Can Your Personal Training Website Be Found In Google?
Its no good having a website if nobody can find it on the first page of Google…
The truth is only a very small percentage of web users click past the first 3 or 4 websites that show up in an online search. Check out this picture of a search engine eye-gaze heat map. It shows that 85% of people will click on the first 3 organic results.
The visitors interest rapidly declines as you go down the list. Thus, you MUST strive to get your personal training website ranked on top of the first page of Google.
The sad reality is less than 1percent of fitness professionals know what it truly takes to rank on the first page of Google, many personal trainers are left with a website that is buried deep under 4 or 5 pages in the search engines, never to be seen.
Let me reveal a few secrets to getting better rankings for your personal training website.
First off, I still grit my teeth when a fellow personal trainer tells me “yeah my website is number one in Google, just type in my company name, xyz training”. While it is very likely your website will pop up number one if you type in the name of your company (or the name of your website – geez!), your potential clients will NOT be typing in your company name, they don’t know your company name yet! What they will be typing in is words related to what you have to offer, not what you called your company. For example they will type in ‘personal trainer’ or ‘outdoor personal trainer’ or ‘personal training for women’. Type those words in a search engine, the words your prospective clients will use, and I bet you don’t show up any where near the first page (if at all!). So the first thing you need to do is start ranking for those types of terms. I’ll tell you how in a minute.
That brings me to my next point: “How do people find you in the search engines?”
Think of your personal training business just like any other business… if you were looking for a hardware store what would you type into Google? Probably ‘hardware store’, or if you were looking for equipment for your kitchen renovation you might get more specific and type in “DIY kitchen renovations’ or ‘kitchen cabinets’. And if you were really serious about finding some kitchen cabinets to buy now you would probably type in ‘kitchen cabinets [location]‘ with location being the city where you live, so you may find the closest place to you where you can go and buy new kitchen cabinets. Now what most people do when they put up a website is they focus on their NAME rather than WHAT the customer is searching for. So in this example it would be Dean focusing on his business called Dean’s Cabinets rather than ‘kitchen cabinets [location]‘, no-one is going to actually type in Dean’s Cabinets just like no-one will type in Tom’s Personal Training. But if Tom lived in Beakonsfield and his website ranked for ‘Personal training in Beakonsfield’ then he has a very high chance of ranking on the first page of Google.
So the key here is to FIRST identify the keywords your potential customers will be using to search for your service.
OK, so how do you start ranking for these keywords…? There are many different components to address which help how well your personal training website ranks in the search engines. Including and not limited to:
- Website design and layout: Many websites have poor design that is not search engine friendly. Get this right at the beginning and you wont have to spend hours down the road fixing every page on your website to be search engine friendly. Not all web designers understand this, their main focus is on creating a ‘nice-looking’ website.
- Website Search Engine Optimization (SEO): There are a few on-page optimizations you can make (today they have less pull in the search engines but never the less worth getting right) like H1 tags, META tags, page titles and descriptions. Since they are not as important in the eyes of the search engines as they once were you want to automate as much of this type of SEO as possible. With the help of some other marketing and off-page SEO tactics I’m about to show you you can make a huge leap in the search engines (Search Engines love off-page SEO – thats what ‘other people’ are saying about your website).
- Fresh Content: Is your website a static website or even worse, a single page website? The search engines love new, fresh content. You can rocket up the rankings just by adding new content to your website on a consistent basis (hint: ever heard of a blog? – its so easy).
But wait…
Before we get too bogged down in the technical aspects of website design let’s not forget the main reason to have a personal training website in the first place…to attract new clients and make more money.
Its as simple as that.
If your current website does not do this for you then you need to seriously think about changing your website around a bit. If you don’t currently have a website you can get all the secrets on how to set one up the right way the first time here with Websites for Personal Trainers. Watch the video below…
