Service Provider FAQ’s

Service Provider FAQ’s

You are likely to have some questions when considering listing your practice on Manchester Massage. You may have also found yourself here after running into some trouble with the site. The following are some of the questions we have gotten so far. If you are having trouble and/or can’t find an answer to your question, please feel free to contact us.

*Click any of the following links to jump to the corresponding FAQ.*

Signing Up

Creating And Editing Listings

Other Questions About Listings And Your Account

Site Structure

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Guest Blogging

General Questions about Manchester Massage

Signing up

Do I need a credit card or anything to sign up for a free listing?

No! signing up for a free listing requires no payment information or any kind of obligation. It really is free to add a basic listing, we do charge a small fee for more premium listings.

Who Can Sign up for a listing?

Manchester Massage is intended to be a resource to help connect massage and beauty therapists and health professionals to potential clients in the greater Manchester area.

Creating And Editing Listings

How do I create a listing?

To create a listing you need to create an account and then a listing. Simply click the link on the top right of the home page that says “Add Listing”. This will take you to the listings page, where you can choose the right listing for you.

*We generally don’t advise creating a listing while on a tablet or cell phone, but if you do, you will find these links in the menu at the top left of the home page, not the top right.

How do I get to my user dashboard so I can edit my listing and see my stats?

To get to your user dashboard you must first sign in by clicking the “therapist Login/Register” button on the top right of the home page. After doing this you will see your username displayed at the top of the screen. Click that to be taken to your dashboard.

What image sizes should I use on my listing?

Technically, the images you use on your listing can be any size you want, but there are some things you should keep in mind.

  • Try to keep your images as small as possible without them looking bad. The bigger your images, the bigger your listing page, and the slower it loads. Slow load speeds damage SEO rankings and may make your listing less likely to appear in search engine results.
  • The images that you add to be included in the carousel at the top of your listing will be automatically resized to fit the area they are displayed in. This is done by image height, so images are shrunk or stretched to meet the height of the space they are displayed in on any given screen. Generally any image with a height of 375px or more should display without any reduction in quality. If the height of your image is less than this, it may appear stretched/skewed.
  • As an alternative to the image carousel at the top of your listing, you may choose to upload one larger panoramic image that will appear as a header image at the top of your listing.
  • Our system resizes your featured image to fit the spaces it is displayed in. However, if you upload an oddly sized image, our system might do weird things to it to make it fit the spaces it needs to appear in. To prevent this, we have decided on optimal sizes for featured images. Please make your featured image either 450 x 300,  562 x 375 or 1125 x 750. You can easily do this in Microsoft paint or another similar program.
  • We like to keep featured images in the sizes above so that search pages display in a neat, organized way. If we come across images that are outside of these dimensions we may edit them to fit these sizes. Doing so may require some cropping. We will do our best not to significantly alter your image.

Why does my image look weird in search results?

Because its the wrong size. See the above question for optimal image sizes. We do our best to make images appear well in search results, but sometimes we can’t fix them. If we become aware of a problem we will let you know. There are 2 common problems: if your image looks really small in search results then your image is too small. If its chopped off in a weird way, then the dimensions are off. Usually we can fix the weird chopped off problem if the image is horizontally oriented.

After a long wait I got an error message after submitting my listing. What’s the deal?

Check your image sizes. If you try to upload images files that are too big the system may reject them. We have tested this and found that we have been able to upload a total of 10 mb. worth of images to one listing, but doing so resulted in a delay of one and a half minutes. We strongly encourage you to reduce image sizes to lower than 100k each.  If you continue to have trouble after checking your image sizes, contact us.

Other Questions About Listings And Your Account

How do I change my notification settings for when potential clients contact me?

visit this page to read all about notification settings and all of the statistics you’ll find on your dashboard.

How can I tell if/how Manchester Massage is helping me?

You can find lots of statistics about your listing on your dashboard. We wrote a whole blog post about this! Check it out here:  Is your Listing Helping your Business?

Site Structure

Why are listings separated into cities?

Many other directories primarily rely on post codes for users to search for specific locations. We plan on adding this function at some point, but it has some real downsides that we thought could be avoided by categorizing by town instead. When you really think about it, when someone is looking for a service provider, they may be unlikely to care about how close they are, as long as they aren’t really far away. In some cases people might actually want to see a service provider that isn’t too close to home. In sorting by towns, Manchester Massage facilitates this.

