So far, we’ve covered social media, Facebook Ads, and Google AdWords. There’s just one primary strategy left to cover when it comes to driving traffic, and it’s a big one: Show SEO. You’ve probably heard about it. You may even have thought about doing it for your business. But how do you get started? Well, to answer that, I’ll first answer the question… What is SEO?SEO stands for search engine optimization – essentially, building your website in such a way that it’s more visible to users of search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Bing. Why is this so important? Get this: Google processes 40,000 searches a second. Hundreds of thousands of people search for terms like “gym”, “exercise”, and “workout” monthly – that’s a bunch of traffic you can leverage to bring new members to your business. Unfortunately, there’s also a joke that the best place to hide a dead body is the second page of Google. Basically, few people ever click past the first page – so you want to make sure your business ranks as highly as possible for relevant keywords on search engines. Ranking on the first page for your targeted keywords will bring you relevant traffic, and with it, potential customers. When it comes to doing SEO for your fitness center, you’ll want to focus most of your efforts on a branch of search engine optimization called local SEO. How does local SEO work?Local SEO allows you to promote your fitness center to local customers who are looking for a gym or yoga studio (or what have you) like yours. It’s actually a bit easier to tackle than general SEO. Ranking highly for “yoga studio in Nashville” is much easier than ranking for “yoga studio”, and traffic means nothing if it’s not coming from people who could realistically become customers. Google ranks local website results based on three key factors: relevance, distance, and prominence.
Now that we have a basic understanding of local SEO, let’s go over the most important things your business can do to optimize for it. Setting up your “Google My Business” listingCreating a Google My Business page might be the single most important thing you can do to optimize your business for local SEO. It ensures your business shows up “front and center” when people search for it on Google – and that’s important, seeing as an overwhelming majority of people use Google as their search engine of choice. Here’s how a fitness center with Google My Business looks when you search for it: As you can see, it’s quite different than a regular Google search result. Google My Business results provide business information including photos, location, hours (and activity), contact information, and reviews from sites like Facebook, Google, and more. Creating a My Business listing for your fitness center makes it as easy as possible for potential customers to find it, maximizing the chances they’ll book a tour or you’ll get a new member. If you have more than one location, create a new listing for each of them. Once you’re set up, you’re not done yet. There’s still a few things you can do to maximize your business’ chance of ranking highly on Google. Here’s a few best practices:
NAP and Schema markupDon’t be alarmed if you haven’t seen these words before. They’re simple principles that will help bump your website up the the search rankings and make sure they’re being indexed correctly. NAP consistencyAs much as I love dozing off for a couple hours on a Saturday afternoon, NAP refers to name, address, and phone number. To maintain consistency, you want to ensure your business name, address, and phone number are the same across your website, in content and formatting. Make sure your NAP is present on all of your pages – the best place for it is in your footer. For example you want to use either “123 – 4567 Name St.” or “4567 Name St. Suite #123” in all instances of your address online – never use them interchangeably. This goes for your business name and phone number, as well. You’ll also want to make sure your NAP appears the same across different websites, as well. Each mention of your NAP on another website is called a citation, and local search rankings are heavily affected by citation quantity, quality, and consistency. Basically, the number of times your NAP is mentioned, the quality of the sites citing your NAP, and the consistency of the NAP itself all improve your fitness center’s chance of ranking on the first page. If you see your NAP mentioned on another site incorrectly, take the time to reach out to them so they can correct it. Schema markupCREATE GENERATOR Schema markup is similar to NAP; it’s another method of improving the quality of your business information to increase your website’s search rankings. To explain it simply, Schema is a series of HTML tags attached to your NAP information that help search engines identify what it is and attach it to your business. Basically, it’s an invisible sign that tells Google “4567 Name St. is a street address”, or “604-123-4567 is a phone number”. You can use Schema to mark up other portions of your website, like reviews and testimonials, but I’d recommend marking up your NAP information at the very least. It helps your site rank better for keywords that are relevant to it, and helps search engines know what information to use to answer questions like “[gym] phone number” or “[yoga studio] address”. I know it can be hard sometimes to see the concrete benefits of SEO, but trust me, they’re there – and you’d be wise to take advantage of them to bring new business to your fitness center. NAP and Schema markup are also two crucial parts of citation building. Let me explain… Building CitationsI previously explained what citations are: mentions of your business with another piece of business information (like your phone number or address. Again, these are important because they help boost your site’s search engine rankings – so having a number of citations from quality sites is key to SEO success. Luckily, many of these sites allow you to build your own citations. Here’s a few best practices for citation building:
A list of sites you can get started with to build citations:
If you’re looking for local citation sources, try searching for “citation sources [city]”. If you’re based in the U.S., Moz has built a handy list of citation sources by U.S. city. Take some time to build citations and you’ll see the traffic roll in. Gathering ReviewsSomething related to building citations is gathering reviews for your business. They’re important in building credibility and can also be a big booster for SEO. Though reviews can be pretty straightforward, here are some review best practices:
Simple Website SEOThe final piece of this guide is a simple overview of optimizing your webpage for SEO. It helps your webpage rank for things like “gym in Montreal” or “personal training San Francisco”. I’ve put together a quick list of things you can do to make sure you capture as much organic traffic as possible:
These are some of the most impactful things you can do to help your site rank for the keywords you’re targeting. ConclusionThere you have it – a complete beginner’s guide to SEO for your fitness center. Though it can be tough to understand, SEO can be a huge traffic driver for your business. It’s an extremely effective way to draw in potential customers who are interested in a fitness center like yours, and it’s certainly worth your time. |