SEO promotion of a website providing laser hair removal services

Search engine optimization of a website helps to attract the target audience to the website. That one is likely to perform the target action (for example, order a callback or service) which is extremely important for a new website because neither search engines nor users know anything about the new resource.

SEO methods allow you to:

• increase the visibility of the site in search results;
• promote a web resource in search results closer to the first page of Google, where users will see it and click on links;
• attract organic traffic to a new website;
• improve the user experience by making it easier for visitors to find the information they are looking for;
• increase the number of conversions (applications, sales, etc.).

SEO results can be measured and tracked, allowing you to see the impact of search engine optimization efforts and, if necessary, adjust your promotion strategy promptly.

In the current case, we will analyze the situation with the SEO promotion of a new service website related to the laser hair removal niche.

Website for laser hair removal and cosmetology services

The Client is the founder of a network of studios providing aesthetic medicine and cosmetology services Epilook, in particular:

• laser hair removal;
• injection cosmetology;
• facial cosmetology.

Each service has its extensive list of procedures. The company uses the latest laser equipment and operating techniques. Studio specialists have medical education.

The Client contacted ITForce for recommendations and feedback in February 2022 for website creation and search engine optimization. By that time, we already had a history of cooperation - setting up and maintaining contextual advertising for a studio providing laser hair removal services (at that time the client was working with one service and the site was located on a landing page and gradually grew to the size of the site in structure and content).

In the future, our customer planned to create a full-fledged website taking into account all SEO requirements for further promotion of the resource on the Internet. Over time, the company planned to expand its range of services and open branches in several cities in Ukraine. We provided the client and his team with recommendations for creating a new website that considered the requirements of search engines.

So the resource came to us as a newbie, and SEO work still needs to be done.

Getting started - analyzing the website's domain providing laser hair removal services.

Before search engine promotion, our specialists do a preliminary analysis of the domain to know its history and identify problems if they exist. Thus, the analysis showed that the Client’s website was hacked and contained critical errors that made it impossible to promote the current domain.

Problems faced by ITForce SEO specialists:

• the presence of extra pages on the website, for certain queries from which the website was already ranked in the search;
• 14,000+ spam pages in sitemaps;
• spam links from low-quality suspicious domains, which were at a rapid pace;
• presence of 2 site maps on the resource.

Fig. 1 – Critical errors present on the laser hair removal website domain

That is the current domain of the laser hair removal studio was clogged with link echoes from links from gray niche websites. In addition, the number of links increased every day. The situation could not be corrected without damaging search engine promotion. Our specialists recommended that the Client change the domain and begin work on SEO promotion of a website providing laser hair removal services on a new clean domain.

While our Client was selecting and analyzing acceptable domains with the team, the ITForce programmer checked the site content on the old domain and cleaned the resource of spam links so that the content could be transferred to the new domain without the errors found. After all, only after these preliminary works done you can transfer the old website to a new domain.

Note that we did not set up a redirect from the old domain to the new one, because we would drag all the problems to the new domain. ITForce specialists created a stub page on the old domain, which indicated information that the website had moved to a new domain, and the text indicated the domain address (not an active link).

Fig. 2 – Page for clients with information about website transfer

We have also installed additional anti-hacking protection on the Client’s website to prevent the situation to have happened again.

Analysis of competitors and the niche of aesthetic medicine

The laser hair removal niche is highly competitive. Especially in Kyiv because the city is large and the demand for this service is significant. Accordingly, there are a large number of studios to satisfy it. And in the TOP of search results, there are websites with a huge amount of external links.

Analysis of competitor websites in the niche provided the following information:

• the age of competitors' domains varies from 2 to 12 years;
• 250 – 900 pages in the index have competitors’ websites;
• competitors have from 300 to 81,000 monthly users from organic;
• 6,400 – 347,000 – the number of key phrases by which websites are ranked;
• the most traffic pages of competitors are Services, Price, and Blog;
• The main social networks of competitors are Facebook and Instagram.

