Case study

Hair salons: how we built 8 sites

Seoul and Gyeonggi Province divided into service regions, one site per region. All 8 started at zero impressions and reached 128,300 impressions in the 60-day reporting period, measured in Naver Search Advisor. The period is 60 days, but the sites were live for 33 days on average.

8 regions

8 sites, one per region

Sites built: 8 sites, split by region and built on the same structure. Every one launched as a new site with zero impressions.
Impressions, last 60 days: 128,300 in total. Top site 23,000; median per site 17,000.
Days live: The reporting period is 60 days; the sites were live for 33 days on average.

Sites

Before we started

Hair salons: what we diagnosed first

Before deciding what to build, we looked at what was keeping these businesses out of search.

What we checked

Which regional unit matches the way people actually search
Whether the service or the neighborhood comes first in the query
Whether the existing site was already split by area
Whether the HTML that crawlers receive actually contains the body copy

The problem

Neighborhoods multiplied by services add up to hundreds of queries, yet there was a single page. That one page tried to answer both “Gangnam hair salon” and “Gangbuk hair salon” and missed both.

So we split the sites by region. Hair salons split the other way from legal and construction sites. The services are the same everywhere; what differs is distance. So the split is by region rather than by service, across both Seoul and Gyeonggi.

8 regions

Work and results

Hair salons: from zero to 128,300 impressions

Between the starting point and today’s numbers is the work. Here are all three side by side.

Before
All 8 sites at zero impressions
New sites with no pages that could appear in search, and no way in beyond brand-name searches.
What we did
Split by region, same structure 8 times
We launched the sites, expanded the pages that could surface in search, wrote the content, submitted everything to search engines and added evidence that can be verified off-site. The five steps below show the order.
Now
128,300 impressions, last 60 days
Top site 23,000, median per site 17,000. The sites were live for 33 days on average.

Week by week

Hair salons: what happened over 33 days

The average of 33 days live across all 8 sites, divided into five stretches.

Week 1 · Days 1–7
Launched a site for each region
The services are the same everywhere and distance is what varies, so Seoul and Gyeonggi were each divided into regions with a site apiece.
Week 2 · Days 8–14
Expanded with location-based queries
Neighborhood queries like “Gangnam hair salon” were combined with service names to build pages that answer each one.
Week 3 · Days 15–21
Wrote about the process and aftercare
Instead of reviews, pages describe how each service is done and how to care for it afterward.
Week 4 · Days 22–28
Registered all regional sites on the same day
The regional sites went to the search engines together, each with its own sitemap.
Week 5 · Days 29–33
Made the name visible off-site
Supporting links in each region let the same name show up outside the site itself.

Original screenshots

Hair salons in Naver Search Advisor

Screenshots show Naver Search Advisor’s Korean interface: 최근 60일 = last 60 days, 노출 = impressions, 클릭 = clicks, 평균 CTR = average CTR, 백 = hundred, 천 = thousand, 만 = ten thousand (1.8만 = 18,000).