How to Rank Above Your Competition in Google

The personal training industry is very competitive at the moment. To stand out from the crowd, you need to make sure that you are doing everything in your power to optimise your online presence and feature high up on the search engine result pages.

However, this can be a lot easier said than done. This is especially the case if a lot of other fitness brands in your area have had a head start and have already made some good traction on Google. But there is no time like the present to start strategising about how you are going to rank above your competition. With that being said, let's take a look at some tips and suggestions below.

1. Link Building

To rank high on Google, you need to make sure that you are building quality backlinks to your personal training website. A backlink is essentially a link that is posted on another website that will direct people to your homepage or any of the other pages on your personal trainer website.

This essentially works as giving Google the thumbs up about your website. Google can see that other websites and blogs are willing to feature your site and this serves as a positive sign. However, it is not as simple as just posting your link everywhere on the web. It is definitely a case of quality before quantity when it comes to link building.

Therefore, you need to make sure that the links pointing to your website come from businesses that are relevant to your own and they need to have high domain authority.

This is what we did for one of our clients here:

And this is how those backlinks impacted traffic their website:

There are lots of free domain ranking checkers that are available on the Internet today, so you can easily search the website in question to find out whether or not they have a good domain ranking. 

Don't forget, you need to make sure that their blog or website is relevant to your own site. If you run a personal training business for pregnant women, for example, it makes absolutely no sense for your website link to be posted on a mechanic’s website.

Relevancy is key. Therefore, you should consider reaching out to blogs for expectant mums, nutrition websites, fitness blogs, and other websites that fall into the realm of your target audience.

2. Guest Posting

In order to get backlinks, you need to think about the different ways that you can get your website featured on other blogs and websites.

Guest posts are one of the most effective solutions here. This involves writing a guest article for a website with high authority in your niche. For example, you could put together a post on how to motivate yourself to go for a run if you are feeling like you can't be bothered or you could do a post on the correct form when performing a squat. The former one would be useful for a blog on running, the latter might be a great addition to a lifestyle coaching business who's also focused on the fitness of their clients.

Essentially, you need to make sure that you are putting together something that is valuable and will engage the reader. What you certainly should not be doing is simply putting together a promotional piece of content that is all about your business. Instead, it needs to be a general piece about health and fitness that offers value and will include a backlink to your website in a discreet yet highly effective manner.

3. Timeless Content

When you are designing different pieces of content to try and build up your authority, there are a few things that you will need to keep in mind. We would always recommend that you choose timeless content.

What we mean by this is content that will be just as valuable in two years’ time as it is now. For example, putting together an article on how to follow a gluten-free diet is an evergreen content that will always have value.

Here are some of the ranking pages for one of our clients. Notice how all of them are blog posts.

It doesn't mean you should never post about time sensitive ideas, they have their time and place and can be also important to gain traction quickly. However, from a content marketing point, evergreen articles will be the backbone of your long-term inbound marketing strategy.

4. Choose Shareable Content

It is also worth thinking about what types of content you can use to increase the engagement of your audience. For example, infographics are very popular and are more likely to be shared on social media and other platforms.

Infographics present you with an excellent way of getting the word out about your personal training business and increasing your visibility across all platforms, including on Google. After all, if people are sharing your infographic, which includes your website link, on social media platforms and on various websites, this creates more and more backlinks and will help you to move up the search engine result pages.

5. Original Content Is a Must

In order to make sure that you really do succeed on Google, make sure that the content that you produce is interesting and valuable, and also needs to be original.

You cannot simply copy and paste content that you have found elsewhere. You need to make sure that all of your work is plagiarism-free and there are some great plagiarism checkers that can make sure that you have not written something that is too similar to another piece of content on the Internet today.

If you are found to have duplicated content, Google will penalise your website and your ranking will suffer as a consequence. This is something that could be very difficult to come back from, so it is important to make sure that you do not try and cut any corners.

Conclusion

As you can see there are a number of different strategies that you can take to boost your ranking on Google. One of the most important things to do is to build a quality backlink profile and to make sure that you are increasing the number of quality, relevant links that are pointing to your website.