As a fitness club owner with ambitious goals, you’ll find that one of your biggest challenges is tackling paid digital advertising. From Google Ads to paid sponsored ads on social media, there’s no doubt that you’ll start to question your tactics from pay-per-click (PPC) to organic content. The following are tips to help you top-rank your organic content on Google.
1. It’s all in a name
The good news is that even new business can easily rank at the very top of organic search results. Meaning, anyone who knows your business name and does a Google search will get immediate results without costing you a dime. This is great news because it means anyone who Googles your gym in order to find more information about something like your hours or class schedule, will find you very quickly. Unfortunately, a problem remains because most fitness clubs are not household names like, “McDonald’s.” Therefore, prospective members who don’t know your business exists will result in very low probability that they will find you. Even if you specialize in yoga and a potential member searches, “Yoga near me” there is only a small percentage of a chance that they will pick your gym among the rest of search results.
Second, if you only rely on organic placement, then you will virtually never be at the top of the search results page. Top-of-page results almost always get more clicks than any other results on the search page. If you only rely on organic placement, you’ll end up in the third or last group of results, giving you the least possible engagement.
2. Ranking for fitness and wellness content
Many health clubs believe that if they post generic health articles on their site than they will rank higher in any given search. They also believe that this kind of content is the key to acquiring new members without spending much (or anything!) on digital advertising. However, studies repeatedly show that using generic fitness blogs to get first-page search rankings takes a very long time. If you’re a new gym, it will take you even longer.
While fitness and wellness blogs are absolutely helpful to current members, if you want to attract prospects, you’ll need to have FAQs with SEO that provide answers to questions customers are actually seeking. Answers to questions such as “Can I cancel my membership at any time?” “Explain each type of yoga class” and more. Providing detailed descriptions of your classes, club rules, and more will actually do better for as far as advertising goes, than any generic fitness blog could ever do.
3. Go for ranking locally
Of course, there is a place for a very specific type of wellness blog: local fitness. For example, an article about “The Best Running Trails in Chicago” or “Healthiest restaurants in Chicago” (or whatever city your gym is located) actually has a pretty good shot of winning organic traffic. Prospects looking for a good training program or running club are more likely to find you this way. Essentially, the more local you make your general interest wellness content, the better you will rank. You can also do this by optimizing your sales content. If you invest in content that is tailored and locally-optimized to the very individual and specific concerns of your target market, your content will rank very high.
So, as a business owner looking to successfully replace organic content for pay-per-click advertising, the answer is yes, you can…you just have to have a very good strategy in place. When you invest in optimized content that is locally tailored to your prospects’ decision making process, than you will increase your chances of ranking higher in the search results – ultimately seeing rapid customer and revenue growth.