So, you’ve started your personal website, but are you clued up on the finer details of the SEO?
We’re confident that you know how popular this niche is, which should also reflect on the competition in it. Personal trainers are popping up everywhere at this point in time – this means you have to stand out from the crowd.
Did you know that nearly 95% of your traffic comes from search engines? This means that search engine optimization one of the critical factors to take into account.
Below, we’ve compiled together a guide, which will help you write SEO-friendly content for your personal training or fitness website.
Understanding the basics
To understand this guide, we’ll be using a few terms that might require you to learn quickly.
- Primary keywords – These are the main keywords that you want to rank.
- Secondary keywords – These play a supporting role to the primary keywords.
- Long-tail keywords – These are three or four words that are extremely specific to your service. For instance, “personal training for beginners.”
- Metadata – This is the set of data that explains the data. For instance, the date modified, date created, the author.
Why you need to consider SEO
What actually are the benefits of SEO? This is something you need to know before you even get started with SEO.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization – and it does exactly what you think. It optimizes for search engines.
Effectively, when a user searches something on Google – SEO brings the most optimized to the top.
Users trust search engines at a profound amount. If your page ranks high on search results, they’ll automatically trust your site and appreciate your company.
For a personal trainer site, ranking high on search results is so important. This is down to the fact that personal training and fitness are so popular and competitive at the moment.
Step 1 – The website copy
The first step is to start with your actual website copy. However, it’s essential to stress that it takes time to learn copywriting.
The main components of the website copy are:
- Header tags: This will be known as your H1 (or main headers) and H2 (your subheadings). These will be all over your website.
- Consider using the following principle: incorporate your primary keywords in the main headings (H1) and your secondary keywords in the secondary headings (H2).
- Image attributes: this data will allow you to rank higher in the search results of various search engines.
- Copy: Copy should be around 700 to 1,000 words and well written. This is essential for SEO.
Step 2 – Metadata is crucial
Metadata is especially important for personal trainer websites. This little tiny focus will help improve your visibility on search engines.
Metadata consists of three main elements:
- The meta title/tag – This is the title that is presented on the search engine. This will explain what the blog or site is about.
- Keywords: These should be used throughout the metadata.
- The meta description: This gives a more detailed explanation, featured under the meta title. It contains a bit more information about your personal training website.
Metadata might seem a little confusing right now. However, it all falls into place as you create your website.
Step 3 – Keywords
We’ve already looked into keywords and mentioned them previously. Keywords are arguably the most critical part of your SEO efforts.
Keywords are essentially phrasing on your website that allows users to locate your site on search engines.
For instance, if somebody searches for “personal trainer for women,” if you’ve included this phrase on your website – your site has a greater possibility of showing up for them.
Step 4 – Don’t overdo it, though
It becomes self-evident when you overload your site with keywords. Make sure that you don’t make your copy or website look unprofessional, or not read right.
This is known as “keyword stuffing,” and can really have detrimental effects on your SEO efforts.
Overusing keywords can actually make your site rank lower. This won’t increase your chance of gaining new clients or followers. Keep your keyword usage to a respectable amount.
There shouldn’t be any irrelevant keywords you should focus on. Again, the best rule to follow is a primary keyword for the headlines and secondary keywords for subheadings.
Step 5 – Location is important
Of course, some personal trainers are based solely online now – and that’s completely fine. Local SEO will still be vital for you.
It’s also essential to focus on a specific geographical zone. Local SEO will help you with this.
It goes without saying; this is especially beneficial to those that are offering one-to-one fitness classes or PT sessions.
Google’s local search algorithm is especially great for this. When a user searches “near me” or their specific location, your website could easily show up as the number one result.
As the majority of people looking for personal trainers, will likely be looking for one-to-one sessions – this is incredibly important.
If you do focus predominately online, you could use this in your keyword phrases.
Step 6 – Creating your content
Now that you have the basics considered, it’s time to actually create your content.
Below, we’ve listed all the things that your content should and shouldn’t do.
· It should solve problems
· It should be grammatically correct and error-free
· No plagiarism
· Keep it topical and relevant to the times
If you’re not experienced in content creation, there are many resources on the web, where you can learn writing techniques and best practices from professionals.
Step 7 – Use your analytics
The hard part isn’t over just yet – once you’ve created your content, you have to track SEO.
Use your analytics to find out what does well and what doesn’t do so well. This is an integral part of SEO.
New SEO trends will come and go. You need to keep up with trends and adapt to them.
Step 8 – Identify your target audience
It has to be said, knowing who your target audience is should be completed as the very beginning – way before you consider SEO.
You should know these bits of information about your target audience:
· Age
· location
· Gender
· Occupation
· Education level
· Interests/hobbies
· Their needs
How your service could benefit them
It’s only when you know this, that you can get into their brain – and try to decide what they might be searching, and what may interest them.
Once you’ve gained a detailed portrait of every future customer, you can decide to build your SEO content around this particular data.
Step 9 – Set your objective
Setting objectives that you want your SEO to achieve is also important.
As with every marketing strategy, these objectives should motivate you and promote your service. However, they should also help you move forward with other goals and plans.
Here’s some inspiration for your objectives:
- Increase brand awareness
- Reach local people
- Reach an international audience
- Drive engagement towards your social media and content
- Promote all the benefits of your service
Step 10 – Where will you publish your content?
There are various ways to create and distribute content, which can all help with your SEO efforts.
Once you create your content, it will be published somewhere, or maybe even in multiple different places. You must know your platforms, before creating content – this way you can ensure its relevant, and will be useful.
The main types of platforms are:
Earned Distribution: This is when another company or influencer mentions your blog, website, or brand. This can be really effective and increase your search rankings.
Paid media: You can always pay influencers to promote or advertise your brand.
Owned media: These are your own sources, such as website blogs, landing pages. Publishing on these platforms is the most important thing for you. This keeps your website active and ensures that you keep driving up the search results.
Step 11 – What type of content will you publish?
Now the last part of SEO is deciding on the content that you will actually publish.
Now, with SEO, we predominately focus on written content. This is due to the fact that the majority of people still search for content in a traditional (written) way. However, this is changing rapidly.
The different types of main content are:
- Blogs and articles – You should consider posting blogs about personal training, dieting, and fitness. This will help you show up for more people.
Due to the popularity and efficiency of blogs and articles, there are now many high-quality writing services you can outsource blogging or editing to. Here are a few of them:
- Grammarly and TopWritersReview — Essential editing services that’ll let you calibrate your blogs and articles for particular audiences.
- Hemingway —Hemingway has been around for quite some years. It’s an excellent editing service.
- Videos – Videos are highly popular, especially in the fitness industry. You should definitely consider creating workout videos or tutorials.
- Infographics – Pinterest is a great way to share these and gain more potential customers that way. Fitness infographics are always popular.
- E-books and podcasts- These are a little more niche, and may not always be relevant to your brand. However, if you want to create a fitness or food book – this would be a great way to gain emails for your mailing list. Fitness podcasts are extremely popular at the moment.
Conclusion
SEO for your personal training website might seem like a daunting task, but when executed correctly, you’ll find that your site brings in more clients and traffic.
Follow the steps above to help you achieve all your goals.