That is websites are primarily ranked for commercial (Services and Price pages) and informational (Blog pages) queries.

Commercial factors are information and features that influence customer trust and help the user convert to a website. Google takes commercial factors into account when ranking sites. That is, they need to be taken into account, and it is necessary to build a promotion strategy taking them into account.

Recommendations we provided to Epilook after analyzing competitive resources and commercial factors:

• add more blocks with useful information to the Home page;
• optimize the page with prices for services;
• add a page with promotions to the website;
• optimize service pages;
• add a page with gift certificates for studio services;
• introduce the ability to register for the procedure online;
• add to the website information about the certificates of the studio’s specialists (after all, this is confirmation of the expertise of the specialists conducting the procedures);
• introduce additional payment options (in the studio, on the website, etc.);
• add a Blog to your site to receive traffic based on information requests.

An analysis of TOP competitors showed that the website needs changes in structure. In the future, our Client planned to introduce additional cosmetology services as well as open new studios in other areas of Kyiv and Lviv. We considered these new components thought through the best implementation options and incorporated technical capabilities into the website.

Technical and usability audit of a website for laser hair removal services.

In addition to domain analysis, which is done in advance, the primary task of SEO promotion is a technical audit of the website - that is, the technical component of the resource to be promoted on the Internet.

The goal of a technical website audit is to identify and analyze technical aspects of a website that may affect its ability to rank in organic search results.

The main goal of a website technical audit for SEO is to make sure that search engines (for example, Google) can easily crawl, index, and rank pages of a web resource. Problems that can affect the performance of the website are understood as any errors in the technical part (incorrect page response code, missing page at the URL and redirection to another page, slow site speed, URL structure, and many other factors).

Problems identified by the technical audit of a laser hair removal services website:

• errors in the sitemap (presence of deleted pages);
• pages with response codes 301 and 404 were found;
• hreflang attribute is missing;
• absence of the Description attribute on all pages of the site;
• unoptimized images (lack of the Alt attribute) and their large weight, which negatively affected the site loading speed;
• low page loading speed on mobile devices;
• lack of linking in the blog;
• errors in micro-markup (Markup of Article articles, blog, breadcrumbs, FAQ markup on the main page, Local Business markup on the contact page, markup on the Qing page);
• lack of website optimization for Google YMYL ranking factors (for medical websites this is evidence of expertise, the presence of a professional style, and relevance of information) and E-A-T (the idea of E-A-T is that content material in the public domain on the site should be created by a professional expert);
• lack of pages for authors of specialized content on the site;
• inability to add reviews to the form on the reviews page;
• no Privacy Policy page;
• lack of a page with studio certificates;
• lack of an online registration form for a session;
• duplicate H1 header on the main page;
• lack of clickability on the company page in Google Maps in the site footer.

We made a detailed description and implementation option, specified the priority of importance and deadlines for elimination for each problem, and handed it over to the programmer for correction.

First, the team performed the necessary actions to eliminate all possible errors on the test domain, so we eliminated errors at the start. Our specialists also created Google Analytics and Google Search Console accounts and connected the client’s website to them. In February 2022, the website was transferred to a new domain and opened before indexing.

The semantic core of a website in the niche of aesthetic medicine

The Client’s niche is very competitive, so when collecting semantics, ITForce specialists considered the complexity of queries, so all queries in the niche were processed.

The niche of cosmetology and related services contains many fears and questions that have to be dispelled and illuminated. That is, when a user conducts a data register on laser hair removal on the Internet, and finds the information he needs on the website of the Epilook studio network, this indicates that the website page clearly and fully answers his questions. This in turn may mean that, most likely, this user is likely to become a client of the studio. That is, based on information queries, the website will bring visitors and direct them to pages with commercial information. That is, targeted visitors can subsequently become actual customers.

