In the highly competitive world of fitness training, it’s important to make sure you have a personal trainer SEO website. This will help you rank higher in search engine results pages. More importantly, it’ll help potential clients find your website.
This means that you should understand how SEO works and how you can optimize your website to rank higher in search engines.
You don’t have to become an expert in SEO personal trainer key words, but a basic understanding will go a long way.
I’m going to discuss the basics of SEO, how to choose the right keywords, and how to optimize your website for search engines.
Do You Have a Fitness Business Website?
One thing before we dive in: Do you currently have a fitness website or fitness blog?
If not, consider reading the following posts:
Do Personal Trainers Need a Website?
This details all of the reason that a personal trainer needs a website if they’re serious about their business.
How To Choose a Blog Domain and Hosting Provider
This gets you started with the basic steps of getting your website and blog set up.
How to Start a Fitness Blog that People Want to Read
And finally, this post is a guide on how to get started with your fitness blog so that you can drive more traffic to your site.
Personal Trainer SEO: How to Optimize Your Fitness Website
With housekeeping measures out of the way, let’s talk about how to optimize SEO for a personal trainer’s business website.
Learning how to do this will help you increase your ranking, traffic, and potential sales.
1. Identify Your Target Audience
SEO is not just about keywords. It’s more about your target audience.
Specifically, what is your target audience searching for online.
For example, let’s say that you are a personal trainer who specializes in weight loss and fitness.
Your target audience is going to be searching for something much different than the audience of a personal trainer who specializes in sports medicine or physical therapy.
To get the most out of SEO, you need to know exactly who your target audience is.
This means that you should be able to answer the following questions:
- What do my clients want?
- What are the pain points of my market / clients?
- How can I help them?
- Where is my audience located? (local vs. online)
Once you have answered these questions, you’ll have a better idea of what to look for when doing keyword research.
2. Research Keywords That Are Relevant to Your Business
When you are doing SEO for personal trainers, it is important to find keywords that are relevant to your business and your target market.
That’s where keyword research comes in.
This will help you understand what people are searching for online when they are looking for a personal trainer.
Once you know these keywords, you’ll be able to create content that focuses on those keywords, phrases, and questions.
How do I find SEO keywords?
One free and very popular option is the keyword planner available with Google Ads.
The Keyword Planner tool allows you to find out the monthly search volume for specific keywords.
This tool will show you how many people are searching for a specific term within the past month.
The SEO Keyword Planner tool is free to use, but you must have an active Google account and be logged into your Google AdWords account before using this SEO tool.
The SEO Keyword Planner tool is a great way to find new keywords that you may not have thought of before. You can also use this tool to get ideas for new blog post topics that you can write about.
3. Long-Tail vs. Short-Tail: What Should I Put for SEO on my Website?
When doing SEO for personal trainers, it is important to use a variety of keywords. This means targeting the following:
Long-Tail Keywords
These are specific and detailed keywords that have a lower search volume than general keywords.
As the name suggests, these keywords are longer in text and contain more detail than something basic like “personal training.”
Targeting long-tail keywords will help you rank higher in the search engines, because there is less competition for these terms.
Here are a few examples of a long-tail keyword for personal trainers:
- “personal training in [name of city and state]”
- “online personal trainers for weight loss”
- “personal trainers who specialize in helping seniors”
- “personal training for beginners who want to build muscle”
Short-Tail Keywords
These are general keywords that have a higher search volume than long-tail keywords.
Since they are more common and have a higher search volume, they will be harder to rank for in the search engines because they are more competitive.
Targeting short-tail keywords can help drive more traffic to your site, but not if you’re new to the game.
I’d recommend focusing on long-tail keywords until you grow your site traffic enough, and you’re ranking on the first page of Google for a variety of keywords.
Here are a few examples of a short-tail keyword for personal trainers:
- “personal trainer”
- “personal training near me”
- “online personal trainer”
To summarize, when doing SEO for personal trainers, it is important to target long-tail keywords.
Long-tail keywords are keywords that are more specific and have a lower search volume than general keywords.
Targeting long-tail keywords will help you rank higher in the search engines, because there is less competition for these terms.
