Getting found on Google
The Page That Answers the Search
Rewrite your page title and opening paragraph with the exact words people search, instead of your business introduction.
You run a mobile hair stylist business in Austin. Nice photos, good colors, no typos in the text. You type "mobile hair stylist Austin" into Google and you don't show up, not even on the second page. A competitor with a worse-looking website than yours shows up instead, with pixelated photos.
It's not a design problem. It's that your website never says that exact phrase. Google doesn't see that the page is pretty: it reads words, and it shows the page whose opening line matches closest to what someone just typed into the search bar.
What you write isn't what the person searching writes
When you describe your business you talk about yourself: "Hair studio with over ten years of experience, specializing in color and treatments." That's true, and it doesn't help anyone find you, because nobody types that into Google.
The person searching for you types the problem plus the place: "mobile hair stylist Austin," "haircut at home for seniors," "mobile hair color price." If those words aren't on your page, word for word, Google has no reason to show you when someone types them.
We already covered this in What Your Website Should Say on Day One: the first thing your website says shouldn't be your introduction, it should be the answer to the question someone arrives with. Here's the next step: that answer has to be written in almost the same words the person searching uses.
A page that tries to do everything answers nothing
If your business does cuts, color, treatments, and also bridal makeup, it's tempting to cram it all into the same homepage, one paragraph after another. The problem is that someone searching "bridal makeup Austin" and someone searching "haircut at home" type different things, and one page can't open with both phrases at once.
Google splits things up: each page competes for the searches whose words match its own. A homepage that talks a bit about everything doesn't win any specific search, because there's always another page, yours or someone else's, that answers more directly.
- One paragraph per service, mixed together on the same page
- Easy to maintain, just one place to update
- No sentence matches word for word a specific search
- Each page opens with its own phrase: "bridal makeup in Austin," "mobile cuts and color in Austin"
- Each one can rank on its own search, without competing with the others
- More pages to maintain, and each one needs its own content, not a copy with the title swapped
Which one to choose: With two or three services that get searched differently, it's worth splitting them into their own pages. With a business that does one thing, a plumber, a driving school, there's nothing to split: the homepage already is the answer.
The words that reveal urgency
Not every search wants the same thing. "Locksmith Austin" is someone researching for later; "emergency locksmith Austin" or "locksmith open now" is someone locked out right now, looking for whoever can help immediately. If your business handles emergencies, those words need to be on your page, not just the name of the trade.
The same goes for "price": someone typing "mobile hair color price" wants to know the cost before they call, not a sentence about your passion for hairstyling. If your page doesn't mention the word "price" or a ballpark figure, that search goes to whoever does mention it, even if they charge the same as you.
Subheadings answer questions too
Below the opening paragraph come the questions that same person asks next: how much it costs, how long it takes, whether an appointment is required. Each of those questions can be its own subheading on the page, with the answer right underneath, instead of buried in a long paragraph.
This isn't just for readability. Google looks there too, in the subheadings, to see if the page answers variations of the same search: "mobile hair color price," "how long does an at-home haircut take." A subheading that says that literally is worth more than a paragraph that mentions it in passing.
The browser tab title is an answer too
There's a spot where this matters more than it seems: the title that shows up in the browser tab and in the Google result, the blue clickable line. A lot of websites put the business name there, or the word "Home." It's the highest-weight spot on the whole page for Google to understand what it's about, and it's being wasted on a tagline.
That title should say the same thing as the opening paragraph, summed up: "Mobile hair stylist in Austin" instead of "Marta's Hair Studio." The business name can go after it, with a dash, if there's room.
- 1Write your customer's exact phrase
Write down, word for word, what someone would type into Google to find you: service plus city, or service plus urgency. - 2Put it in the tab title
The title Google sees comes first, summed up, before the business name. - 3Open with that phrase
The page's first paragraph starts with that same phrase, not the story of the business. - 4Turn each question into a subheading
Price, duration, whether an appointment is needed: each one becomes a subheading with its answer underneath.
- The opening paragraph of each page says, in the words people actually search, what's offered and where
- The browser tab title says the same thing, summed up, instead of the business name
- If services get searched differently, each one gets its own page
- The phrase gets written once, naturally; repeating it doesn't help, it gives you away
Tell us what you do and your site is live this afternoon
Say it in one line, the way you would say it to a customer, and it goes live. Free, no card needed.
Build my site freeIf you run a barbershop or a salon, see a barbershop website with online booking.
