Home » Personal Trainer Business & Sales » Local SEO Tips for Fitness Professional to Follow

by Tyler Valencia, PhD(c) | October 10th, 2017

In Part 1 of this blog, I covered some basic essentials for fitness professionals who manage their own search engine optimization (SEO). Handling your own website and SEO requires a lot of time, but it can be much less expensive than hiring an SEO consultant. Starting your own business doesn’t always mean immediate revenue, and saving money on website development by managing it yourself is completely doable. In the last article, I shared a story of an SEO “expert” who wanted to charge a gym owner over $8000 a year just for SEO. Recently, I spoke with another gym owner who, after 11 months working with an SEO consultant, still hadn’t even gotten his gym listed on Google Maps. As I mentioned in my previous article, Google is the authority on internet ranking, and using any Google-related platform will only boost your search presence.

If you haven’t read the first part of this SEO series for fitness professionals, I highly recommend you start there. In this article, I will review three additional tools that can help you rank higher and increase website traffic.

1. Use YouTube, Not Vimeo

This isn’t a promotion for YouTube, and I’ll admit that KIPS uses Vimeo for specific presentations, but the owner of the internet is Google, not Vimeo. Not to mention, YouTube is the second-largest search engine, making it more critical than Bing or Yahoo. When you think of YouTube as a search engine, there are some considerations to keep in mind. Uploading your video without tags or a description is like setting up a website without SEO optimization. Here are three tips for improving each video you upload to YouTube:

a) Call to Action: Sometimes at the end of a video, you hear someone say, “don’t forget to like” or “make sure to subscribe.” We want to include these because the average person isn’t thinking, “Oh, I need to like this,” or “I should subscribe.” By adding a call to action, you can help increase your likes and channel subscriptions.

b) Title: In the title, make sure you add what the video is about. If you put your business name or a general title, YouTube won’t be able to decipher it from other videos. Also, this is typically what Google/YouTube picks up first. For example, “Title | 2nd Title.”

c) Description: This is probably the biggest mistake made by YouTube novices. The ideal description should be 250 words or more. When you think about it, Google can’t watch videos and know what they are about. The description allows Google to get an idea about the video.

2. Create and Share Your Own Content

While some schools of thought believe that sharing anything is going to generate activity, in my personal opinion, nothing beats original content that meets the general specifications of the outlet you are posting on. Just as I posted recommendations for YouTube above, blog posts also have recommendations that help increase search engine visibility. When you think about improving traffic to your website, what do you think is going to work best? A shared link to another website or original content targeting your niche market? When stated like that, it almost seems too apparent, but of course, there are barriers. Creating original content takes exponentially more time to develop. Not only is it hard to create topics to write about, but after you have to proofread, create the web page, original image, and optimize each page for SEO.

However, just like with every project, the more love you put into it, the more you get out of it. One of the major benefits of developing original content is the ability to network each post. Having friends, family or even other organizations share your post opens up your business to their audience. If you’re not doing paid advertising on social media, this can help you organically grow your followers and also clicks to your website.

3. Title and Label Your Images

This suggestion is an old one, but it remains effective. Just this week, I saw the benefit of labeling images on your website when I looked up images for the new Steel Mace Certification being released for KIPS. While searching Google, I saw images of a friend’s gym that is hosting a mace workshop next month with the same mace instructor. Since each of his images is appropriately labeled, Google thought his images were appropriate to show. When you think about typical image titles, most are “image001” or “image675,” which gives Google no indication of what or who this image is appropriate for. To provide a direct example of how this benefits your SEO, let’s use a WordPress example, as many websites utilize this platform. When you add an image to WordPress, a URL is created for that image (e.g., www.yourwebsite.com/images/imagename). So not only does that image now share the same domain as your website, but it adds another link to your site and can now be searched on the web.

Conclusion

SEO is a complex and ever-changing area within online marketing. Do I think I am the “guru” of the fitness world with SEO? Absolutely not, but the tips shared in this post and the original are some of the tools that have helped me grow KIPS on a budget. Each year, Google aims to improve web search for users, and some strategies become outdated over time. For example, a website I recently consulted on had multiple hyperlinked words that once helped establish credibility for the blog post. This technique still has some validity, but not as much as it used to. Five years ago, bloggers would hyperlink 8-10 words to Wikipedia and often link the same phrase repeatedly. Google eventually took notice of this and now credits links only when the hyperlinked text genuinely helps inform the user. For example, in this post you’ll see that I hyperlinked the previous post on SEO and the YouTube video where I got tips about YouTube SEO. A blogger five years ago might have linked “YouTube” and even used larger words.

To summarize this two-part blog series, SEO takes time. It is a resource that some of us may be hesitant to invest in, especially since it might initially seem like a foreign language. For fitness professionals on a budget, YouTube can be your best friend and help you learn valuable information to increase your website traffic. If you have the resources to invest in an SEO “expert,” make sure they are willing to teach you along the way. In my opinion, the SEO consultants who are confident enough in their services to teach you as they go are the ones who will put in the work.