This story, like all good stories, has a beginning, a middle and an end. And like the best stories ever told, it starts with an idea and a fairy tale ending.
Not my idea. Lewis’s idea to get his fitness business website on page one of Google, get all the leads and clients and retire in a sea of monies. £40,000 in profit from around £3,100 spend. Not too shabby.
However, Lewis didn’t know how to get his website on page one. He just knew it started with SEO and meta tags or something.
So he turned to us and if this story was Shrek, we would be his donkey. Guiding him along his treacherous journey to become the go-to personal trainer in the swamp. This is a bad analogy because that swamp is Milton Keynes and Milton Keynes is actually quite beautiful.
Nevertheless, we got to work and this is how we got the Armoury Coaching Studio website on page one of Google and over £40,000 in sales.
Step 1: Marketing Systems Audit
Wow, how professional does that sound? A "marketing systems audit"! That’s because it is! The first step for any grand plan is to assess where you are now so you can more easily identify what you need to do to get to where you want to go.
So we took a look at Lewis’s website, Google My Business page and current rankings to see how things were going and well, they weren’t good.
So we took a look at Lewis’s website, Google My Business page and current rankings to see how things were going and well, they weren’t good.
The website was barely optimised at all and visits totaled around 2 per month. If it were a physical store, there would have been tumbleweeds rolling through the shop floor.
Optimisation was pretty straight forward and we got it to a half decent SEO score in no time. We even made some design and user experience tweaks to make sure that when the website visits increased, they’d be more likely to convert to clients.
Just these tweaks alone actually put the Armoury Coaching Studio on Google's radar and because of this, Lewis was pretty sure we knew what we were doing and had us redesign the site from top to bottom for him. Here’s a before and after.
Goodbye wall of text. Hello branding and user experience design.
Next up, we needed to optimise the businesses Google My Business (GMB) page. A quality GMB page says to Google that you’re a pretty serious business and increases the chances of landing in the location results when a user searches for your service in your location.
Step 2: Business Listings
One of the things Google looks for, to tell if you’re all serious and what not, is instances of your business Name, Address and Phone number on the internet. NAP for short.
An example of this might be a business listing in the local Milton Keynes business directory. Google logic says if you’re listed there, and many other places, you’re legit.
So we went hunting for places to list the Armoury Coaching Studio business.
If you like Googling things for hours and hours and hours, you’d really like this part of the process. Because that’s essentially what you need to do. It’s not so bad if you know some cool Google shortcuts like adding speech marks to a search asks Google to search for a specific word or group of words. Like this:
An example of this might be a business listing in the local Milton Keynes business directory. Google logic says if you’re listed there, and many other places, you’re legit.
So we went hunting for places to list the Armoury Coaching Studio business.
If you like Googling things for hours and hours and hours, you’d really like this part of the process. Because that’s essentially what you need to do. It’s not so bad if you know some cool Google shortcuts like adding speech marks to a search asks Google to search for a specific word or group of words. Like this:
With a round of 20+ listings in place we moved on to step 3.
Step 3: Press Release
To preface this next step and get the newbie SEO’s up to speed, we need to talk about backlinks.
In short, a link from one website to your website says that your website is awesome. Because people don’t generally link to crappy websites. So more links, higher rankings.
In short, a link from one website to your website says that your website is awesome. Because people don’t generally link to crappy websites. So more links, higher rankings.
A press release might sound like an odd thing to have in an SEO strategy but there’s a really good reason we use them.
Press sites have a lot of authority with Google. If Google was the headmaster, press releases would be like the hall monitors. The kids that keep an eye on the other kids and tell the headmaster what’s going on.
Because of this authority, it’s really easy to get a quality base layer of high authority links to the business website.
And that’s what we did. Wrote a press release and submitted to as many major news sites we could find. Got a tonne of high authority backlinks for the website and a little traffic too.
Step 4: Backlinks
Yep, backlinks again. But a different kind. While Google uses the number of backlinks to a website to decide how popular it is, it also uses the authority and content of that site to decide what you should be popular about.
For example, a high value link from a car mechanic site would be less useful than lower value link from a website that was specifically about personal training.
For example, a high value link from a car mechanic site would be less useful than lower value link from a website that was specifically about personal training.
Or in other words, if you want to rank for anything personal training related, you’d do well to get links from websites that are personal training related.
Luckily for us, we have a huge network of personal trainer website owners, magazine website owners and general fitness industry website owners that we could get links from.
But it’s not so easy. You generally need to reach out to these websites and offer them something in return. Some sites just want you to give them monies for a link. Others will take a guest post and you can add a link in the author box.
Whichever way you get the links, it’s a bit of a grind and actually why SEO can be quite expensive.
Luckily for us, we have a huge network of personal trainer website owners, magazine website owners and general fitness industry website owners that we could get links from.
But it’s not so easy. You generally need to reach out to these websites and offer them something in return. Some sites just want you to give them monies for a link. Others will take a guest post and you can add a link in the author box.
Whichever way you get the links, it’s a bit of a grind and actually why SEO can be quite expensive.
Step 5: Monitor and Tweak
With the other steps all in play, the whole system needs monitoring and tweaking. Usually weekly to check how the rankings are doing, continue searching for backlinks and listings and to also keep an eye on any quick wins.
For example, sometimes Google will rank a blog page before ranking the home page. So we create a link from that blog to the home page to pass the new found authority from one page to another.
There are lots of little odd jobs to do but it’s essentially a waiting game. Lucky fo us, we’ve tested and tweaked this system for over a decade now so it’s a pretty sure thing.
For example, sometimes Google will rank a blog page before ranking the home page. So we create a link from that blog to the home page to pass the new found authority from one page to another.
There are lots of little odd jobs to do but it’s essentially a waiting game. Lucky fo us, we’ve tested and tweaked this system for over a decade now so it’s a pretty sure thing.
The Results
Is SEO even worth it? It’s a question a lot of personal trainers ask and rightly so. Big monies go in and you don’t see a return for months.
My answer to that question is bias because I run several businesses off of SEO alone and get results for our clients consistently.
For Lewis, the results were as expected. 1st page of Google… twice. Once in the organic search and again on the map for pretty much every combination of the main keywords we were trying to rank for.
My answer to that question is bias because I run several businesses off of SEO alone and get results for our clients consistently.
For Lewis, the results were as expected. 1st page of Google… twice. Once in the organic search and again on the map for pretty much every combination of the main keywords we were trying to rank for.
All in all it took us 7 months to go from not even being on Google's radar to being practically best friends.
But what does that even mean? What does first place of Google actually do for a business? This is what Lewis had to say:
 | I hired My PT Website to help me create a recognizable online presence in my local market when we took the step in 2019 to sign our first lease and open up our own Small Group and Personal Training studio in Milton Keynes. |
So that’s that. SEO still works. We’re pretty good at it and man, it feels good to lift businesses up!
