10 Easy SEO Tricks to Improve Your Fitness Website Rankings

For any fitness business, the importance of having an effective online presence as just as, if not more important than having a presence in your physical location. After all, competition is fierce today, and so you need to do everything in your power to stand out.

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Most prospective clients will begin their search for personal trainers and fitness clubs online. If you are to secure their business, you are going to need to make sure your fitness website is visible in the places they search. Google. To do this, follow the ten quick and easy SEO tricks mentioned below.

1. Use Long Tail Keywords

Our use of keywords has changed considerably over the years. instead of one or two word searches, we've learned to be more specific about what we're looking for.

For example, if someone wants to find a ‘personal trainer in Manchester’ they are going to search this, rather than simply searching ‘personal trainer.’

Long tail keywords are search terms that contain around four or more keywords. These keywords tend to result in a much better return on investment. This is because they are going to be less competitive, yet, at the same time, they’re more likely to be what people will search for when they are looking for a business like yours.

2. Be More Mobile Friendly

If your fitness website is not mobile-friendly, then this is definitely going to be holding you back in terms of website rankings.

You only need to look at the statistics to see that the smartphone is the preferred device for accessing the Internet today.

Having a website that is optimised for use on a small device is no longer a luxury, it is a necessity. Your website needs to be easy to read and use, and it must be optimised for searches conducted via mobile phones as well.

To check if your personal trainer website passes the Google Mobile friendly test, head on over their Mobile Friendly Test site, input your website and get feedback and direction on how to improve your site.

3. Create Content Consistently

You have probably heard the saying that content is king, and this is definitely the case when it comes to your search engine presence. It's something we remind our fitness website design clients of on a weekly basis.

Make sure that your content is fresh, original, exciting, and informative. A tool that can really help is the Google Search Console. This will reveal where your pages are ranking on Google. You will be able to see what pages are ranking well and what pages are not performing so great.

For those pages that are not doing well, you can refresh the content. Rather than simply re-writing what is on the page, you can look for ways to add extra content in the form of audio, videos, images, and of course, words.

However, you need to make sure that you still add value. Do not merely write words for the sake of it.

4. Rewrite Your Meta Data

Meta data sounds complex but it's super simple. Meta data is the data a search engine like Google reads to understand what your website is about.

It's also the data that's shown in the actual search result to encourage people to click on your listing.

Here's one we set up for one of Manage Website clients.

Good meta data is unique to each page, contains your main keywords  and fits nicely within the character limit.

5. Add image Alt Tags

Most personal trainer websites are going to incorporate a number of different images but Google isn't so good at reading images so it needs help.

Search engines rely on two things to understand what an image is about. The context of the page and the Alt Tag. The Alt Tag, usually found in the images advanced settings depending on the builder you're using, tells Google what the image is.

If you have the same keyword in your alt tags, as well as your title and heading tags, which we will discuss next, it will give Google a much better indication of the keyword that your page is about.

6. Add Headers

Optimising your fitness website headers is of huge importance if you are to get the results you are looking for on Google.

One of the key steps here is to make sure that all the headers of each page are optimised, and that all of your pages have them, to begin with! Headers help to rank the topics of your page. For example:<H1> - Most important keyword <H2> - Second most important keyword <H3> - And so on This is important because it means that the search engine bots will find your website a lot easier to trace and understand. There was a study carried out by NoHatDigital, which revealed that you can increase traffic by as much as 47 per cent by tweaking your headers.

7. Improve Page Speed

A lot of people do not realise that the performance of their website is going to have an impact on their search engine result rankings too. This is because if your website offers a poor user experience, people are going to click off it and look elsewhere.

This will result in your bounce rate increasing, which is something that Google will pick up on, and this can cause your ranking to drop as a consequence.

There have been a number of different studies that show that bounce rates increase with every second longer it takes for a website to be accessed. You can use PageSpeed Insights to find out how quick your website is. If pages are slow, compressing files or changing your web host could resolve this.

8. Install a Sitemap

Another way to boost the performance of your website on the search engine result pages is to install an XML sitemap. This is the blueprint of an entire site. It will show URL links, enabling Google bots to find all of the posts and pages on your site.

This will also contain information such as when the pages were last edited and how they are structured. This will ensure that Google bots are able to discover everything on your personal trainer website with ease so that they can rank it accordingly.

Your can create an XML sitemap here.

9. Start Link Building

Link building is an important strategy for all businesses, including personal trainers and fitness companies. More links to your website from other sites equals higher rankings.

However, the way you go about your link building approach is what truly matters. Gone are the days where it was all about quantity. Quality is well and truly the name of the game.

If you have a link pointing to your website that comes from a blog on 1950’s vintage vehicles, this is not going to do anything to boost your ranking. In fact, it is probably going to hurt your ranking because the website is not related to your business, and so this comes across as spam.

This is why you need to make sure that all links pointing to your websites come from relevant sites that have a good domain authority ranking.

10. Create a Google My Business Page

A Google My Business page is free to create and will only take about ten minutes for you to create, yet it can have a massive impact on your SEO campaign.

Once you have done this, you are going to appear in the local results on Google Maps and Google. This is especially important for fitness companies and professionals, as most tend to operate on a local basis.

Today, when people are looking for personal trainers in their location, they will begin their search on Google and Google will show them business nearer to them. So you need to make sure you can be found here.

Plus, through optimisation, you will be able to ensure that your business features in one of the three localised results that Google showcases when someone performs a local search via their platform.