Analysis of the semantics of competitors made it clear to us that almost all of the main competitors in the niche provide more than 1 service (hair removal, cosmetology, etc.). At first, our priority was to work with low- and medium-frequency queries, for which the Epilook website could compete with existing sites providing laser hair removal services. We identified the landing pages on which we promote the website based on the collected query semantics. 

Fig. 3 – Implementation of switching between cities on the website

The SEO team collected requests for the Client’s new services and provided recommendations on semantics for Kyiv and Lviv. The technical part of implementing geo selection was already in the work.

Link building of a website for laser hair removal services

Link building (building a link profile) is an essential component of search engine promotion, as it helps to increase the number of quality links pointing to the website.

Selecting links from relevant and authoritative sites is important. After all, search engines consider backlinks as indicators of the reliability, authority, and relevance of a resource. And for a new site, which is Epilook, this is the main factor, because search engines don’t know anything about it yet and cannot assign a certain ranking in the search results. Backlinks from quality sources increase the likelihood of receiving a high ranking from search robots, which leads to further promotion of the site in search results closer to the first page.

The strategy of building links to a website from the first days of SEO work allows you to build a high-quality link profile and improve the visibility of the resource in search engines. These efforts will lead to increased traffic to the site and subsequently better conversion rates. That is, the sooner link-building work begins, the faster we will see the result. It is not recommended to actively increase link juice for new websites since there is a chance of falling under the search engine filter.

The correct link-building strategy is to use different types of links in certain % shares of the entire link profile:

• dofollow and nofollow links;
• anchor and non-anchor, etc.

A gradual increase in the link mass is important because a sharp surge in external links can lead to the site falling under sanctions from search engines.

The main feature of link-building work in the aesthetic medicine niche is the search for quality donors for placement. Therefore, the budget for external promotion of our Client’s website is gradually growing, and more and more time is being spent searching for link donors. We carry out all work on building a link-building strategy with the consent of Epilook.

Work on SEO promotion of a website in the niche of aesthetic medicine and cosmetology

The Google algorithm was updated in March 2023 which negatively affected the position of the resource - the website sank, and the traffic indicator decreased. We did not stop the pace of work and worked systematically according to the developed SEO promotion strategy - we continued work on external promotion and the implementation of planned updates on the resource. At the time of the update, we had some tasks in our work that were postponed (either by the Client or the budget), so after the update we tried again to implement them as quickly as possible. Thanks to compliance with the website development plan agreed with the Client. After some time the positions in the search leveled out, and traffic gradually increased.

Subsequently, a team of ITForce specialists carried out constant monitoring of error detection. We quickly processed all the errors found so that they did not affect the promotion.

Our search engine optimization efforts on the Client's resource included:

• systematic work on the formation of a high-quality link profile and adjustments to the work performed by a specialist;
• work on analyzing priority pages and their additional optimization (uniqueness of the FAQ block, elaboration of internal linking, additional optimization of meta tags, unitization of some text blocks on pages);
• creation of a vehicle for ongoing link-building work;
• filling the site's blog to attract potential customers;
• analysis of micro markup and implementation of changes (FAQ block and service rating are marked).

An analysis of the site and competitors showed that it was necessary to refine the structure and add new landing pages with prices for new areas of client services. Later we finalized the design - and added a block and functionality for linking between pages:

Fig. 4 – Implementation of linking between services

We continue to work on search engine optimization of the site according to the approved plan. Now let’s take a look at the results of our cooperation over 18 months.

Results of SEO website promotion in the niche of aesthetic medicine

Epilook is actively engaged in the strategic development of its website through search engine promotion. To optimize and improve the functionality of the web resource, the company owner carefully considers and implements the recommendations provided by ITForce specialists.

Visibility and positions of key queries in the TOP 10

Visibility is the percentage of users who saw a link to a site in search results for certain queries. The higher the indicator, the higher the ranking the website will be and the more Internet users will see it.

