bad she’ll look at the wedding on Saturday.

The clinics that stay full have a page for each treatment, written the way they’d explain it across the desk in a consult.

I’ve read a few hundred of those pages this year, and I can tell inside two lines whether a clinician wrote it or a marketing company did. So can she.

Does it hurt. How long before it settles. What it costs, or at least the honest range. Who shouldn’t have it at all, which is the answer that sells the hardest, because nobody expects a business to talk them out of anything.

38.1% of these sites publish a blog or anything like one, which is about what I find on small business sites generally, so most of your competition has left those questions unanswered.

She’ll read four of those pages before she books, and she’ll book with whoever wrote the ones that sounded like a person.

How many of those questions does your site answer today? Not the brochure version, the real one.

Then she arrives at the consult already sold, and your day gets shorter. When did you last spend twenty minutes explaining downtime to someone who could have read it on a Tuesday night?

3) They let a machine repeat their opening hours

Plenty of these decisions get made without your website being opened at all, which took me an embarrassingly long time to accept about my own industry.

She asks her phone what’s open near her on a Sunday, or which places nearby do the treatment she’s just heard of, and something hands her three names in a box before she’s tapped anything.

Those names come from the pages that tagged their own facts as facts. Schema markup is that tagging, and it settles whether your clinic is one of the three she gets offered or none of them.

When did you last run the search your customer runs, on a phone that isn’t yours?

74.9% of med spa sites use it, a little ahead of the 70.5% I see everywhere else, and your trade is quietly better at this than most.

The clinic without it doesn’t get beaten in that box. It never gets into the box, so there’s nothing to lose and nobody to blame, and the owner spends the winter wondering why the phone went quiet.

I’ve built enough med spa sites to know the reply I get here. Nobody wants to pay for work that never shows up on a screen.

Neither do I, particularly. I still do it first.

Orthodontists weigh the same pair of quotes, and the cheap one is cheap because of the parts a client never asks about.

The habit almost nobody in your trade has

Now the part where your industry falls over, and it’s the cheapest item on the whole list.

24.8% of these homepages carry a contact form, against 28% of small business sites in general, which is one of the few checks where your trade sits under the national line rather than above it.

Picture the woman from the first section. She’s read your treatment page, she’s scrolled your feed, she’s decided, and it’s twenty past nine on a Sunday night.

Your homepage gives her a phone number and your opening hours.

So she has to remember, tomorrow, at work, to step outside and ring a stranger about something she’d rather not say out loud in an open-plan office.

She won’t. She’ll book with the place whose page let her type her name at twenty past nine, and you’ll never learn that she nearly picked you.

A form is a few boxes and an email address. Name, treatment, and when she’s free, and every extra field you add costs you another one of her.

A clinic owner told me last year that her customers prefer to phone. I asked her how she knew that, and she went quiet, because her website had never once offered anyone the alternative.

If you want to see what a homepage that asks for the booking looks like, I keep a few med spa examples over here.

Do this one, ignore the rest

Put a form on your homepage this week. Above the fold, where her thumb already is.

Then ignore everything else I’ve written up there.

I’d rather you did one small thing this week than nodded along at three of them and did none, which is what usually happens whenever I hand an owner a list of four improvements.

Leave the social links alone, leave the treatment pages for next month, and let the tagging wait until spring. None of them are worth anything while she’s standing at the end of your website holding a phone number she isn’t going to dial.

If you’d rather I checked yours before you spend a penny, send me the address and I’ll tell you what happens to a stranger who wants to book you tonight.

Then come back and tell me you’re the exception, and bring me the last three bookings to prove it.