If Your Competitor Copied Your Salon Website Copy Word for Word, Would Anyone Notice?
Probably not. Most salon website copy has been tweaked so many times they’ve turned into beauty industry wallpaper, and wallpaper is easy to copy. The treatment name you made up, or the thing clients always say to you on the bed, is much harder to copy. That’s your voice, and it belongs on your website.
Some version of that question has come up in nearly every virtual coffee I had last week with salon and clinic owners who feel embarrassed by their website copy.
The answer is usually a long pause, followed by a sip of coffee that goes on a bit too long.
Everyone’s going on a journey (but which one?)
“Your skin journey starts here” is printed on more homepages than I can count. Somewhere along the way the industry agreed that every client must be taken on a journey, and nobody stopped to ask where to. Right now nobody knows if they’re hopping onboard Emirates first class or a Europe Contiki tour that most definitely stops in Amsterdam.
When every salon promises the same trip, the word stops telling her anything. She has no idea what you fix, or why she should pick you over the four other clinics sitting in her Instagram feed.
The maths is mathing
According to Inside Industry’s State of Professional Beauty 2026 Report, Australia has more than 40,000 hair and beauty businesses, and that number is growing three times faster than the market itself. Same pool of clients, a lot more of you fishing in it. In a pond that crowded, sounding like everyone else costs you bookings. Beige copy doesn’t survive that maths.
You knew what you wanted to say. Then came the tweaks.
What surprised me is that almost none of these owners were lost. They knew what they wanted to say and how they wanted to sound. They got so caught up in industry noise and comparison that every time they “tweaked” their copy, they were really just adding another layer of confusion to wtf their voice and message was.
It usually goes like this. A quiet month hits, and you hit the panic button. You look at what the salon down the road is doing, and their website reads all calm and polished and grown up, so you put a bit of that into yours.
Then someone tells you to be professional but not too professional, maybe a little bit quirky. You feed all of that into Chatty G, and it hands you the most average sentence ever written. You think, "I guess that’ll do?"
Every one of those calls has turned you into beauty industry wallpaper. Nice enough to look at, and impossible for the right client to notice.
If you just recognised your own website’s edit history in that paragraph, book a virtual coffee with me. Bring your homepage and I’ll show you which layers to peel off first.
Peel it back to the bits that sound like you
The fix starts with putting back the bits that made you sound like a real person: the treatment name nobody else would have thought of, and the lines clients say to you when they’re on the bed, the actual feeling (not the industry thesaurus version) your client experience creates and the one I love reading most, the special touchpoints I can expect to experience when booking a treatment with you.
These examples of emotive-driven copy are what your client connects with. They're also usually the first things a “small tweak” sands off.
Here’s your homework. Open your homepage and ask whether your salon website copy says what you fix for your client, or how you want her to feel when she walks out your door. If your answer is “relaxed,” try again. Every salon on your street says relaxed.
A useful answer is something she’d notice in her own week. She gets asked what foundation she’s wearing and gets to say, a little smugly, that it’s her skin.
She stops rescheduling because your late Thursday appointments fit around her life. Specific, maybe even a bit unglamorous, but completely yours.
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