Fig. 5 – Number of queries for which the client’s site is ranked in Google (both language versions)

For 18 months of cooperation, we have the result (all language versions of the site are taken into account):

• 484 or 5% – the number of keywords in the TOP 10 (this means that for 484 queries the website gets into the TOP 10, and this is the first page of Google);
• 30 – average position of the site in the search results (for all requests of both language versions, the client’s site is on average displayed on the 4th page of the search);
• 300 – the service predicts an increase in traffic by 300;
• 2.6 – site visibility in a search engine (i.e., out of 100%, the site is shown in 2.6% of search results);
• 5 – Search Elements (these are specific Google SERP elements found in search results for the keyword you are tracking).

Data on queries in the TOP-10. It should be noted that throughout the entire period of promotion, the Client changed priorities, that is, at different periods we focused either on laser hair removal services or on cosmetology. Since May of this year, the emphasis has been on laser hair removal services.

Information about queries according to Fig. 5 (all language versions of the website are taken into account):

• 31 queries take 1st place in the search (for 31 queries the customer’s website is displayed first on the first page of search results);
• 80 queries are in 2-3 place on the first page of Google;
• 373 queries belong to the TOP 4-10 results (this is the first page of Google);
• 818 keywords are ranked in the TOP 11-100.

There is data on queries for different language versions because they have different levels of competition. For example, Ukrainian semantics have less competition and lower frequency and therefore will bring less traffic. However since the competition and complexity of the phrases are low, the result can be obtained faster and at lower costs than with another language version.

Let's take a closer look at determining the average position of a site in search results. At first, the team collected semantics and promoted laser hair removal services, and only in November 2022 did we start working on promoting cosmetology services.

Laser hair removal

Fig. 6 – Dynamics of changes in the average position of the semantics of the Ukrainian version from June 2022 to August 2023 (laser hair removal service)

At the beginning of the cooperation, the Client’s website took an average of 76 positions for all queries in Ukrainian (this is page 8 of Google). Today, in August 2023 – 15th position (second search page). The site has moved 6 pages and is closer to the leaders.

Regarding the Russian version: the site had the 82nd position, and now it is 20th. This is a very good result considering the number of competitors - we have a jump of 7 pages.

Cosmetology 

In November 2022 (the beginning of cooperation), for all requests, the Ukrainian version of the Epilook website received an average of 99 positions (Google page 10). In August 2023, we already have position 46 (5th search page). According to the Russian version: from position 86 the site rose to 36.

Fig. 7 – Dynamics of changes in the average position of the semantics of the Ukrainian version from June 2022 to August 2023 (cosmetology service)

And now specific data on the dynamics of the distribution of key queries. Let's consider requests in Ukrainian:

Fig. 8 – Dynamics of distribution of key queries in Ukrainian

We see that the first 10 key queries we selected for the main services of our Client at the beginning of cooperation were almost not ranked in the search - 3 queries for laser hair removal were ranked, and they were located on page 3 of Google. Whereas in August 2023, some keywords already ranked 1-11. These are the first and second pages of search results. That is, our approved promotion strategy is effective.

The Client’s website is ranked by Google for 2002 queries on 10 search pages in August 2023. Taking this into account, let's look at the Google Search Console data for the last year, the Performance report:

Fig. 9 – Website performance, Google Search Console data

From the screenshot we can see how the website visibility is growing, the average position in the search results is increasing, which contributes to an increase in the number of impressions and clicks, that is, visits.

Link building for a website providing laser hair removal services

The number of domains and pages linking to a website shows search engines that the site has authority in the niche. The more authoritative trust sites a site has in its link profile, the higher it will be ranked in searches for query groups.

Let us remind you that the website domain is new. And we built our link-building strategy taking this factor into account.

Fig. 10 – Dynamics of building links to the Epilook website

We have the following results in August 2023:

• 152 – number of resources linking to the client’s site;
• 693 – the number of backlinks received by the client’s resource;
• 26 – client domain rating;
• 10 – rating of the main page of the site.

