How To Write Website Copy For Salons That Book

Right, so last week you heard nothing from me, and I'm not going to dress it up as a strategic content pause. The deadlines were deadling (yes, that's the tense now, I've decided), school holidays have landed like a freight train with no brakes, and I spent the month head down writing website copy for a chaotic spread of businesses across our world.

Yes, that's a tent & no, I will not be taking further questions

Website copy for salons, award-winning clinics, a global brand, educators and an at-home salon running between school pick-ups.

They're all about as far apart as our industry gets, and the same three gaps in every single one of them.

The budget made no difference to it, neither did the size; the site was leaking in exactly the same spots, whether there was a whole department behind it or just her and a Squarespace template.

So I sat with that for a while, because it makes no sense and total sense at once.

Here are the three that came up each time.

Trying to talk to everyone = talking to nobody

Each of them could sketch their dream client for me in full HD. Her age, her budget, the school run, the almond latte she buys herself afterwards like a tiny medal (I feel seen).

Then they'd publish a homepage written for, and I cannot stress this enough, absolutely nobody.

It's not that they don't know her. They know her like a best mate, and then they sit down to write and ghost her completely, because the page is busy talking to "everyone" (which is just no one in a nicer outfit), and your dream client clocks that in about a second and a half.

She can feel when she's not the one being spoken to. We all can. It's the website equivalent of a bloke at a party looking over your shoulder for someone better the whole time he's talking to you.

Selling the glycolic, not the glow

Nobody, and I mean nobody, is booking the peel. She's booking the version of herself who stops hiding at the back of every group photo.

The copy I kept wading into was all treatment, all tech, all percentages of this acid and that one, every fact correct, and the entire bloody point nowhere to be found.

Your client did not get out of bed for your offering. She got up for who she gets to be on the far side of it, and a page that gives her no room to feel that is a page she'll happily abandon for the brand down the road that does.

Confuse her, and you lose her, fine, we all know that one. Bore her senseless, and you lose her just as fast, and nobody seems to want to talk about that bit.

Forgetting that robots read website copy for salons, too (and honestly, I don't blame you)

Most of these sites were still writing breathy little love letters to Google circa 2019, like the only reader who'd ever matter was a search engine snuffling around for keywords.

Meanwhile, half their clients have quit Googling and started asking Chatty G: what skin condition they've got, what they should book and where.

So I built proper FAQ sections into every product and service page, written in the actual words a real person uses. I also made these pages hold more information, but with less overwhelm by breaking up the copy with subheadings like "how it feels" and "what to expect."

This is a clever way to speak to your ideal client and please the robot overlords in one. Your Type A reader gets to disappear down the detail without drowning your Type B, and those neat labelled chunks happen to be exactly what the AI reaches for when it's deciding whose name to hand over.

You're still writing for her. You're making sure the robots can find her and walk her to your door.

So there's your three. If you got to the bottom of this with a slow, sinking feeling about your own website copy, good. Spotting the gap is the hard part, and most people never get there; they just low-key wonder why the enquiries aren't landing.

The rest is only words, and (lucky you), words are the whole thing I do. So if the thought of rewriting your service pages on a school night makes you want to drink retinol, this is me gently reminding you that you don't have to.

Click here to connect, and let's get cracking.