A woman opens her phone and types "cosmetologist," an ordinary word that everyone searches with. The salon two blocks from her does not appear in the list. It is in the directory, it works, it takes clients, it is just recorded the wrong way. In its category field it says "Xeomin"
We opened 51,129 listings of salons, studios, and clinics in Kazakhstan and looked at which word names each one. There turned out to be 694 words. Of them, 301 are categories in the usual sense: "Cosmetologist," "Hair salons," "Gynecologist." The other 393 are names of procedures and services
17,389 listings, a little over a third of all, have no category at all. The field holds a single word, and that word is the name of a procedure
| the word the listing sits under | listings |
|---|---|
| early childhood development center | 1,156 |
| Xeomin | 1,112 |
| enzyme peel | 1,010 |
| thermal baths | 996 |
| speech therapist | 975 |
| sports doctor | 615 |
| treatment room | 557 |
| tresses | 485 |
| medical diagnostics | 481 |
| capsule hair extensions | 381 |
"Xeomin" is the trade name of a botulinum toxin drug. "Tresses" is a hair extension method. "Enzyme peel" is one of dozens of procedures a cosmetologist performs. For a search these are three different words, and none of them is "cosmetologist"
Check on your own phone: type a familiar category, then the name of the main procedure of the same salon. The lists will come out different, and in one of them the salon will be missing
The directory is filled in by the owner, who picks the word that describes them. A specialist who does tresses honestly writes exactly that, because the word seems more precise to them than the broad "hairdresser." Whoever injects Xeomin writes "Xeomin"
The price arrives unnoticed. A client searches with a broad word, and the narrow word does not find her. The reverse is true as well: a person who searches for "Xeomin" directly sees 1,112 listings and does not see the hundreds of cosmetologists who inject the same drug under their own category
A procedure in the listing is useful: it brings a person who already knows what they need. The trouble starts when it stands alone. Then all the demand for the broad word passes the salon by
The source is the open listings of health and beauty businesses in Kazakhstan with the status "active," 51,129 of them. The category name was taken from the listing's rubric field and the full list of its rubrics: categories are written with a capital letter, procedures and services with a lowercase one, which is how the directory itself tells them apart. Measured on September 3, 2026
Numbers in this article come from our own database of public directories in Kazakhstan, counted on September 3, 2026. We count them ourselves and never take them from other reports