The aesthetic medicine niche is very competitive and we are meticulous in selecting quality donors for backlinks.

Organic website traffic in the aesthetic medicine niche

The ITForce team has been working with the site since its inception and will show all the dynamics of search traffic (February 2022 – August 2023).

Fig. 11 – Organic traffic to the website (February 2022 – August 2023, Google Analytics 4)

Screenshot information on organic transitions to the Client’s website:

• 14,823 users have visited the site via search since February 2022;
• 10,771 visitors had some interaction with the website;
• 84,918 events registered by users;
• the average visitor spends 1.03 minutes on the website.

The number of achieved organic goals from the Universal Analytics resource:

Fig. 12 – Achieved goals from organic events on the website during the period of cooperation

Conversion goals we set up for tracking:

• 2,419 organic goals achieved;
• 7.39% rate of goals achieved.

That is 7.39% of website visitors completed a conversion action (a conversion is an event that we track (for example, placing a call or clicking on the phone).

Analysis of the niche and competitors showed us that the target audience of users of services in the field of aesthetic medicine has a significant number of visitors who come to the site for information requests, that is, to read about the service and see prices. This audience does not necessarily order the service from the first event. Therefore, in this context, it is useful to monitor the number of associated conversions with search and the number of days before the conversion (let’s take a period of up to 90 days after the first visit to the resource):

Fig. 13 – Assisted conversions on the client’s website within 90 days of the first event

Our Client’s website received 435 associated organic conversions in just 18 months of cooperation.

Associated conversions are deferred conversions that have more than 1 touch with a Client resource, for example:

• the user went to the Client’s website from a social network;
• viewed service pages;
• left the website;
• saw an advertisement on the Internet and clicked on it;
• went to the website;
• performed the target action.

That is, each audience attraction channel performs its action. Now we have 55.13% of completed conversions from organic events, that is, more than half of the total number of conversions. We also see that the more days pass from the first visit to the resource, the fewer associated conversions the website has. The bulk occurs in the first 2-18 days after the first event.

We will conduct a comparative analysis of organic traffic during the same periods since our Client’s business has seasonal factors. Let's look at the number of events on the site through a search a year ago and today (August 2022 and August 2023). We have data on the Universal Analytics resource:

Fig. 14 – Traffic comparison August 2022/August 2023

• The Client’s website had 182 monthly users in August 2022 and 3,288 users in June 2023;
• 1,706.59% was the total increase in users;
• 1,884.05% is the increase in new users to the site;
• 1.22 pages are viewed by a visitor per session.

That is, our Client has a significant share of organic visitors. A slight decrease in the number of pages viewed per session can be explained by proper work with the content strategy: optimization of the website structure when the user immediately finds the answer to his query and leaves the page satisfied with the search result. This way we have improved the user experience.

Conclusions

Results of cooperation with a website in the aesthetic medicine niche since February 2022:

• 14,584 users visited the website;
• 2,419 achieved goals through the organic traffic channel are on the Client’s website;
• 484 key queries are in the TOP 10;
• 152 domains linking to the Client resource;
• 2.6% website visibility.

The goal that the Client set for us was to be in the TOP 10 for all groups of queries for the company’s services. The Client’s website is ranked for 484 queries in the TOP 10 in August 2023.

Currently, our search engine optimization work includes:

• analysis of commercial blocks of priority service pages and conversion blocks for blog pages, providing recommendations for their optimization;
• detailed analysis of priority site pages (content and meta tags and, if necessary, their adjustments);
• collecting semantics for blog articles;
• selection and writing of texts for the company blog and external sites;
• link building work (analysis of the link mass, selection of specialized sites for placement);
• working with Google Search Console and analyzing website positions.

We are expanding the semantic core of the website following new types of services provided by the Client. We follow the developed link-building strategy according to the approved plan.