Rank in Your City: The Local SEO Playbook for Tattoo Parlors

To state the obvious, tattoo shop owners need clients to actually come to their location and get a tattoo in order to make money. Like other local businesses, growing your studio requires clients walking through your doors regularly. 

Managing your shop, building a portfolio, and providing high-quality artwork for your clients leaves you little time to spend on chasing down new customers. Effective digital marketing strategies bring the clients directly to you — with relatively little legwork on your part.

We’ll explain how local SEO strategies improve online visibility, leading to more bookings and a steady stream of clients for your business. 

Why Local SEO Matters for the Tattoo Industry

Most tattooists — from independent artists to multi-service shops — struggle with generating leads for their business. They often depend on a single platform, such as Instagram, which can fail them whenever the algorithm changes and hides their content. 

Local SEO is based on the online properties you own — your website and online business listings. This means that even when Google makes changes to its algorithm, your rankings in search will continue to build on your previous success. If your site is optimized to match local search intent, you’ll continue to appear near the top of local search results for your niche. 

While social media marketing is still a key part of your strategy, you shouldn’t overlook local SEO as a means to improve your tattoo studio’s online presence. 

There are three main strategies that generally help tattooists see the greatest immediate gains in leads: 

• Google Business Profile Optimization
• Bing Places Optimization
• Google Local Service Ads 

We’ll cover each in turn. 

Google Business Optimization for Tattoo Businesses

This is one of the quickest and easiest ways to boost your tattoo shop’s online presence. Google Business Profiles (formerly known as “Google My Business”) is a free service provided by Google. Each business has a single listing. Business owners need to “claim” their listings to prove that they own the business, and then they can update their listings to contain more complete information. 

This is a highly effective way to enhance your online presence, because Google considers this your “official” business listing. If you have each element of your Google Business Profile optimized to match relevant local searches, you are far more likely to rank highly in search results.

For tattoo artists specifically, pay attention to GBP’s options to leave reviews and add photos. This is a phenomenal way to advertise your art and improve your rankings.

Some of the strategies that help tattoo shops perform well on GBP include:

• Adding photos of your tattoo designs
• Incentivizing previous customers to leave reviews
• Ensuring your name, address, and phone (NAP) information is consistent and accurate
• Adding keywords related to your specific niche 
• Adding an FAQ section 
• Linking directly to your website
• Adding a “book now” or “call now” button

Our team can help you get the most out of this tool and generate more inquiries and bookings. 

Bing Places for Tattoo Studios

Bing is a competitor to Google and offers a similar service to GBP called Bing Places. Currently, Google has an 85% market share in North America, which leads many people to overlook Bing. However, we recommend that local businesses like tattoo artists take the time to set up and optimize a Bing Places Profile.

This is because we emphasize a multi-channel local marketing strategy. Since your business growth relies on customers actually physically walking into your location and getting a tattoo, you need to improve your tattoo shop’s online visibility in your region as much as possible. Therefore, it’s best to reach all potential leads in a small geographic area (say, Atlanta or Cleveland) on Google, Bing, and other platforms they might use. 

In other words, it’s possible that only 15 local customers are using Bing. But, for a relatively small amount of initial effort, you can acquire 15 more local customers, which can be a big deal for a tattoo shop. 

Another reason to include Bing Places in your strategy is that additional online listings — on any platform — improve your overall rankings across all search engines, including Google. This is because adding clicks to your tattoo studio’s website increases your traffic metrics, which Google takes into account when calculating your rankings. 

Bottom line: don’t overlook Bing Places as a low-effort lead generation tool! 

Google Local Service Ads for Tattoo Artists

Tattoo SEO takes about 3–6 months to generate long-term, lasting results. Your organic strategy will help you rank for specific local searches like “tattoo shops near me” or “best tattoo parlor in CITY-NAME.”

Google Local Service Ads are a paid search strategy that complements your organic strategy. We recommend them specifically for tattoo artists because they target high-converting, local intent searches. Google local service ads are displayed prominently in local search results with a small “Ad” label attached. 

If someone is searching for tattoo services in their area, they are interested in booking an appointment soon. By paying for a local service ad, you can make sure that your business is one of the first that they see on the search results page. Then, on your Google Business Profile, updated website, or social media accounts, they can browse your tattoo styles and services, and ultimately choose the perfect tattoo from you. 

FAQ: Marketing Strategies for Tattoo Studios that Bring In Clients

Effective SEO strategies help match your business with people actively seeking tattoo information and services in your area. To appear in local search results, SEO is essential. 

We’ll break down the differences in different kinds of SEO and explain how setting up your online presence helps you generate an automatic stream of new clients — so you can get back to the business of running a tattoo shop and helping your customers choose their next tattoo! 

What is local SEO for tattoo shops?

Local SEO is a set of strategies that helps tattoo shops improve their visibility in local search results. It focuses on optimizing your tattoo business website for local-intent searches, like “tattoo artist near me,” “best tattoo parlor in CITY-NAME,” or specific niches like “watercolor tattoo shop” or “blackwork tattoo.”

By matching the content on your website with local business directories, your online presence will naturally attract new clients for your tattoo business as people find you through search engines. 

How does local SEO help me get more clients?

When looking for a new tattoo, people often start by conducting an online search to see what artists are available near them and researching reviews and portfolios. 

Local SEO ensures that those people will easily find all of that information about your business from their search engine results pages. Your business will be more likely to be featured on Google Maps, leading to more walk-ins and bookings. 

Businesses that show up highly in search results, include positive, detailed reviews, and have portfolios of high-quality images are far more likely to be featured on local searches and have customers actually choose them for their tattoo. 

Why does Google Business Profile matter for tattoo studios?

Google Business Profile is central to your local SEO efforts. Google considers it the main source of information for your business, so it will be the first exposure most new clients to your tattoo shop get. 

You should fully update it with your name, hours, pricing, reviews, location, and service areas to make it as appealing and informative as possible to new customers. This makes it more likely that you will receive calls and appointments.

Since GBP is a free service, you are essentially receiving free tattoo marketing by keeping it up to date. 

Do reviews help my tattoo studio rank locally?

Reviews are absolutely essential to grow your tattoo studio! Building trust is central to any marketing efforts in this industry. People need to know that your studio is clean and that your artists are friendly and professional. Getting a tattoo is a highly personal choice, and clients want to know that you will execute their design perfectly and with a positive experience. Strong reviews communicate all of this to your customers. 

How quickly does local SEO begin to work?

Local SEO is a long-term strategy. It focuses on matching your online listings with local-intent searches, like “best tattoo shop near me” or “tattoo studio downtown.” As your business starts to receive more clicks and clients, search engines determine that your business is a good match for these queries and will send more traffic your way. Success begets more success.

While SEO strategies for tattoo parlors bring more success the longer they’re effective, they generally take some time to get rolling — about 3–6 months is pretty typical.

If you need a short-term boost in bookings while you wait for your SEO techniques to take full effect, Google Local Service Ads can be a great paid search option for the tattoo industry, as they focus on delivering high-converting searchers to your website. 

Ready to get more local clients? Schedule a free comprehensive local SEO Analysis today to see how well your website is bringing in new customers!