As a fitness professional and business owner, you’ve already put the time hitting the books, learning training programs, nutrition habits, and what really affects change in the health and fitness of a person. But how are you communicating your knowledge to people outside of your gym? How are you driving traffic to your front door?
The answer: Blog!
One of the best things you can do to improve the chances of your fitness business being found or ranking high in the search engines is to start blogging.Blogging helps with SEO (search engine optimization). Understanding SEO is an important skill in driving traffic to your fitness business. But it is also pretty complex. (...we’ll save the SEO speech for later). So we’ll focus on the blog component of SEOWhen you have a blog that’s updated regularly with blog posts that are high quality and on topics relevant to your audience, it can make a huge difference with how your website performs in search engines.
Blogging keeps your website current
Websites that are regularly updated signal to Google that the website is alive, the business is operating and offering fresh content. It also gives the search engine algorithms more reason to index your website more often, keeping it more on their radar over time. On top of that, the reader can get a real understanding of your area of expertise. Your blog is a practical tool for adding new content to your website on a regular basis.
Blogging helps you target keywords
Most people start out doing SEO wanting to aim for the most relevant keywords for your business type. For example, if you’re a gym, you want to show up on google for key-terms like “fitness” or “gym near me.”SEO is very competitive, so you’re probably going to have a hard time ranking for popular search terms. Your best bet is to look for longer, more specific keywords people are searching for that are relevant to the type of business they are searching for and try to rank for those.These are known as long-tail keywords and they are extremely important for SEO strategy - half of all searches are for terms that are four words or longer. For example, with the keyword “weight loss,” the long tail keyword could be “weight loss for women over 40.” These types of keywords can be awkward to try and fit into a product or program page, so instead they are better to use in a blog post where you can provide thorough information with that term.
Blogging Increases Inbound Links
Blogging increases your opportunity to earn inbound links from other websites, which is very impactful for SEO. An inbound link is when another website links to your blog. (Think: when someone shares a link to your blog on facebook)Having a large quantity of high-quality content blogs on your website increases your chances of being found on the web. Some of those people may be compelled to link to it if they found it helpful to them.You can also create internal links for yourself. Failing to include internal links on your website that point users from one page on the site to another is one of the simplest mistakes you can make.
Blogging Helps with Backlinking
This is one of the hardest things for SEO. In order for Google to recognize your website as trustworthy and authoritative, other sites (preferably popular sites) need to link back to yours. It’s not impossible to get external links without a blog, but it is much harder.To start, you can connect and network with local businesses around you. Reach out to your Chamber of Commerce. Let them know that you’re happy to mention them on your website, and likely they will return the favor. Once you start filling your blog with valuable information, the likelihood that others will want to share this useful information on their site.
Not sure where to start?
Did you know that PushPress Websites includes unlimited blogging. It’s so incredibly easy to use too! We’ve created a help doc on how to post a blog. Here's how! We can give you more tips on making it an effective blog!Don’t have a PushPress Website? Set up a call with us and we can get you setup in 3 days!
