What this looks like in a health and beauty business
Someone's just moved to the area, or their usual stylist's fully booked, and they search "hair salon near me" on their phone. They scroll the map results and book with whichever listing looks current: full services, recent photos, a page of reviews from the last few weeks. Your salon might have a loyal client base built up over years, but if the Google Business Profile was claimed once and never touched again, you're not in that scroll at all.
Nobody on the team is quite sure whose job the listing is. The categories were set years ago, the photos are from before a refit, and the reviews trail off from around the time everyone got busy. Meanwhile a newer salon two streets over, with half the experience, keeps showing up first because every field is filled in and every client's asked for a review. As a rough practitioner rule of thumb, not a figure Google publishes itself, salons and clinics competing reliably in the map pack tend to sit above 50 recent reviews with a handful of new ones arriving most months, which is a sensible target rather than a guarantee.
Marketplaces are quietly competing with your own listing
Treatwell, Fresha and Phorest all run their own public booking pages, and Google often surfaces those alongside, or even above, a business's own website and profile in local search results. That's not necessarily bad: a well-reviewed marketplace page can bring in genuinely new clients who'd never have found the salon directly. But it does mean your "near me" visibility is now spread across at least three places, your Google Business Profile, your website and a marketplace page, and if only one of them is kept current, that's the one that ends up representing you. See who should rank first: your marketplace page or your own profile for a simple monthly check.
Clinics face stricter rules on what the listing and reviews can actually say
For a physio, aesthetics or cosmetic clinic, local search success runs into advertising rules that a hair salon doesn't have to think about, and that's exactly why local SEO for a salon and a clinic isn't quite the same job. The Advertising Standards Authority's CAP Code restricts how prescription-only treatments like Botox can be advertised to the public at all, which affects what a Google Business Profile post, a website page or even a photo caption can safely claim, as covered in full in what you can and can't say about Botox on your Google profile. Before-and-after photos are powerful for conversion but need handling carefully: implying a guaranteed result, or advertising a POM treatment directly, can fall foul of the rules that govern medical and aesthetic advertising, separately from anything Google itself cares about. If the practice is CQC-registered for any regulated activity it carries out, that registration is also worth surfacing on the website and profile (more on showing it properly), since it's one of the few credibility signals a prospective patient can actually verify.
Meet Jess
Jess runs a hair salon with four stylists. Most bookings used to come from regulars and word of mouth, but she's noticed fewer new faces lately, even with the same quality of work going out the door, and a chunk of the new clients she does get now arrive via a Treatwell listing she set up once and forgot about.
"I assumed being established for years counted for something on Google. Turns out it doesn't, unless the listing actually shows it."
Jess is an illustrative example, a composite of the salons and clinics we talk to, not a real client.
How we'd fix it
- Google Business Profile setup: every category filled in properly (hair salon, colour specialist, physiotherapist, whichever genuinely apply), services and prices listed individually, real photos of the salon, team and finished work, and short posts so the profile looks active.
- Local SEO foundations, what's often called local SEO for salons or local SEO for hairdressers: fixing parts of the website that don't currently mention the services and area clients search for, and making sure the business's name, address and phone number match exactly across the website, the Google listing and any marketplace page.
- Automatic review requests, sent a day or two after the appointment, so recent reviews keep arriving instead of sitting frozen from years back, and worded so clients aren't inadvertently prompted to mention a specific treatment or health detail in a public review.
- A content and claims check for clinics offering regulated or prescription-only treatments, so before-and-afters, service descriptions and profile posts stay the right side of the CAP Code rather than risking a complaint or a takedown.
- A short check on the website itself, so it backs up what the profile and any marketplace listing say, rather than quietly disagreeing with them.
What it costs and how long it takes
Google Business Profile setup is a guide price from £250, usually live within a week. Local SEO foundations, covering the technical and on-page work, start from £600 and typically take two to four weeks. Automatic review requests start from £250. A clinic needing advertising claims checked alongside the listing work doesn't usually add much time, since it's largely a wording and photo review rather than a separate project. All of these are guide prices for a typical business, with the fixed quote following a free 30-minute call.
The trade-offs worth knowing
A complete, active profile competes properly, it doesn't guarantee a particular position in the results, and nobody honest can promise you one. Reviews and fresh content tend to move things in the right direction over weeks rather than overnight. For regulated treatments, getting the advertising right sometimes means a less dramatic before-and-after photo or a more cautious piece of wording than a competitor who's simply not following the rules, which can feel like a disadvantage even though it's the safer and more defensible path.
What you get back
Someone searching for exactly what you offer, nearby, should find the salon or clinic, see it looks current and well-reviewed across every listing they come across, and book without scrolling past you.
Related
Read the general guide to customers can't find us on Google, see the wider picture for health and beauty, and the related example of a hair salon with online booking and an end to no-shows. For more detail, see the Google Business Profile checklist for local businesses.