You quickly realise, when you set up your own aesthetics business, that you need to become not only an expert injector, but an expert marketer, designer, bookkeeper, admin and sales person!

One of the things you should quickly acquainted with is websites, Google, blogs and SEO.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It’s basically the steps you take to improve your website’s visibility on Google.

Other search engines exist, but with around 92% of all search traffic going through Google (and it’s nearest competitor, Bing taking just 3%) most businesses, marketers and web developers optimise their sites for Google.

Why is SEO important for aesthetic businesses?

With 81% of consumers going online to find information and answer any questions about a service or product they’re interested in, having a strong online presence is crucial for the success of any independent business. Not only is it a great way to market your services - a well designed and branded website, containing easily accessible information for your perfect patients is an amazing way to engender trust and position yourself as an expert in aesthetics. Becoming a resource that patients and potential patients can visit and re-visit is GREAT for business.

When patients are choosing a practitioner, they take information from a variety of places. Even if you come highly recommended, a person will check out social media profiles, websites, reviews and before and afters to ensure that the recommendation is right for them.

A website, rich with information, one that is well branded and easy to navigate is an important asset. Like a shop window on steroids!

But getting “to the top of Google” is no happy accident. Those who are there have optimised their website and content not only for humans, but for search engines like Google.

Here’s a short, hopefully easy to follow, guide on SEO for aesthetic practitioners, from building your website, to filling it with content.

BUT before you get going, you need to have your brand identity sorted, with various versions of your logo, your fonts and brand colours. You should also have professional photographs of you, your clinic, your team and any products you retail. Your website should not contain generic, stock photography.

Step 1: Plan Your Website

There are those that say there’s no point having a website. That you can build your business on Instagram and Facebook. And in the very early days of your aesthetics business, while you’re finding your feet and figuring out whether working as a solopreneur is for you, it could be argued that adding your booking link to a Google Business Profile is sufficient and getting active on socials is the way to seed your business.

But once you’ve decided that having an aesthetics business - in whatever form that takes - is what you want to do…you need a website.

A website providing relevant information for patients, helps you build credibility and trust and makes it easy for potential clients to understand more about your business, ethos and the services offered.

Here are the basic pages an aesthetic clinic website should include…

The Header and Footer

The header of each page should have your logo on the left and a navigation on the right.

The footer of each page should have your contact details, location, links to other pages, privacy policy, late cancel and no show policy, Ts and Cs, Book Now Button.

Home Page

This is where most people will land when they Google you. Here is a summary of what they should find when they get to your home page.

• A brief overview of the clinic's ethos, service offering and brand.

• Make it clear WHO you are for

• Professional photos of the clinic, team and products - these should not be stock photos.

• Embed your social media feeds

• A Call To Action button (CTA) - ideally Book Now

About

• Share the origins of the business

• Share your ethos, mission and values

• Introduce team members - include names, photos and profession.

• CTA button

Services

• Detail the treatments you offer and the concerns they address

• Include the prices

• CTA button

Our Work / Gallery / Portfolio

• Showcase your very best work. Curate a gallery of the before and afters you’re most proud of. This makes it easier for your potential perfect patients to see themselves represented in your work.

• Include a carousel of your best reviews. Add credibility by including the reviewers name, the date the review was left and the star rating. Even better if you can add a photo/selfie of your patient too.

• CTA button

Contact Us

• How to Book

• Clearly display the clinic's address, phone number, and email

• Location Map Include an embedded Google Map for easy navigation

• Information about public transport, parking or directions if necessary

• CTA button

Blog

• Treatment Guides

• Blog Articles

• News and updates

• Offers

• FAQs

• Pre- and Post-Treatment Information

• CTA button

By including these pages and content, your website can effectively communicate what you offer, who you’re perfect for, build trust and establish you as an expert, encourage potential clients to take the next steps toward booking treatments AND increase the likelihood of your website appearing in search engine results pages.

Step 2: Build Your Website

Once you have drilled down what is going to be on your website, you need to set about designing and building it.

There are a two main options here:

1. DIY - There are loads of platforms out there where you can buy a domain, sort your email address and build your site using pre-set templates. A few user-friendly platforms you can check out include Squarespace, Wix, GoDaddy

2. Outsource - get someone else to build it for you.

This guide can help in both instances.

Here are some things to consider when designing and building your site, or paying someone else to build a site for you:

Plan out the navigation - Design a user-friendly navigation structure with clear menus and categories. Plan this out BEFORE you start to build your website. Be clear on the copy, images and CTAs you will use on each page.

Keep your website on brand - It helps to have a few versions of your logo, your brand colours and any photography/images to hand. Know which fonts you will use. This will make designing your website a whole lot easier and ensure that it looks cohesive when you’ve finished.

Keep your website simple - Ensure that visitors can easily find what they're looking for within a few seconds/clicks. Your website should be intuitive and easy to navigate. Your slugs or URL (the web address that appears in the browser bar) should make sense to Google and humans who use your site.

Step 3: Optimise Your Website

If you have built your website yourself, you may need some help with this section. This is the bit where you make sure your website it “seen” by Google.

If you’ve outsources the build of your website, ensure that you have briefed them on the following, so that it is included in your website build costs.

Think “Mobile-first”

Most people browse on their phones. Google loves mobile-friendly websites and prioritises mobile-responsive sites. So when you’re checking how your website looks and feels, don’t use the desktop view, use the mobile view.

