The salon that had to hire someone

This project ran in 2024.

A salon in a small Minnesota town hired an extra stylist because of this project. That is the part worth leading with, because rankings are a proxy and a new hire is not.

Where it started

They ranked for about 200 keywords and got 69 clicks a month. For a working salon that is close to invisible. Local competitors were taking the searches, and five of their keywords sat in the top three results.

The site was not broken. It just was not answering anything anyone was asking.

What I did

I started with the competitors, because in a local market the gap is usually obvious once you look at who is already winning and what they have not bothered to cover. That produced a keyword list built around what people in the area were actually typing, not around what the salon wanted to be known for.

From there, a content calendar. Articles that answered real questions, written in the salon’s own voice rather than in the flat register most salon content gets written in. A few pillar pieces carried the weight, and the rest supported them.

Then the internal linking, so that someone who landed on one article could find everything else without going back to search.

What happened

Keywords went from 200 to more than 15,000. Top-three rankings went from 5 to 523. Clicks went from 69 a month to more than 7,600.

The part that showed up offline

The salon got busy enough that the owner brought on another stylist. She put it down to the content and the search work, which is the only outcome here that was visible from inside the business.