- DOS-M PRESENTS -

The Black Rose Tattoo Company

Strategy Guide

Things That Are Going Well

I want to start this report recognizing all things you are doing well from my perspective as a customer and digital marketer for everything you do beyond just great tattoos. 

Unique Selling Points​

My first impression of your shop is that you specialize in flower tattoos. This is something I would describe as a competitive advantage. By doing killer floral work, you'll be known as the go-to which is great when it's a popular request.

You stand out compared to the standard tattoo shop because first of all you offer piercings. Not all shops do this, and the good news is that more searches are happening for piercings than tattoos in the Worcester area.

Additionally, you offer a range of times to be available for appointments. You don't see too many shops open in the AM so that's an additional way to provide value to your customers.

Excellent MyBusiness Presence

You have an amazing digital presence on Google by utilizing the MyBusiness feature to collect 100+ 5-star reviews. With 5K views on the search and 4.2K views on the map in the last quarter, this is the sign of a very healthy MyBusiness profile. You are set up on the most popular social profiles and these are linked to your account. Nice to see you have many great reviews on Facebook as well!

Other Postive Notes

You offer promotions like Friday The 13th and Black Friday. This is a great way to boost your marketing efforts on social media to prospective/repeat clients.

It would be great to incorporate a live feed of your Facebook or Instagram so that way users can see what's coming up if they're visiting a website.

My Top 5 Recommendations

These are the top 5 things I found in my analysis of your digital presence that can be optimized for. 

One of the biggest things I like about your existing user experience is that there is a clear call to action that you want users to call to set up an appointment. However, I believe there is a lot of room for improvement on the website, especially on mobile. In this digital age mobile-first is the necessary approach since more users browse sites on mobile devices more than ever. I’ve outlined my recommendations with this interactive photo. 

The header takes up a large portion of the viewing experience. This can be a visual eye sore when trying to read the text throughout the site.

The view more is an uncessary step for users to take, this can be simplified by just enabling the entire gallery. 

There are too many menu options in my opinion. This takes up a lot of space. 

Can be reduced by:

  • Creating one-word page titles
  • Utilizing sub menus for Gallery/Designs as well as Tattoo/Piercing aftercare
  • Testimonials can easily be sprinkled throughout the site or even in a footer to showcase on every page

Linking google maps to the address would be beneficial to users trying to find your location as it can pull up automatically with directions

Thryv appears to offer some really unique features for your website but at a cost of visual space. I’m assuming they built your website so this won’t be too much of a concern with a rebuild.

I looked into phrases being searched in the Worcester, MA area related to piercing and tattoos.

Only 13 phrases are being searched regularly in your city. These are included with the average monthly searches:

  • piercing place near me (390)
  • tattoo shops near me (320)
  • tattoo near me (210)
  • piercing near me (110)
  • tattoo places near me (70)
  • piercing shops near me (50)
  • ear piercing near me (50)
  • tattoo parlors near me (50)
  • nose piercing near me (40)
  • tattoo artists near me (30)
  • body piercing near me (20)
  • best tattoo shops near me (20)


You can download a full copy of this report here which includes Worcester County as well. There are dramatically more searches happening in the county which can be taken advantage of with AdWords, if used correctly. 

In my research I noticed that your Google Ads were appearing when someone searches your shop. I imagine this is where a good portion of your budget is going. Only targeting specific keywords relevant to you as [exact match] should help reduce the costs especially at a bid price of less than $2.

SEO is known as search engine optimization which is how you appear on Google’s front page without paying.

I used a service called BrightLocal to pretend as if I was searching from your shop’s zipcode for the popular keywords identified above. Unfortunately, your website did not appear in any of the search results other than a couple map results.

Also when searching your business specifically you were not showing up in any search results on the front page. The only thing that showed was your Google Ad as well as your MyBusiness profile. This is due to the variety of shops with the same name as you across the country.

I looked more into this using an SEO Analyzer tool by Neil Patel and unfortunately your existing website has poor SEO included in it. Good SEO takes A LOT of content and strategy behind it but this is less than the bare minimum required. 

If you want to be found in Google searches beyond the maps SEO is critical to do so. 

