Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a way to optimise your personal trainer website so that it gets more traffic without having to spend any money on paid advertising. There are three ways to focus on SEO, and each of them needs to be considered for best results.
On-page SEO focuses on the written content on any page of the website, trying to rank on the first page of Google for specific keywords.
Off-page SEO focuses on the relationship between your fitness website and other sites, based on the quantity and quality of the "backlinks" between you.
Technical SEO focuses on the back end of the website, such as the coding and how it was set up.
Step 1. Evaluate Current SEO
Before you begin your SEO campaign, it can help to get clear on a few critical details about your website first.
Regularly updated websites do much better for SEO than those which are updated infrequently. Like for fitness success via exercise and a healthy diet, consistency is vital for SEO with Google preferring websites that have new content regularly.
If you're struggling to maintain a posting schedule of high quality, well-written blog content, we offer a done for you service to help with this.
- What sort of message are you trying to communicate on your website?
- What type of clients are you trying to attract?
- When people are on your website, what action do you want them to take?
- How often can you commit to updating your content and bring in new visitors?
Regularly updated websites do much better for SEO than those which are updated infrequently. Like for fitness success via exercise and a healthy diet, consistency is vital for SEO with Google preferring websites that have new content regularly.
If you're struggling to maintain a posting schedule of high quality, well-written blog content, we offer a done for you service to help with this.
Step 2. Complete On-Page SEO Settings
In short, this is about the content that you can edit, add and update on your website. The copy of your main website pages, the SEO Titles and Description of each page and the metadata all belongs here. We went into details on how to optimise these features in a previous blog on SEO optimisation.
The articles you publish also belong to the on-page SEO methods and are a crucial element for improving your website's ranking on Google.
Step 3. Optimise Your Articles for SEO
It can be helpful to start with a list of topics that your clients (and potential clients!) would find useful and this way you can be sure that what you're writing will be well received. For some time now, Google has been able to look at the "intent" of the article, not just the keywords, so stuffing the blog or page full of repetitive keywords not only makes it hard to read, but it could hurt your chances of ranking.
Think about your personal training services, and come up with a list of around a dozen broad "associated terms". You could then use Google's free Keyword Tool to identify how popular a search it is and use this list to come up with keywords that make sense for your fitness business. This will associate your topics with popular short-tail keywords.
Think about your personal training services, and come up with a list of around a dozen broad "associated terms". You could then use Google's free Keyword Tool to identify how popular a search it is and use this list to come up with keywords that make sense for your fitness business. This will associate your topics with popular short-tail keywords.
From here, you'll make a short-list of around 15 short-tail keywords that are relevant to your audience. Rank them based on how important they are to your services, and how many people are searching for them.
You can think of each of these short-tail keywords as a "pillar" that supports a "cluster" of long-tailed keywords. For each short tail keyword pillar, you could have as many as 10 long term keyword clusters that will explore the topic in more detail. Long tail keywords are typically easier to rank for.
Long-tailed keywords are how you can optimise specific pages for a very particular interest, which creates lots of "doors" into your personal training business. And through these sub-topics, you can create lots of ideas for blog content which will drive the traffic to your website.
A content creation schedule of around one new post a week is a minimum recommended. Google monitors regularly updated written content for keywords. When your website goes into details around a specific problem through your SEO-optimized cluster articles, Google will rank your website much higher because it could be a single reference point for the person searching.
Step 4. Focus on Off-Page SEO
In short, this is about relationships with other authority websites. Backlinking is the process of attracting people to your website from links found on other reputable and high-traffic websites. If you're linked with a page which has a lot of authority on a given topic, that backlink will have more "weight" for your page.
You could do this by linking to other websites that your clients might be interested in. People who are interested in personal trainers may also be interested in local massage therapy or osteopathy treatments, hairdressers or tanning salons. They may be interested in healthy restaurants or gym clothing companies. You could offer to write a guest blog for their website or post about current events going on in your town that might be of interest. The backlinking opportunities will depend on your target audience.
In your blogs, linking to reputable sources of information on websites with high authority on the topic will also help Google think that you are an expert on that topic too. For example, if you use a particular source of info for your nutrition topics, mentioning and linking to their website will build trust in your readers but also the authority of that article in search engines. Feel free to add the link in-text and also to any visuals you use.
You could do this by linking to other websites that your clients might be interested in. People who are interested in personal trainers may also be interested in local massage therapy or osteopathy treatments, hairdressers or tanning salons. They may be interested in healthy restaurants or gym clothing companies. You could offer to write a guest blog for their website or post about current events going on in your town that might be of interest. The backlinking opportunities will depend on your target audience.
In your blogs, linking to reputable sources of information on websites with high authority on the topic will also help Google think that you are an expert on that topic too. For example, if you use a particular source of info for your nutrition topics, mentioning and linking to their website will build trust in your readers but also the authority of that article in search engines. Feel free to add the link in-text and also to any visuals you use.
Similarly, if you use statistics or research data in an article from a reputable source, don't hesitate to use an external link to the original source. In the age of fake news and made-up data, it will become essential so that you can show you've done your research as an expert would. That will show integrity for your visitors and also rank your blog higher.
Step 5. Technical SEO
In short, this is about infrastructure and indexing. Technical SEO helps Google to look at your website and interpret what it's all about by being organised. It has nothing to do with the actual content on the website, and instead focuses on the "back end" stuff like the infrastructure and architecture. It's about the way your site is built and put together.
You can check Google's ability to index your site by using their own free tool. If there are any issues with your site, you can start to see them here. Typical problems might include forgetting to compress images before uploading them which can slow down the crawl, or adding metatags which is the text available in the HTML code that says explicitly what that page is about.
You can check Google's ability to index your site by using their own free tool. If there are any issues with your site, you can start to see them here. Typical problems might include forgetting to compress images before uploading them which can slow down the crawl, or adding metatags which is the text available in the HTML code that says explicitly what that page is about.
Conclusion
All three aspects of SEO work together to influence your website's overall ranking on Google. While you don't need to have all this in place on your website at first, it can help to go back and systematically add to historical content to help boost it. Once you're ranking for the keywords you wanted to (which can take a few months depending on the keyword), track where your blog posts are ranking. You may need to tweak some subheadings, or some content to reflect changing keywords to keep your ranking. Refresh old content by updating outdated information, or adding new information to keep the post relevant.
Staying on top of SEO can feel like a full-time job. Our Managed Website service includes on-site SEO settings and developments. At the same time, we also provide Search Engine Marketing service to our website clients to help them with their off-site and technical SEO strategies.
Staying on top of SEO can feel like a full-time job. Our Managed Website service includes on-site SEO settings and developments. At the same time, we also provide Search Engine Marketing service to our website clients to help them with their off-site and technical SEO strategies.
