The Challenge
Lee Graves Salon is a top-rated hair salon in Plano, Texas — 30+ years in business, 18 stylists, a 5-star Google rating built on 336 reviews, and a full specialty menu spanning color, balayage, extensions, keratin treatments, and bridal styling. It is exactly the kind of established local business that should dominate local search.
It didn't. The old website ranked for the salon's own name and very little else. Anyone searching "Lee Graves Salon" found it; anyone searching "hair salon Plano," "balayage near me," or "best hair salons in Plano" — the searches that bring in new clients rather than returning ones — rarely saw it. Three decades of reputation, nearly invisible at the moment prospective clients were choosing a salon.
The business needed a website that converted its real-world standing into search visibility across every service it offers.
What We Built
We rebuilt leegravessalon.com from scratch using our SEO-first methodology:
Technical Foundation
- Next.js framework with server-side rendering for fast mobile page loads
- Core Web Vitals optimized — LCP under 2.5 seconds on mobile, zero cumulative layout shift
- Mobile-first responsive design — salon research and booking is overwhelmingly mobile
- Vercel deployment with global CDN
SEO Architecture
- A dedicated page per specialty — color, balayage, extensions, keratin, bridal — each with its own URL, meta tags, and internal-linking footprint, so Google can rank each service on its own merits instead of one generic "services" page competing for everything
- JSON-LD structured data — LocalBusiness/HairSalon schema with full NAP, the real review count and rating, and geographic signals for Plano and the surrounding North Dallas suburbs
- Optimized meta tags written around real client search intent, not brand-first copy
- Internal linking connecting services, stylists, and pricing content naturally
- XML sitemap submitted to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools on day one
Content & Conversion
- Pricing transparency content answering the questions people actually search — "how much is hair color in a salon" now surfaces Lee Graves on page 1
- Stylist and team content that puts 18 chairs of expertise in front of Google
- Trust signals everywhere — the 5-star rating, review count, and 30-year history woven into pages and schema
- Clear booking CTAs on every page
The Results
Comparing the 30 days before go-live (March 11 – April 9) against the 86 days after (April 10 – July 4), Google Search Console shows the salon's visibility transformed:
Search Visibility
| Metric | Before (avg/day) | After (avg/day) | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Impressions | 502/day | 1,748/day | +248% |
| Google Clicks | 6.8/day | 11.9/day | +75% |
| Google Clicks (last 28 days) | — | 14.4/day | +112% |
| Average Position (last 28 days) | 11.4 | 9.5 | 17% closer to page 1 |
Traffic Totals
| Metric | Before (30 days) | After (86 days) |
|---|---|---|
| Impressions | 15,068 | 150,320 |
| Clicks | 203 | 1,023 |
| GA4 Sessions | 3,052 | 7,819 |
And the growth is still compounding: the most recent 28 days averaged 2,437 impressions per day — nearly 5x the pre-launch baseline — and the most recent week averaged 16.1 clicks per day at position 9.4. GA4 sessions held steady at roughly 90–100 per day across the transition; what changed is how much of that audience now arrives through organic discovery searches the old site never appeared for.
Top Search Queries (last 28 days)
| Query | Clicks | Impressions | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| lee graves salon | 85 | 462 | 1.4 |
| hair salon near me | 3 | 55 | 8.3 |
| hair salon plano | 3 | 28 | 8.1 |
| hair salons plano | 2 | 11 | 3.8 |
| best hair salons in plano | 2 | 9 | 5.2 |
| hair salons near me | 2 | 50 | 6.8 |
| how much is hair color in salon | 2 | 6 | 5.7 |
| average cost of hair coloring in salon | 1 | 10 | 7.9 |
This is the pattern we build for. The brand query is locked at position 1. But the money rows are underneath: "hair salon near me" at position 8.3, "hair salon plano" at 8.1, "best hair salons in plano" at 5.2 — page-1 placements on the exact searches a new client types the day they're choosing a salon. The old site appeared for essentially none of these. The pricing-question queries ("how much is hair color in salon") come from content pages written around real search behavior, and they put the salon in front of clients at the research stage — before they've picked anyone.
An Honest Note on Average Position
The full-window average position moved only from 11.4 to 11.0, and we want to be straightforward about why that understates the improvement. The old site's average was built almost entirely on branded queries it had ranked on for years. The new site competes on a vastly larger set of competitive local queries — thousands of impressions on searches it never entered before — and new queries join the rankings low before climbing. That mix shift drags the average down even while every individual query improves. The cleaner signals: the most recent 28 days average position 9.5 on the full competitive query set, and the discovery queries above are already on page 1.
Key Takeaways
- Impressions grew 248% — from 502 to 1,748 per day over the full window, with the most recent month at 2,437/day, nearly 5x baseline and still climbing.
- Clicks up 75% full-window, 112% over the last month — 6.8/day became 14.4/day, and the last week ran at 16.1.
- Page 1 for the searches that book chairs — "hair salon plano," "hair salon near me," and "best hair salons in plano" all sit in the top 10, none of which the old site ranked for.
- Reputation finally visible to Google — 336 reviews, 5 stars, and 30 years in business now live in structured data where they influence rankings and click-through, not just in clients' memories.
- Still compounding at 86 days — every visibility metric's most recent month beats its full-window average.
Why It Worked
Lee Graves Salon had everything Google wants to reward — decades of history, hundreds of five-star reviews, deep specialty expertise — locked inside a website that gave Google no way to see any of it. The rebuild didn't manufacture a reputation; it exposed a real one, service by service, in the structure and schema search engines read.
Most salon websites are booking-widget wrappers on generic templates: fine for existing clients, invisible for new ones. The gap between a salon's real-world standing and its search visibility is where we work — and 86 days was enough to close most of it for one of Plano's most established salons.