This brings up another problem we see with using post codes. One of our editors lives 2 miles away from the Manchester Massage office, but that happens to be in another post code are. When she searches her home post code on some of the directories she is listed on, our office doesn’t come up in the results even though it’s right down the street. There is usually a way to adjust the search radius, but it’s often hard to find, and we don’t think many people will bother with that. Categorizing by town makes for a more simple, browseable experience.

Why is my town not listed?

We are always adding new towns as and when we have listings created by service providers in those areas or when we review a service provider in those areas. If your business is located in an area outside of any of those listed in Manchester Massage you can contact us at info@manchestermassage.net to let us know.

How are the “featured service providers” on the front page selected?

The “featured service providers” shown on the front page of Manchester Massage are selected at random each time the page is loaded.

What determines the order that therapists appear on search result pages?

The order in which therapists appear on search result pages is determined by the date at which the advert is created. If you renew on a regular basis, you will often appear at the top of the listings.  Of course you can always pay to advertise your business using our PPC ad campaigns found in your dashboard, this way you will be guaranteed a favourable position.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Can Manchester Massage help my search engine rankings?

Yes! Most other therapist directories do things to prevent you from getting any SEO credit for your listing. We don’t do that. Manchester Massages can help your site to rank better in search engines in a couple of ways. Click here to read more about this.

Why do some categories use the word “therapy” and others “service provider”?

Some of the advertisers on this site like to be known as massage therapists, whilst other like to be known as service providers, we therefore like to use both terms. Aside from that, when writing any web content you should do some keyword research to discover what keywords are being searched for. In some cases therapist is searched for more frequently than service provider.

Guest Blogging

How can I write a guest blog post?

If you are interested in writing a guest blog post, contact us and let us know what you’re thinking. We’re generally open to people writing about anything mental health related and we welcome anybody in the mental health community to contribute, even if you aren’t a Manchester Massage member.

Read more about writing a guest blog post

How can guest blogging benefit me?

Guest blogging can benefit you in a variety of ways. Essentially guest blogging amounts to free advertising. When you write a post for Manchester Massage we will feature it on our front page for 15 days and include it in our social media advertising for 5 days. Current statistics as of 12/5/18 are putting us at an average of around 200 views per guest post in the first 5 days. This potentially drives traffic to your site, your listing, and can increase awareness of you and your practice.

Read more about writing a guest blog post

Where will my guest blog post appear?

When you write a guest blog post for Manchester Massage it will appear:

  • On the front page of Manchester Massage for 15 days
  • In all of our social media accounts
  • In our social media advertising for 5 days
  • At the bottom of your Manchester Massage listing

Read more about writing a guest blog post

General Questions About Manchester Massage

Why is Manchester Massage so cheap?

Because we are passionate about massage and want to ensure that the best service providers are all listed in one recognised place. We want Manchester Massage to be the go to resource for service providers and clients.

How does Manchester Massage handle security?

Security is really important to us. We take several measures to protect the security of the site, our members, and the people who use our site.

  • Our site uses a secure socket layer (SSL) to protect data transferred between users’ computers and the website. Have you ever noticed that some websites start with HTTP, while others start with HTTPS? the “S” on the end of our HTTP indicates that we use SSL. Our site using SSL basically means that every time a person visits our site, their browser and our website talk to each other to decide on a unique encryption code and use that to encode and decode information sent between the user and the site. Essentially SSL means that your computer and our site come up with their own freakin language and use it to talk to each other! Crazy!
  • We use a powerful security program called Sucuri. It protects our site from malicious code, brute force attacks, hacks, DDOS attacks, and other security issues. Sucuri is really awesome in that it scans our site every 6 hours and notifies us of any problems that we can then fix right away. It also provides us with a sophisticated firewall that keeps out potential threats.
  • We use direct methods for handling payments. Payments are handled directly through Stripe or Paypal. This means that we don’t collect or keep any of your payment information.
  • We use multi-factor authentication to protect the heart of our site….so somebody would literally have to torture or otherwise coerce one of us to get unauthorized access to the back-end of our site.

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