SEO is an Art > Men's Haircut Business Helped with Local SEO

The Needs of Local Search Visibility

A men's haircut business had eight stores located in different Arizona metro areas, and they needed help improving their visibility for local search.

What's "local search"? In plain terms, it's focused on building visibility for web searches with a "local intention". That means getting your website to rank for queries like "haircuts near me", or even simply "men's haircuts" when typed into Google Maps. Google considers these types of searches as having a "local intention" because they indicate that the web user wants to perform an action at a specific business near them. This is different from an "informational intention" like "When did Christopher Columbus discover America?"

Local-intent searches cause search engines to display different results. When you do a search like "haircuts near me", you won't see a set of links, or an AI overview, but you will see "Map Pack" links accompanying a map of the area you're in, as shown below:

As you might imagine, there's a lot of competition for local search rankings. To appear in a local web search, your website has to make it clear to search engines that you are a local business at a specific geographic location. When someone searches for "haircuts near me", Google has to know for certain whether your business is located near the person who made the search, otherwise your business wouldn't be a good search result. For example, if you lived in Boise Montana and searched for "Haircuts Near Me", Google wouldn't show you barber shops in Hilo, Hawaii.

To be found in local search, you will have to include your business's complete address and phone number on the website, and you'll have to make sure that information is as consistent as possible. As an example of consistency, suppose one web page says your business is located on "123 Greenway Road" and another web page says your business is located at "123 Greenway Street". Search engines will be less certain where your business actually is, and they'll be reluctant to include your business in a local search.

SEO Actions to Help Local Search Visibility

There's a recurring truth I've found working with clients: every website is different, every business is different, and every business is going to have its own unique set of competitors and challenges. The SEO actions I took to help this client were as follows. These actions helped local visibility, but another men's haircut website will likely have entirely different requirements.

• We helped improve site speed by using WebP images and reducing the size of the site's CSS files.
• We plugged a security leak - hackers will always be a threat for websites, and an SEO review is one way to identify things that shouldn't be there. Not only site security protect data, but insecure sites are going to get lower ranks for a variety of reasons.
• We identified and fixed broken links. If a link on your website points to a File Not Found page, it's a bad experience for your visitors, because they'll wonder how well your site is maintained. Search engines have the same opinion.
• We adjusted the site's XML sitemap. Their sitemap.xml file contained a few "orphan" pages, which are URLs that appear in the sitemap but can't be reached through the site's navigational link.
• We consolidated URLs with similar content. This is another issue that affects both users and search engines, because each page on your site should have a unique purpose and useful content.
• We updated the contents of the store pages to contain FAQs. This ended up helping the most, because it provided useful information to visitors about store hours, available haircut styles, prices, and so forth. Search engines like well-written FAQ pages because it helps them give better search results for very particular searches, such as (for example) "How much is a fade haircut?"

The Results: Success in Local Search

Retention: Maintained a massive 79% Engagement Rate from 2024 to 2025.

Local Growth: Though the site received minimal user growth in 2025 due to economic headwinds, SEO efforts are starting to pay off as the economy continues to recover. Individual store pages saw significant month-over-month growth in visitors from January 2026 to February 2026. The table below contains data from Google Analytics:

By prioritizing the "Locations" and "Services" pages, we ensured that the traffic we did keep was highly engaged and ready to book an appointment.

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