**When recreating this exercise it’s important that you browse in an incognito window. Google will recommend sites you regularly visit in your search results skewing the true perspective of what a potential client might see.

You do a decent job already coming up with hashtags but you can use up to 30 hashtags and I recommend using all 30. However, I’d say rotating your hashtags is more important than using 30 different ones. When coming up with 30 hashtags, the best approach is to use what’s referred to as the “funnel strategy:”

  • 15 – Low Volume Hashtags (Under 100,000 posts)
  • 10 – Medium Volume Hashtags (100,000-1,000,000 posts)
  • 5 – High Volume Hashtags (1,000,000+ posts)

In addition to the “funnels strategy,” there are three types of hashtags you should be including on all your posts. These are:

  • Local Hashtags – This is how you get legitimate followers that become clients.
  • Descriptive Hashtags – These are how you keep that variety and rotate which hashtags you use
  • Industry Hashtags – These are the most standard hashtags you can come up with, they also tend to be the most high volume.

Let’s pretend this is the picture you’re going to post:

I’m going to come up with as many keywords as possible for each category so that way you can see how it’s possible to rotate them and pick your hashtags appropriately.

Location Hashtags

#newengland (6.4M)
#massachusetts (5.5M)
#worcester (930K)
#worcesterma (262K)
#worcestermass (10.9KK)
#newenglandartist (62.3K)
#masstattoonetwork (40.4K)
#massachusettsartist (23.2K)
#newenglandart (18.1K)
#newenglandtattoonetwork (15.4K)
#massachusettstattoo (5K)
#newenglandtattoo (5K)
#massachusettstattooartist (1K)

Descriptive Hashtags

#flowers (200M)
#traditionaltattoo (6.8M)
#rosetattoo (3.3M)
#flowertattoo (3.1M)
#hibiscus (2.1M)
#traditionaltattoos (1.5M)
#traditionalartist (1M)
#thightattoo (637K)
#flowertattoos (251K)
#hibiscusflower (231K)
#traditionaltattooing (164K)
#thightattoos (73.1K)
#hibiscustattoo (34.1K)
#flowertattoodesigns (17.4K)
#thightat (15.9K)
#thightattoosforwomen (5K)

Industry Hashtags

#tattoo (141M)
#tattoos (63.5M)
#inked (38.5M)
#tattooartist (19.2M)
#tattooart (16.8M)
#tattooideas (5.1M)
#tattoosofinstagram (2.9M)
#tattooinspirtation (2.2M)
#tatooworld (1.1M)
#skinart (1.1M)
#tattootime (857K)
#tattoosociety (701K)
#tattooartwork (602K)
#tattooculture (594K)
#tattos_of_instagram (584K)
#tattoers (275K)
#inkmasters (132K)
#tattedlife (99.6K)
#tattooarts (85.4K)
#tattedskin (83.1K)

Growing your account is more complex than just using the best tattoo hashtags for Instagram.

We’re going into 2021 and one thing hasn’t changed; the more interaction you can get, the more people you reach. So, ultimately you want to create engaging content! Anything that gets them to interact with it which goes beyond just likes and comments. Stories that create engagement through a variety of the little things, this is why IG offers polls, Q+A’s, sliders, and consistently more features.

This means, the simple strategy of posting 1 good post a day is the bare minimum you need to be doing. You need to be creating as much content as possible, that’s engaging. It’s a balancing act between engagement and spamming your followers. Because if you overdo it and nobody engages with your content, then Instagram’s algorithm is going to bury you below the accounts that get quality engagement.

Finding the optimal point of engagement takes a little bit of testing. Luckily, if your IG is set up as a business account there’s some data that can help. The most important piece is time of day and day of the week. Figuring out what time to post your content is the best way to get more engagement. This is different for every account so that’s why it is important to check your own data.

If you really want to take your social media presence to the next level it goes beyond posts, stories, engaging, and using the best hashtags for Instagram. You want to utilize the most recent features that IG hast to offer like the Shop, Reels, or IGTV. You will instantly get more exposure this way because the algorithm wants people to see these new features. An additional benefit is that not too many profiles are going to be using these features. So get ahead while you can!

Website Mockup

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