Personal training is a growing industry with a 24% increased in personal training and fitness instruction jobs between 2010 and 2020.
It’s no wonder why it’s becoming an in-demand and popular industry. That said, it’s also becoming more competitive as personal trainers market themselves online.
Search engine optimization for personal trainers is vital in the process. Content creation and link building itself requires effective tools and techniques to maneuver rankings for personal training-related keywords.
In this post, we’ll focus on effective content creation techniques for the personal training industry.
“ANYTHING THAT COUNTS” CONTENT
If you are handling a personal training client, you’ll find all sorts of articles about fitness. One theme of topics that gains traction in terms of links is how to count/calculate topics specific to personal training.
People basically want to know their current physical standing – in one part or parts of their body. If you can provide rough estimate counts, your content would help suffice their needs.
Here are some examples of count-related keywords in the personal training space:
How to count macros
How to calculate leangains macros
Make it comprehensive, but more so, add meaningful content formats such as charts, infographics, and even a simple calculator. It would literally require investment, but it’s worth it if you can dominate the search result for a target keyword with substantial search volume.
The next question is, where can you find these how to count or how to calculate keywords?
There are two approaches that you can choose from.
The first method is by checking personal training competitors for keywords they are ranking. It will quickly reveal keyphrases where there are published content assets that served those queries.
Plug in one of your competitors’ domains. Go to Ahrefs’ Organic Keywords data. Filter the results by including keywords like, “how to count” or “how to calculate”, so you would only have keyphrases with those exact words.
[ Ahrefs’ Organic Keywords ]
Sift through the list and get industry terms that you can confidently create content.
The second approach to get counting ideas is to discover gold mine topics in Reddit. The way to do this is either directly searching it on Google (see the first image below) or plugging Fitness sub-reddit in your link building tool (for this example, I use Ahrefs).
Pop in the same words (how to count or how to calculate) in the inclusion filter of Ahrefs.
From here, you discover content ideas that Fitness sub-reddit ranks for.
GUIDES FOR UNFAMILIAR TERMS
Jargons and industry technical terms may not necessarily be familiar to your target audience. So, having content assets published on your blog dedicated to elaborating what those terms are and giving more specific information about them is a big plus to your content marketing campaign.
Here are some examples of guides that define and discuss some personal training niche terms.
Intermittent Fasting
http://romanfitnesssystems.com/articles/intermittent-fasting-101/
Leangains
https://rippedbody.com/leangains-guide/
https://rippedbody.com/reverse-pyramid-training/
Show off your expertise by publishing technical guides. By being the forefront of content creators who craft expertly-written online assets on subjects only specialists can best write, you’ll have a better advantage of ranking for some of the most competitive keywords.
EAT slideshare
Here is a recent useful slide deck by Lily Ray of Path Interactive on the topic of leveraging E-A-T for SEO success. The “E” in E-A-T stands for Expertise.
[ slideshare link ]
CONTENT REPUBLISHING
I’ve shared this effective content creation technique in my recent post on how to produce content for links.
Content republishing works perfectly for personal training websites. The idea is to find content assets published years ago but have been recently re-published given the topic relevance to its current date – its potential traction to gain new traffic and links and mentions from new people who might need the topic information.
The process of content republishing goes like this:
- Start by identifying topics being republished using Ahrefs Content Explorer’s new features (publishing and republishing dates).
- You can add more filters to the search results to only discover linkable topics – i.e. add a referring domains filter with 100<.
- Go through each topic and find ones you or your team is capable of producing.
[ content republishing topic ]
Find ways on how to leverage content formats for your chosen topic to make it more comprehensive than what’s already been published. For example, you can integrate data charts to appeal more to visual consumers.
There are two subreddits that you would find very helpful in getting inspiration for data visualization:
- Infographics Sub-reddit
- Data Is Beautiful Sub-reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/Infographics/
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful
DETERMINING HISTORICAL HOT TOPICS
Aside from digging into evergreen topics that often gets republished using Ahrefs’ Content Explorer, you also want to look out for historical hot topics. These are basically topics that seem to come back year after year.
In almost every industry, you’ll find these topics that don’t change over time, but rather are updated only with new tools, strategies, and techniques. Historically hot topics maybe issues, pain points, and problems that often experienced in daily human lives.
For personal trainers, one evergreen topic is procrastination. Whether in 1962 or 2025, this is a topic that keeps coming back every year for sure. The only thing that varies is the verbs accompanying the topic, so phrases like the following are getting searched at the highest level:
- how to overcome procrastination
- how to avoid procrastination
- how to beat procrastination
- how to fix procrastination
- how to get rid procrastination
[ ahrefs keyword explorer ]
Join sub-reddits, slack groups, and niche forums to get a feel of what’s often being discussed by your community. You can really identify historical hot topics if you are heavily involved in community engagement.
CONTENT GENERATION MATTERS IN PERSONAL TRAINING
Among verticals, the personal training industry is heavy in its production of content and in introducing new content types and formats. A niche you’d get inspiration for content ideas if you take a look on them on a regular basis.