Spa Marketing and Website Design:
Common Mistakes Spa Owners Make when Developing Web Sites

Here are some of the mistakes spa owners make when building their web sites:

Website design that's not search engine friendly
You can spend thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars on your web site, but if the site design is not search engine friendly, then you'll be missing out on substantial ROI (Return on Investment) opportunities. Even if a full-scale SEO campaign is not in your budget right now, you should at least build a web site that is search engine friendly.

Many spa owners focus too much on the visual appearance of the web site to the detriment of the web site's marketability. Creating a web site in Flash with lots of fancy graphics and animation is not a good idea if you want potential customers to find your web site by searching in Yahoo, for example.

To make things worse, if you have a non-SEO friendly web site design now and want to do an SEO campaign in the future, you may need to have your web site completely re-built. The costs of that can be equivalent to creating a web site from scratch. In other words, the money you spent creating a "fancy" web site with lots of animation and graphics is wasted.

Estimated cost of this mistake: between $5,000 - $15,000 and up just for development costs; plus $500 - $1,000 and up per month in lost sales because Internet users can't find your web site on the Internet.



A web site that is too graphically rich
Obviously, you need to have photographs on your web site. This could be anything from photos of your spa, to product images, to stock photos of beautiful flowers and butterflies. However, it is possible to overdo pictures.

If you have a lot of large photos that take a while to download, then this won't work well for potential customers who are on slower Internet connections, or have old computers. And even if they have good computers and high-speed Internet connections, they may still have lots of spyware and what not that will slow down their machines. It will be very frustrating for these people to go to your web site, and have to wait for all your graphics to download. Inevitably, they will become too frustrated and leave your site, not wanting to come back. And that's not what you want your potential customers to do. You want them to look at many pages on your web site, bookmark it, come back to your web site later, maybe even e-mail your link to their friends, and book an appointment at your spa.

Putting text in graphic images can also be a mistake because this kind of text cannot be read or indexed by search engines.



Not enough content on the spa website
When developing a web site, what many spa owners do is essentially duplicate the content from their brochure and that's it. This is the most basic, "bare-bones" way of offering content on your web site. Internet is much more interactive than a piece of paper, and you can update the information easily and regularly when you need to. You can offer streaming videos or 360 tours of your facility; you can have forms for people to fill out and submit to you with questions or appointment bookings; and you can even sell gift cards and spa products online.

The more pages, article, information, resources, etc. your web site has – the better it will look in the eyes of your potential customers, as well as search engines. You want to engage your website visitors with your content, so that they spend more time looking at your pages and bookmark your link.

Having good quality text content on your web site is also very good for search engine rankings. So don’t be afraid to put more content on your site: if your customers don't want to read it, they don't have to. And as long as everything is well organized so that you are not confusing people or making your site hard to navigate, then you can't really go wrong with adding content.

You might want to create different sections on your site, for example, "gift ideas", "online store", "monthly specials", "news coverage", "helpful articles", "home spa recipes", etc. in addition to your descriptions of treatments and packages.



A web site that's not easy to navigate
If you have a large website, it's very important to make sure that people can easily find their way around your multitude of pages. Having broken links, confusing navigation menus, annoying fly-out menus that you have to mouse over several times before you finally get it right – elements like these tend to make the user experience on your web site frustrating.



Not updating the spa websites often enough
Many spa owners will develop their web site, and leave it unchanged for months, if not years. They neglect their online presence. They don't take advantage of the sales and marketing opportunities the Internet presents. They don't update their spa packages, or monthly specials, or even their photos. Their website looks exactly the same on Christmas, Valentine's or Mother's day when they could be featuring these holiday specials and attracting customers who are searching for gifts for these holidays. And while these spa owners are neglecting their online presence, their competitors are getting ahead because they are taking full advantage of Internet marketing and keeping up with the latest marketing trends.



There are many other mistakes that spa owners can make, and this is just a list of a few most common ones. If you are a spa owner and you would like some help with marketing your web site to its full potential, please call Ront Communications at 604-629-7499 and we’ll be happy to discuss with you how we can help.

For more information on getting your web site to rank well in search engines, internet marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), as well as other marketing services such as graphic design and corporate identity packages, please contact us at our office in Greater Vancouver:

Tel: 604-629-7499
E-mail: info [at] rontcommunications [dot] com

Thank you and we look forward to working with you!