Is a Vagaro website good for SEO?

Vagaro gives you two different pages

Your Listing Page is your page on the Vagaro marketplace. Vagaro’s MySite FAQ says it’s generated for every Vagaro business, uses Vagaro’s branding, and can’t be customized.

MySite is a website builder you pay for on top of your subscription. It has a different address from your booking page, you can connect a domain you own or buy one through Vagaro, and its Vagaro components sync your services, staff and prices from your account.

They can do different things on Google, so it helps to take them one at a time.

What the Listing Page can do

It puts you in Vagaro’s marketplace, and it’s one more listing of your name, address and phone. Vagaro’s SEO advice is to keep your name and address formatted the same everywhere, including the marketplace, so check that it matches your Google Business Profile.

It can’t be customized, so you can’t add a page about balayage to it. If the Listing Page is your only page online, there’s no page of yours about a single treatment for Google to show.

What MySite can do

MySite pages have their own names, URL slugs and titles. Vagaro’s SEO article for MySite advises naming and titling each page, describing your location on the home page, keeping your name and address formatted the same everywhere, and listing your business on Google, Yelp, Apple Maps and Bing.

Its help center also lists an HTML component, described as being for advanced users who want to add custom HTML.

So a page for each treatment, on your own domain, is possible on MySite.

What Vagaro’s documentation says about the limits

No sitemap. The MySite FAQ says a sitemap isn’t currently generated for your site. A sitemap is a file listing a site’s pages for search engines. Google also finds pages by following links, and its documentation describes a properly linked site as one where every important page can be reached from the menu or from links on other pages. So link every page you build.

It’s tied to your Vagaro account. There’s no contract, and the FAQ’s instructions for deactivating MySite end with confirming deletion. I couldn’t find anything in their documentation about moving a MySite elsewhere if you leave Vagaro. If that matters to you, ask them before you build.

SEO isn’t part of their design service. Asked in the FAQ whether the design team can help with SEO, Vagaro says they aren’t SEO experts, that MySite provides the tools to build an SEO-optimized site, and that they recommend businesses find outside support for it.

Structured data isn’t covered. I couldn’t find anything in Vagaro’s documentation about whether MySite adds structured data, the code that tells Google what kind of business you are and where. If you add some through the HTML component, check it with Google’s Rich Results Test.

If you’re staying on MySite

1. Build one page for each service you want more of. Give it a plain name, a slug like /balayage, and a title with the service and your city in it.
2. Write your city into the home page in ordinary words. Vagaro’s own example is “Salon Serving the Pleasanton Area”.
3. Write your name, address and phone the same way on MySite, your Listing Page and your Google Business Profile.
4. Put your MySite domain in the website field of your Google Business Profile, and use the Vagaro link for booking.
5. Link every page from your menu or from another page, since there’s no sitemap.
6. If you can verify the site in Google Search Console, use its URL Inspection tool to request indexing when you publish a new page.

When I’d build the site somewhere else

When you want the site to stay put if you ever change booking systems, or you want more control over what’s on every page. A site on its own domain, with Book buttons going into Vagaro, gives you both, and your clients book through the same Vagaro flow they use now. Adding Vagaro to Squarespace has the steps for the widget and the buttons.

That build, with the search work, is $1,000, once. If you’d rather see where you stand first, the audit on the home page is free and doesn’t ask for your email.