TopSalonJobs.com update

By
Angie Herrera

It's been almost 4 weeks to the day since we [launched TopSalonJobs.com](http://www.topsalonjobs.com/) and so its fitting to give a little bit of an update. ## No one said marketing was easy Okay, marketing in and of itself isn't hard. But getting results (and being patient enough for them) is. Before the site was launched it was being promoted using Google AdWords. That certainly helped quite a bit but I think we suffered from putting all our eggs in the lone proverbial basket. More on that later. The other major marketing effort that was put into the site was SEO. This was tough mainly because the site was (and still is) so new. Google likes older sites. And by older, I mean sites whose domains have been around for a couple of years. It continues to be a bit of a struggle but today marks a good day in the way of organic search listings. ## SEO - or how to test your patience on the Web We've set up our own SEO services to help track how the site is doing in the search engines and e've run reports just about once a month since late October / early November. This was very important. If you're using any kind of automated software to check your site's rankings, doing it more often than once a month can have an adverse effect - the search engines (Google in particular) will pick up on it. As tempting as it is to want to check and check often, don't. Leave it be. Up until recently TopSalonJobs.com didn't rank in the top 40 of any of the big 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo! and MSN). It was pretty dismal. Today's report, while not anywhere near our goal, gives me a much needed boost of confidence. We are actually ranking for our top keyword phrase and a few other secondary keyword phrases. I'm most excited about our Google rankings, which I'll get to in a minute. But the MSN and Yahoo! results aren't too shabby either. (I've taken screenshots because rankings can and sometimes will fluctuate daily.) ### Yahoo! Ranking Yahoo! has us listed for 2 keyword phrases at very different positions (click an image to enlarge):
*TSJ #2 Yahoo! ranking for "salon job board"*
*TSJ #40 Yahoo! ranking for "salon jobs"* The first screenshot is very exciting. Number 2 is a good position to be in on any search engine. But it's not our primary keyword phrase. "Salon jobs" is. So while #40 for that term is a very slight bit disappoint (very slight), it's still good. If anything, it tells me that we're progressing and that there's room for getting better ranking. ### MSN Ranking MSN gave us a bit more love. Sort of.
*TSJ #1 MSN ranking for "salon job board".* MSN has listed at number one for "salon job board". This is **great** but again, it's not our primary keyword phrase. Still, I can't help but be excited about this. ### Google Ranking Now for the king of search engines. I'm probably happiest about these results.
*TSJ #21 Google ranking for "salon jobs"*
*TSJ #26 Google ranking for "day spa jobs"*
*TSJ #17 Google ranking for "salon job board"* The 3 keyword phrases that Google has listed TSJ for are all in the top 30. While not our goal (we want top 5), this is still huge. Although the figures change every time I hear this statistic, when searching for something, people will rarely go past the first 3 pages (which for Google means the top 30 results). To put it in perspective, let's take the first keyword phrase "salon jobs". TSJ is ranked 21 **out of *10.3 million* index sites** that come up for that search term. **10.3 MILLION**. From nowhere to be seen to #21. Not shabby at all. More importantly, however, this means that we're gaining a bit of momentum. It may not be a ton, but it's there. That's very good news for this website. ## More than just SEO SEO / SEM isn't all we're doing though. That would just be plain silly. It's a little like advertising in just one phone book (if phone book advertising worked, which doesn't in my experience / opinion). We're also adding direct mail to our marketing strategy. There's debate about whether or not direct mail works. I think it can and it does. If it's done right. We're starting our campaign in the next couple of weeks. It's a straightforward postcard campaign sent out to local salons with an incentive to sign up. And it features a landing page. I'm confident we'll get some results but we have to wait and see. And of course there's AdWords. Our current AdWords campaign is on hold for the moment. We'll probably want to fire it back up soon but for now our focus is offline marketing, on-page SEO and link building. Those are plenty to have your hands in. For AdWords to work well, you have to give it the same amount of attention so it's not the best choice right now. ## Stay tuned There will be more updates as the site grows, you can be sure of that. So come back for that, or subscribe to our RSS feed to be alerted.