4. Optimize Your Website Content for Those Keywords
Once you have identified the target keywords that you want to rank for, it’s time to start optimizing your website content.
This means adding those keywords throughout your website content.
Here are the places you’ll want to put those keywords:
Blog Content (Body Text)
You’ll want to start by incorporating keywords into the actual blog post. Put the keywords in the paragraph text as well as the subheadings (H1, H2, H3, H4).
But only do this when it’s natural, flows, and makes sense.
Don’t try to overload your article with keywords. Search engines like Google pick up on this and will penalize your website for being spammy.
In general, make sure that your target keyword is included in the first 100 words of your blog posts, and again somewhere else in the text.
If you have a really long article like an evergreen post, you should use the target keyword several times throughout the post.
Secondary keywords should be used throughout as well.
Title of the Blog Post
The title of your blog post is also important. You’ll want to include your target keyword in the title.
Take this blog post as an example.
My goal is to help personal trainers (and fitness businesses, in general) improve their online presence.
Since my focus is on personal trainer SEO, I’ve included that in the title.
Again, this helps search engines understand what your article is about. This, in turn, will help them rank it accordingly.
Metadata
Metadata is made up of the title tag, meta description, and blog URL.
You want to incorporate your target keyword into all three of these.
We discussed the title above, and as for a meta description, this is the text that appears under the title in a search engine results page.
Here’s an example:
You’ll want to make sure this text accurately describes the content of your article and includes your target keyword.
The blog URL is also important.
This is the web address for your blog post. You’ll want to make sure it’s SEO-friendly by including your target keyword.
Again, take this article as an example.
The article is about personal trainer SEO, and it focuses on fitness writing. So, the category and the keyword are both in the URL of the blog post.
Both can easily be changed in your blog host (e.g., WordPress).
5. How Do I Promote Myself as a Personal Trainer?
Social media is a great way to promote your business and SEO for personal trainers.
You can use social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube and more to share content from your website.
When writing descriptions for your social media posts, don’t forget to use the target keyword.
You should post at least once per week on each of these social media accounts with links back to blog posts or pages on your website.
Social media is also a great SEO tool because it helps SEO in two ways: social signals and backlinks.
Social signals include likes, shares, comments, retweets and more on social media posts that link back to content on your website.
You’re essentially getting the social proof that your content is worth checking out.
Backlinks are links from other websites to yours.
As long as the other websites are considered safe and not toxic, your own site ranking will increase.
6. Monitor Your Website’s Search Engine Rankings and Analytics
One of the most important aspects of SEO is monitoring your website’s search engine rankings and analytics.
This will help you track your progress and see what SEO tactics are working best for you.
You can use Google Analytics to track how many people are visiting your website, where they are coming from, and what pages on your website are being viewed the most.
It is also important to monitor your website’s SEO rankings for specific keywords in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
These tools will show you what ranking your website has in both search engines, as well as any SEO errors that need to be fixed on your website.
You can also SEO tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs to monitor SEO rankings for specific keywords.
7. Make Changes as Needed to Improve Your SEO Results
SEO is not a one-time process, it’s an ongoing effort.
You will need to make changes to your website and content as needed to improve your SEO results.
Keep track of the keywords that you are targeting, and see which ones are bringing in the most traffic.
Based on your monthly search traffic and what your target audience is searching for, adjust your website content and SEO tactics accordingly.
Also, keep an eye on your website’s search engine rankings and analytics.
SEO results can vary from month to month, so you will need to make changes as needed to maintain a good ranking.
Not Sure if You Want to Deal with Personal Trainer SEO?
SEO is an important part of marketing for personal trainers.
It can help your business grow by helping you rank higher in search engines, attracting more traffic to your website and generating leads.
SEO for personal trainers is all about targeting the right keywords and optimizing your website content for those keywords.
But make no mistake about it: You’ll need to be dedicated to this process.
If you want to improve your personal training website, but you’re swamped with running your business, I can help you.
Let’s chat about your website, target market, and how I can provide you with optimized content for your business, ensuring it gets found by the right people.
