SEO for sports, fitness, and gyms: 5 tips to get your ranking

SEO for sports, fitness, and gyms: 5 tips to get your ranking

Ever since its growth in prominence in the mid-2000s, SEO instantly became one of the most popular and most important digital marketing channels in existence. And keeping in mind that as many as 93% of online experiences start with search queries with the second page of Google SERP getting only 6% of the global web traffic, the decision to spread the word about your fitness company by tweaking the search results does seem like an excellent decision.

This is a good opportunity to mention, however, that, in spite of various tech aspects, SEO is not an approach that offers one-size-fits-all solutions, and tackling an area so specific as fitness, and personal health does require a slightly adjusted optimization approach.

Let us take a look then at a couple of SEO tips that should help your fitness company reach the deserved stardom.

Find the niche and leverage the long-tail keywords

If you are unfamiliar with the term, long-tail keywords are the keywords that are more complex than usual keywords offer lower search volume, but, on the other hand, allow access to targeted users and higher conversion rates.

This SEO approach makes a perfectly fortunate marriage with carving out some unique marketing niche where you will be able to stand out from general fitness services and offer your tailor-made services to a specific audience.

So, if you are, for instance, holding group training for elderly citizens, it would be much better to focus your efforts on long-tail keywords like “group fitness for seniors” than simply “fitness.” Granted, you won’t be casting a particularly wide net, but the services you are promoting will easily find their target audience which is exactly what you need.

Aim for the local SEO

Unless they are extremely popular franchise brands or selling fitness products nationwide, a vast majority of fitness companies rely on the local audience to keep their operations going. Keeping that in mind, you should do your best to leverage the benefits of the local SEO as much as possible.

But, how you can do that?

Well, for a start, you can use the SEO tools to research terms you want to use and grace them with a local designation. Furthermore, try to optimize the on-page content, add the contact page, and use the benefits of geo-tagging. Finally, you can always earn some SEO points by registering your company for Google’s “My Business.”

Start putting out written content

Or in other words, start a blog that will give you an opportunity to unleash your creativity, lure in people who are not necessarily interested in your services but, at least in some capacity curious about fitness (virtually anyone), and, most importantly, give you a powerful platform for implementing your future SEO strategies. Another good thing about this approach is that the choice of topics you can tackle is almost undeletable. No matter whether you are going to do the reviews of premium kettlebells for sale or you are going to offer your clients nutritional advice is entirely up to you and the preferences of your audience.

Make your content engaging and shareable

Promoting your content and keywords to as many people as possible was always seen as one of the main requirements of the SEO process. In this day and age, this kind of wide reach can’t be imagined without access to insanely powerful social media platforms and playing to the tastes of their built-in audiences which can vary depending on the social media platform.

But, speaking in general terms, the social media followers like their content to be fun, engaging, and easily digestible. You can use the following tips to meet these requirements:

  • Put out frequent reviews, top lists, how-to’s, and instructions
  • Create infographics, and videos
  • Use a lot of images to illustrate the topic
  • Trigger emotions
  • Tap into relevant trends, nostalgia, and pop culture
  • Use smart structuring (avoid walls of text and leverage headlines)
  • Add value to users’ lives

Promote your content wherever you can

Last but not least, we would like to remind you that no matter how well-made your SEO content might be, it can only go so far in reaching out to a wide audience without your help. You can make all of your SEO efforts much more efficient by simply putting more effort into promoting the content you put out.

The opportunities for that are, once again, limitless and range from paid, targeted ads to dedicated fitness forums and social media groups as well as general discussion platforms like Reddit and Quora. Even though it’s not considered a very media-friendly platform, Twitter has a loyal following and very strong hashtag infrastructure so you shouldn’t overlook this channel either.

In conclusion

We hope these five tips gave you a general idea about the strategies you can use to fine-tune general SOE practices and make them suitable for your aspiring fitness or gym establishment. We are living in a society where World Wide Web has become an integral part of our personalities and Google stands as its almost exclusive gateway. The success of your fitness business will largely depend on how successfully you use these assets. Well, now you know where to start.