Four On-page SEO Tips to Help Increase Traffic
In the time that you’ve been running your PT website, you’ll have heard often that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is key for generating leads. Why? Simply put, robust SEO is one of the most effective, and proven ways to drive traffic to your website, because it increases findability and builds authority. That’s why it's in the #1 spot in our eBook, Website Workout - 10 Ways to Bulk Up Your PT Website.
You can have the best-looking fitness website around, packed with great content and advice, but if potential clients don't know you exist, it's all for nothing.
SEO isn't just about making sure the search engines know about you—it’s about continually optimizing to maintain your high Google ranking. Consider this:
- Excluding advertisements, 34.35% of your potential leads choose the first link when they do a Google search
- Fewer than 10% of them will continue on to the second page of a Google search
That's why it's so important to think of SEO as an evergreen process that needs continual monitoring. We've come up with a few tips that will help boost your SEO and drive more potential leads to your website.
1: Make Sure Your Keywords are Strategically Aligned with Your Services
Think about what your clients enter in Google while conducting a search. Now check if these terms are mentioned explicitly on your website. Look for:
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Your area of expertise
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Your target audience
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The range of services you provide
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Your location
Let's say your main focus is to help women get back into shape after childbirth, and you're located in Elizabeth Bay, Sydney, Australia. If you've got the right keywords (in the right place) on your site—a search for "personal trainer for new mothers Elizabeth Bay" will display your website near the top of the list.
TOP TIP: If you are using WordPress, here are some of the most popular SEO plugins to help you add your keywords correctly. And AnswerThePublic is a great tool to help you find keywords your audience might be looking for and plan content accordingly.
2: Regularly Update Your Website with Contextual Content
It's essential that your website remains dynamic, and one of the most effective ways to ensure this is to keep it updated with fresh, relevant content. When you stop adding new content, your website will stagnate and you'll start to slip in the rankings. Not only that, but when you stop creating new pages, you’re no longer creating backlinks—something that Google looks for.
A steady flow of content means you'll:
- Encourage visitors to return to your site regularly to get the latest updates.
- Update your site often, which signals search engines to re-rank and re-arrange your site’s ranking. Increased content updates mean increased chances of a higher ranking.
- Build up the volume of keywords on your website by naturally incorporating them in articles your audience wants.
- Gain ‘industry authority’ on Google. More valuable content about your area of expertise means greater authority your website provides. This ‘domain authority’ score is key to great SEO performance.
The more content you publish, the more likely you are to engage leads and generate traffic.
When Google sees that people are spending more time on your website, it will boost your ranking because it views your site as increasingly valuable.
3: Add your Keywords to your Website’s HTML
It’s important to take meta tags and page headers seriously. Title tags, URLs, page headlines and meta descriptions are how you ensure that your carefully considered keywords are placed strategically throughout your website.
For instance, one of the most common mistakes many people make is dropping an image into a webpage and just leaving it. Images need SEO just as much as any other content. What you need to do for each and every image is add a meta description. This means giving them an ALT tag and a description of what the image is.
Check out these crucial places on your PT website you need to add keywords.
4: Optimize for Improved Site Speed
You can't optimize your website if you don't know how it's performing. Google Analytics is absolutely crucial, so if you haven't connected with it, now's the time. It's essential that you learn who's visiting your site, where they've come from, how long they stay, what pages they visit and at what point they click away.
TOP TIP: Google Analytics Academy offers free courses to help you get up to speed with a understanding the analytics your business needs. You'll learn how to leverage Analytics to its best advantage, so you can use intelligent data to grow your business.
Bonus: Use Google My Business to Get More Customers
A free business profile listing from the Google suite—Google My Business gives you the space to provide details like location, contact number, service offering, and pricing for your business. This is a sure-fire way to boost your visibility on Google—resulting in placement on Google Images, Google Maps, and others.
We can't emphasise strongly enough the power of great SEO. Take the time to get to grips with it, because the better it is, the more leads you'll generate. Once they've landed on your website, the quality of your content and the power of your expertise is how to convert them to clients. You know that old fisherman's saying? "Anyone can cook a trout. The real art is in hooking it in the first place."
If you're wondering about other ways to build muscle on your website, check out our growth strategy overview plan - Growing Your Personal Training Business