We've all had the emails and the phone calls from the so called “SEO Experts” promising to guarantee you a page one result on Google.
If you don’t know what SEO is it stands for Search Engine Optimisation, which is basically a set of strategies for getting your personal trainer website as high up on search engines as possible (especially Google) for particular phrases ( or search terms) like “personal trainer your-town” or “personal training your-town”
OK so that’s the boring stuff out of the way
The calls I get usually go something like this when I pick up the phone to them
“Hello is that northwest personal training in Manchester?”
“Yes, it is” I usually answer
“Ah, great well I’m calling on behalf of Google…….a position has just become available on page one for a personal trainer in (insert your town here)!”
The thing is a lot of trainers will fall for this shady scarcity tactic.
Unless you live in city like Leeds’s Liverpool Manchester or Glasgow then I really don’t think that you should be focusing or spending money on SEO
Why is that?
Well to be honest most personal trainers and fitness businesses are local businesses and there are simply not enough searches to make it worthwhile for you in many cases to spend a lot of time on effort on this.
Even in a big city like London a lot of the searches for personal trainer London won’t be relevant just in terms of the distance they might have to travel.
It’s unlikely that someone in Wimbledon is going to travel to Watford for personal training and vice versa.
Even here in Manchester people are not willing to travel from Oldham in the North to areas in the South of the city
What should you be doing instead?
There are loads of things you can do to get more people in your local area to get on your site. Once they are there you should be focusing on getting them to leave you their email address by using a squeeze page and a lead magnet (giveaway)
Use Google Business which is fast becoming a great way to get traffic to your site. It’s a bit beyond the remit of this blog post but you should have a Google business account for you personally and also for your business.
Using Facebook’s ad platform by far the easiest way to get in front of your target market as it is really easy to nail the demographics.
Twitter and other social media platforms can also be a great way to not only get people to your site but can be a great way to build relationships with potential personal training clients or boot camp members as can LinkedIn.
Flyers still work and if you do them properly you can get some great results from them.
Google is also making it harder to manipulate search results so the back linking, keyword stuffing, forum commenting and trickery that used to work doesn't any more. By focusing on putting out great content and getting it shared on social media you will not only be getting visitors in any case but you will also be inadvertently helping your search engine rankings.