In this digital era, everyone is turning to the Internet to find a local business. With that said, Gym and fitness industries are facing challenges when trying to attract new members. Gym SEO is one of the most significant reason, there are at least a couple of gyms in each street, but not all of them are online. Meaning, the competition is high, and the online presence is low. So, when a potential client goes on Google, even though your fitness business exists in that locality, they aren’t able to find you.
However, just creating a website won’t be of any good either. Having a site that’s not optimized for search engines is worse than not having one at all. As a fitness club owner, you need to create a website that is tuned for your local search results. When people in your locality are looking for your business, your site needs to show up in the search engine result pages. Before we walk you through how gym owners can improve their local SEO strategy, let’s first understand why investing in an SEO service is critical.
Reasons Why Gym Owners Should Invest in SEO for Fitness
Google has Replaced Yellow Pages
It’s no longer the era when people look at a local phone book to find small businesses in their locality. Times have changed, and when people want to see something, they look for businesses online. With the explosion of smartphones, people just pull out their mobile devices and do a Google search, and use Google map searches to reach any location. Gym SEO can help you to create a website that Google will love and would show it to your customers when they are looking for a fitness club in your locality.
SEO gives Swift Results
Your competition is only the other gym in your locality. Meaning, creating a marketing strategy gets easier as you exactly know who your competitor is and what are your audience is expecting. If you have your fitness clubs located in multiple locations, you can create different digital market strategies targeting location-based keywords.
SEO Traffic Needs No Investment
Sure, you can spend on your PPC campaigns to attract customers to your website, but what’s wrong in getting free traffic? SEO traffic is free! Make a website using local SEO strategies and give your site a steady stream of free traffic.
Follow these Quick Tips On SEO For Gym Website
Have a Website that Talks about Your Fitness Club
Your website is your fitness club’s online identity. If people can’t find it online, you sure are losing your potential clients to your competitors. Create a website that is optimized for search results that tells your customers about your fitness club. When people come to your site, they expect it to have all the details about the training styles you offer. You may even include the details of your training activities that you want your customers to know about. Use your website to promote the offers you are running at your fitness club. They may want to schedule a trial or a demo session with one of your personal trainers. Create a website that is fully functional and user-friendly. You can even include your happy clients testimonials as people trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Tell them how your clients have benefited with your health plans. Add client photos of before and after a fitness challenge. It will encourage people to consider you for their fitness routine.
Social Media Can Get Your Website More Traffic
Social bookmarking is as essential as any other internet marketing strategy. Though social media may not directly influence your website’s SEO, it sure will help you improve your brand reputation. People on social media don’t spend too much time to read long articles or blogs. You need something interesting that would catch their attention immediately. You can create videos or posters about fitness tips or maybe how a particular workout needs to be done. Post them on your Facebook, Instagram and YouTube accounts to attract more customers to your website. It will help you create brand recognition in your locality.
Create Content that Your Audience Would Like to Read
People usually come to your fitness website either to enrol for a program you offer or to read about some health tips. If your site has useful content, people will come more often to learn about various things. Write articles on how to maintain a healthy lifestyle, tips on what to eat and more. Use long-tail keywords in your content. Long tail keywords tend to be more descriptive than regular keywords, hence will help you attract targeted traffic. In turn, increasing your fitness club’s online visibility and search engine ranking.
Make Sure the Search Engines Know About Your Website
Search engines won’t know about your website unless you tell them about it. As soon as you create your site, create a sitemap, and submit it to the search engines. You can create a free Google and Bing webmaster accounts to regularly submit your sitemap as when you add new web pages. There are even a couple of paid webmaster tools which you can integrate with your website and automate the submission task.
Engage Your Leads – It’s Why You Created a Website
Your website is also your lead generation tool. When people come to your site to read some content or know more about your business, provide them with the options like subscribe for your newsletters, book a demo and more. It will encourage people to give you their contact details which can be used by you to nurture your lead and then change them into your customers.
Leverage Omni-Channel Communication
People who have subscribed to your newsletters or have signed on for a demo are the people who are interested in your brand. You can engage your customers by sending them an email, Whatsapp message (Whatsapp for Business) or an SMS. Leverage Omni-channel communication to improve your conversion rate.
Google My Business is Snapshot of Your Website
Exactly, your Google My Business profile is the miniature version of your website that you can see in the map section of the Google local listings. Claim and optimize your fitness club on “Google My Business”. Fill in your accurate name, address, phone number, and website that are identical across all web listings. Search engines will recognize your gym for that location. When people look for a fitness club in your area, you get a better chance at ranking well in search results.
Plan Your Keywords Relevant to Your Location
When you start working on the SEO strategy for your gym website, keywords are crucial. You definitely don’t your fitness studio to rank for the wrong set of keywords. Do a keywords research for what are the search terms people are using to look for fitness studios in your locality. Optimize your content using those keywords. Include your keywords in the title tags for the people to understand the relevance when they land on each page. However, don’t go over the board with keywords that may lead to losing the essence of the content.
Keep Track of Your Web Analytics
Knowing where your SEO efforts are going is necessary. Unless you know how your strategy is performing, you won’t be able to make any improvisations, if needed. Install free tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console tools on your website. Using these tools you can know the details like unique visitors, a particular page rank, traffic, pages they are visiting, and more. These reports will help you to understand what’s trending and the user engagement on your website.
Leverage the Power of Brand Advocacy
Social media has the most influencing platform that is leveraged by most marketers. Getting a review or a recommendation for your service can have a positive impact on helping you build confidence in your brand. And, if the review is from a brand advocate, it gets more value. Recognize your brand advocates, and ask them for their feedback. You can even engage them by offering them some incentives or exclusive discounts at your fitness club. Social media brand advocacy is an ongoing thing, and it provides a lot of benefits to a company and brand.