• Make sure your site looks beautiful, and is intuitive, on mobile.

• Ensure the text size and font is legible on a phone screen.

• Ensure the contrast between colours is sufficient, don’t use pale text and pale background colours.

You can test how well your site works on mobile using Google Lighthouse - a free Google Chrome extension. This can help you spot where your site needs improving.

Check your page load speeds

Pages should load quickly. Slow page load speeds impact how user-friendly your site is and Google loves a user-friendly site. You want high quality images, but not ones that are so large, they take ages to load. Likewise video content. Again, Google Lighthouse can help you check this.

Get Google to crawl your site

Set up a Google Search Console account and submit your sitemap to Google. This helps Google understand your site's structure, so it’s able to crawl and index it easily. Here’s how to do it.

Create a robots.txt file to guide search engine crawlers on which pages to crawl and which to avoid - you will likely want Google to crawl all pages.

Meta data

Each page on your website will have meta data. These are titles and descriptions that are written for Google, not humans. The provide Google with an indication of what can be found on each page of your website.

Ensure your meta data for each page has:

• Your business name

• Your clinic location

• A summary of the page content including any keywords you want it to rank for

Don’t use the same SEO titles and meta descriptions for each page. The meta data for each page should be unique.

Step 4: Consistently Publish Helpful Content

Search engines are all about providing the searcher with the answers to their questions. High quality, reader-friendly, helpful content is key.

But how do you know what people are searching for?

Start with Keyword Research

• Identify relevant keywords

Using what you know about what clients are asking during their consultations, or in your DMs, and tools like Google Keyword Planner and platforms like SEMrush, Ubersuggest, MOZ or Ahrefs, you can create lists of keywords for the treatments you offer and the concerns they address. If you’re certain that you want content to be a significant part of your marketing.

You want to include a mix of both short-tail keywords (e.g. lip filler - these are broad, generic terms…there will be lots of searches for these terms, but also lots of competition) and long-tail keywords (e.g. best lip filler volume for small lips - these are specific search terms, which will have smaller numbers of people searching for them, but they are typically higher intent searches with much less competition).

• Check the competition

Run your competitors websites through tools like SEMrush, Ubersuggest, MOZ or Ahrefs to find out what traffic they are getting for what search terms. Look for gaps in their keywords, or for ideas for content so you’re able to direct some of that traffic to your site.

• Make a plan

From the list of keywords you have created, start to plan out the blogs you can write for each of them. Categorise these by treatment and get writing. Write content that directly addresses their questions and concerns.

When you’re adding blogs to your site, add internal links to each article to other articles, as people spending a long time on your site is a good indicator for Google that you are providing helpful information.  As an added bonus, add a search bar.

Write with purpose

• Your content should support your patients in their aesthetic journey

Not everyone who performs a search is ready to book. They may be in the very early stages of their journey where they are still researching treatments. Or they may have done months of research and are ready to book…understanding the intent of the person searching and creating content to meet them where they are in their journey is the smart thing to do. Make sure you have content that can suit someone at each point of their aesthetics journey, from first discovering your site, to aftercare information. You want to become a single source of valuable information. A site they can return to.

• Your content should be easy for Google to crawl

You need to write for your human readers. They are the ones that will decide whether your content is valuable. But you also need to run it through the lens of the search engines. Ensure that you have included the keyword you wish to rank for (1-4 times per 100 words). If it fits within your content, include your clinic location. This is great for local SEO. Consider writing in a question/answer format. Use bullet points and images to break up blocks of copy and structure your writing in a reader-friendly way - intro, body, summary.

Any blog titles should be clear, descriptive and include the focus keyword.

Give any images or videos descriptive file names and ensure you add descriptive alt text…this provides more information to Google about the contents of that particular webpage. And yes…including the focus keyword!

• Your content should NOT be wholly written by ChatGPT!

ChatGPT and other AI tools are a great way to get started with content, but humans can spot AI generated written content and it’s typically not as engaging or reader-friendly as copy that has been crafted by a human. So be mindful of relying too heavily on AI to populate the blog section of your website. Remember, Google loves content that humans love…

Link it up

Add both internal links (links to other relevant pages on your website) and external links (links to other relevant websites) into the body of your blog. And, if you can, build up backlinks to YOUR site - these are links to pages of your website from other high authority sites. You can get these by writing blogs for other websites, or by collaborating with other business owners to provide reciprocal links to each others sites.

Step 5: Don’t Forget Local SEO

Set up your Google Business Profile. It’s ESSENTIAL. Ensure you have completed every section, with accurate information, and update it frequently…Google likes fresh, new content.

Encourage your patients to leave you Google reviews by sharing your Google review link on social media, in newsletters and in automated post-treatment emails.

Step 6: Be Patient

SEO is a long game. It can take 3 - 6 months to see the fruits of your SEO labour. But the result are compounding if you consistently publish helpful, useful content.

To summarise:

1. Get professional photography

2. Get a suite of logos, brand colours, know your brand voice and fonts

3. Plan your website (Include a home page, about, service, our work, contact, blog, with a header and footer on each page)

4. Design & build your site - yourself or use a digital designer/web designer

5. Optimise your site for search engines

6. Write & publish helpful, search engine optimised content regularly

7. Add internal and external links to your articles

8. Build backlinks from other sites

9. Set up and maintain your Google Business Profile

By following these steps, you'll be well on your way to improving your website's visibility on search engines and attracting more organic traffic to your aesthetics business.