Getting Started as a Self-Employed Massage Therapist
Quick Cheat Sheet
By Paul Bailey Massage Therapist
Listen to the AI Podcast version of this post!
1: Set up a booking system
Why?
You want clients to be able to easily book you without endless back-and-forth messages. A good booking system makes you look professional and saves you time.
How?
I recommend Fresha—it’s free if you’re working solo. It lets clients see your availability, book online, and even pay upfront if you want. You can also use Fresha as your temporary website until you’re ready to build your own. Here is an example of my booking system on Fresha https://paulmassage.uk/booking
Key tip:
Set up your services clearly, add your working hours, and test it by making a pretend booking yourself to see what the client sees.
2: Set up your Google Business Profile
Why?
This is how you show up when people in your area search things like "massage near me." It’s like a free mini website that Google gives you. Here is an example of my Google Business Profile
How?
Go to Google Business Profile.
Fill out everything, including your name, location (if mobile, add your service area), working hours, and photos.
Post updates (even just sharing your latest Instagram posts) 2-3 times a week—this tells Google you’re active.
Ask friends, family, and past clients to leave reviews. The more 5-star reviews you have, the higher you’ll show up in search.
3: Run ads on Google and Facebook/Instagram
Why?
This gets your name in front of people who are ready to book now. Organic social media is slow—ads put you in front of people fast.
How?
Use Google Ads and Facebook/Instagram Ads.
Start with £5 per day on each—this is enough to get noticed locally.
Important: When setting up the ad, make sure to set a radius around your service area (e.g. 10km around your town), otherwise your ads will show to people across the country, which is a waste of money.
4: Build a simple website (once you’ve done the above)
Why?
Your website is your online 'shop window.' It shows people you’re professional, builds trust, and helps you appear in Google searches. Here is an example of my website https://paulmassage.uk/
How?
Keep it simple: services, prices, about you, and contact.
Start a blog—write short posts like “5 benefits of deep tissue massage” or “How to prepare for your first massage.”
Post 2-3 times per week at the start to get your site noticed faster by Google.
Bonus tip: Use the same content from your social media and turn it into blogs—don’t overthink it!
5: Focus on Instagram Reels and Stories
Why?
Reels (short videos) reach more people than photo posts right now. Stories (the little circles at the top of Instagram) help your followers stay engaged and remind them you exist. Checkout my Instagram profile as an example
How?
Post Reels 2-3 times per week. Show behind the scenes, massage tips, or explain your services.
Post Stories daily, even just a selfie saying “Good morning!” or a clip of you setting up your massage table.
6: Automate your content to save time
Why?
You don’t need to create different posts for every platform. You can automatically copy your Instagram posts to your blog, Facebook, Google Business, and LinkedIn.
How?
Use a tool like Make.com—it lets you set up automations that do the copying for you.
Example: A client of mine posts a massage tip to Instagram, and I have an automation that turns it into a longer blog post, updates his Google Business Profile, and shares to Facebook and LinkedIn—without him lifting a finger.
Bonus tip: Start small—get used to Instagram first, then add automations once you’ve got a routine.
✅ Overall Summary:
Booking system first—make it easy to get booked.
Google Business Profile next—get found locally.
Run simple ads—target only your area.
Website comes later—use your social posts as blog posts.
Instagram Reels + Stories every day—videos work best.
Automate the rest using Make.com—work smarter, not harder.
If you need any help setting any of this up get in touch! https://paulmassage.uk/contact
Link to many more useful resources https://linktr.ee/paulmassage
SEO the long game
You should be building your SEO from day one. Everything you do online will help with building your SEO game. For almost a year I didn’t get any traction. Sure Google knew about my site but it wasn’t growing. Then suddenly, I got my first spike, then a few months later another, and another.
The thing is, nothing about this was sudden. I had been building more pages and posts on my website. Linking back to it from social media regularly and teaching myself more and more about how to help Google see my website as a resource, not just one big advert.
I knew this was truly working when I got a booking for a massage from someone in Canada. They were due to be flying back from India to Canada in a couple of weeks and had an overnight stay in London, they would be in one of the hotels near Heathrow airport. A few weeks before, I’d posted a long blog post and a new page talking about how I cover the hotels in and around Heathrow. I mentioned a few hotel names, posted pics of them. Then made sure Google knew about these pages by adding them in the Google Search Console. The client was looking for mobile massage therapists in Heathrow and my pages popped up. So he booked!
Internal Linking
The thing that seemed to make the most difference for me was internal linking. This can be a long drawn out process, searching through your posts and pages and linking to other posts and pages. It’s soul destroying! Until I found a great hack, which is a WordPress plug in called Internal Link Juicer. Start with your main page, and add in the top keywords for that page, between 3-5 keywords. Then the plugin will search all other pages and posts on your website and create a link from the back to your main page.
You can see below, I added 4 keywords to my main page and this resulted in 196 internal links from other posts and pages back to this one. Google LOVES this!
External Linking
Also important but not as powerful is external linking.
For this I would run my post through ChatGPT and ask it to provide me with 5 credible resources that are on the same topic.
I created a CustomGPT for this so you can just use that
https://chatgpt.com/g/g-682b10bfabec81918f9389195c67afd9-reference-link-finder-for-blog-posts
Just paste in the URL of your post and let the CustomGPT find similar articles
Copy and paste that into the bottom of your post. This shows Google that you’re a great resource for other links.
Google Search Console
Check GSC once a week. In particular the Indexing > Pages section
Look for pages that are “Discovered - currently not indexed”
Hover over each page and tap the magnifier icon
Then tap “Request Indexing”
This can take a few days, so check back next week, if it’s still not indexed, then you might need to refresh the content on that page. Increase the word count and add in more details.
Also, anytime you add a new page or post you can speed up the indexing process by adding your URL to the top of the screen and requesting it to be indexed in the same way.
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