As a salon digital marketing agency, we have gotten this question repeatedly over the past few months! 

There are lots of factors that go into Google rankings and if you are not monitoring your rankings and adjusting your strategy, then you may have lost rankings or even dropped from Google completely. 

One of the biggest issues we have found with Google rankings is from Google Maps.  During the COVID shutdown, Google automatically changed the status of many businesses to Temporarily Closed. We have found that if an owner was not monitoring the status of their Google My Business listing, the status remained closed even as salons opened. 

We have also found that salons who updated their Google My Business COVID policy have been ranking better than those that have not. 

Another big factor that Google looks at is citation management.  The biggest issue that we have seen in regards to this factor is updating business hours on all platforms.  Google likes to see consistent data on all directory listings and most salons have adjusted their hours post-COVID...but they have not updated the hours on all platforms, such as Yelp, Yellow pages, Bing, etc.  While there are tons of factors that Google looks at to rank a business, these have been the biggest issues during COVID that we have seen arise.