Websites play an important role in your digital marketing strategy for your gym. Your website will often be the first way customers interact with your brand, and when it’s utilized correctly, a well-maintained website can help you gain new clients.
Just having a website is a good start, but it won’t be much help to you if it doesn’t attract visitors. Search engine optimization (SEO) can help get your website in front of the people you want to see it the most.
SEO for gyms is important, and luckily, it doesn’t have to be complicated. There are plenty of things you can do on your own to improve SEO for your website.
If you want to learn the best way for you to improve SEO for your gym website, make sure you follow these important tips.
1-Start With the Basics
SEO can get pretty complicated if you want to dive into the subject matter. For now, let’s focus on making sure your website has the basic SEO structure it needs to attract visitors.
Make sure that all of your pages have title tags and meta descriptions. Meta descriptions and title tags show up in search results and they give visitors and site crawlers important information about your web pages.
Also, add alt tags to the images on your website. They aren’t just good for SEO, they’re also helpful for accessibility purposes.
2-Submit a Site Map
If you want to show up in search, you’re going to want all of the popular search engines to find your site so it can be crawled and indexed. Instead of waiting for crawlers to stumble upon your website, take time to submit a sitemap to search engines like Google and Bing.
A sitemap is a list of pages that are on your website. It gives search engines an idea of how your site is structured and what visitors can expect to see when they interact with it.
Creating a site map may seem like a lot of work, but it’s actually very simple. There are plenty of tools you can use that can help you create one relatively quickly.
3-Pay Attention to Google My Business
If you were shopping for stock certificates online, you’d probably do an online search to find the best one. When you go to Google to look, you’ll most likely pick the business that’s most prominent in search.
Have you ever wondered how Google gets information to display about businesses? Some of the information you see displayed on the righthand side of your screen during searches comes from Google, but a good portion of it also comes from business owners.
Google My Business is a way for business owners to gain more visibility online and give Google more information to show people about your business.
People can submit details about your business on their own, or Google may choose to fill in the blanks depending on what they see. Since you want to ensure that the public sees the most relevant information, it’s a good idea to claim your page and submit content on your own.
Once you’ve claimed your profile, there’s a lot you can add to improve your listing.
Focus on submitting plenty of pictures of your gym and show off your equipment and list all of the exercise classes you offer. The more information you can post, the more helpful your profile will be.
4-Focus on Local Keywords
Keywords play an important role in improving onsite SEO. Putting keywords in title tags, headers, hyperlinks, and throughout your website content can do boost your rankings.
Instead of focusing on general keywords, add a local touch to your keywords. Instead of using a keyword like “CrossFit gym”, add location names like the city, state, town, or zip code your gym is located.
Localizing keywords gets you better web traffic. Instead of casting a wide net and hoping to attract anyone that’s interested in fitness, you’ll be able to find people that are located nearby and are more likely to engage with your gym.
5-Produce Plenty of Content
The phrase content is king has become a cliche in the SEO industry, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Updating your website shows search engines that your content is fresh and timely, and the easiest way to keep your site active is to post new content.
This is why blogging has become so popular for businesses. It gives business owners a way to consistently add new content to their website and provides new opportunities for you to interact with your customers.
There are so many different kinds of fitness-related content you can post. Work out videos from your trainers would make great shareable content. You could also dive into topics related to fitness like nutrition and overall health.
6-Utilize Social Media
Social media can and should play an important role in improving SEO. Linking to your website on social media helps you create backlinks and gives you another way to get traffic to your website.
Don’t make the mistake of simply creating profiles and never using them. Create a content calendar so that you always have fresh content going up.
Also, don’t forget to put the “social” in social media. Interact with your customers in the comments section and listen to what they’re saying. Their feedback could give you insight into what matters the most to your customers.
Go Beyond SEO for Gyms
SEO for gyms is one of the most powerful digital marketing tools at your disposal. Once you start to build the basic structure of your SEO strategy, you’ll be able to improve upon it and stay up to date with the latest trends.
Gym SEO is only one way you can utilize digital marketing to improve business. Dive deeper into topics around content creation, social media, and PPC.
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