If you don’t know already SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. In simple terms, SEO is basically improving your website so that you rank higher on Google. 

Why is SEO important?

In a nutshell…the higher you rank the easier it is for customers to find you.  

In this post SEO Tips For Personal Trainers i’ll explain how to improve your SEO so that you increase your web rankings – which will get your site more traffic, and ultimately lead to more paying customers!

The Importance of SEO for Personal Trainers

Being on the front page of Google is extremely important – websites that are on the top of Google’s search engine results pages grab 36.4% of the traffic missed by lower ranked websites.

If you are in the top 3-5 rankings then you are more visible to customers and your site will generate more traffic. The likelihood of visitors clicking on your site increases the higher you rank.

SEO is important in all industries, and personal training is no different. Lots of personal trainers are great at what they do i.e. help people to lose weight, and get fit, however they struggle to get clients because they lack ‘business awareness’ – it’s not something they teach you on your personal training course! 

Lots of personal trainers become qualified BUT then fail within the first year because they’re not aware of things like SEO, marketing, sales, managing finances, and essential business skills needed to succeed in the fitness industry. 

There are lots of areas to cover if you want to succeed in the personal training industry. I’d recommend you check out my ebook The Ultimate Guide To Building Your Personal Training Business to learn about everything you need to build a successful PT business. It’s 85 pages and will totally transform your PT business! 

BUT for this post we’re going to keep it simple and focus solely on SEO…

SEO Tips For Personal Trainers | 5 Tips To Improve Your Web Rankings 

#1 Blog 

One of the best ways to increase traffic to your personal training website is to blog. Blogging regularly will improve your SEO, help you to build an audience (providing your content is valuable and interesting!), and also help you to increase profits. 

Blogging will help improve your SEO as it helps you to build trust with Google. Google likes sites that are regularly updated, and sites which are constantly producing new and valuable content. 

If you think about why you use Google? it’s to search for things, you use Google because you trust the search engine to deliver you with the best results i.e. best prices, most relevant content, etc, etc. If you write valuable content you’ll be rewarded with higher rankings. 

Aim to blog at the very least once per month, BUT if you can… add a new blog once per week. The more you blog the quicker you’ll be rewarded. As a personal trainer you should be dedicating at least 1 hour per week to writing new content for your website.  

#2 Mobile Friendly Website 

Most new websites nowadays are mobile friendly – BUT that said there are lots of sites (especially older sites!) which are not mobile friendly. These sites have seen a huge drop in web rankings. It’s absolutely imperative that you have a mobile friendly site. 

Why?  Because more people use their mobile phones to Google search than they use computers. As a business you simply cannot afford not to have a mobile friendly site. 

#3 Keywords 

If you want people to find you… what should they search for on Google? 

For most people looking for personal training in their local area they will type in something like ‘personal training in X’ 

X = your local area

For example ‘personal trainer Sheffield’ or ‘personal trainer Manchester’ or ‘personal trainer London’ – hopefully you get the gist!

There will also be derivatives of these search terms such as:

• personal trainer(s) Sheffield 
• personal train(ing) Sheffield 

And more terms that could be relevant to your site, things such as:

• fitness trainer Sheffield
• fitness instructor Sheffield 

Basically you want to try and rank highly for these search terms, so that when people search for them, your site comes up in the top 3 – increasing the likelihood that people will visit your website. 

You can include keywords in your blog, on your home page, and on different pages of you website. 

WARING: Be careful not to stuff your site unnecessarily with keywords, otherwise you could be penalised by Google. BUT if you fit keywords in naturally… you should see a real boost in your local SEO rankings.  

#4 Link Building

Google likes to see partnerships with other sites, it wants you to link out to high quality fitness and health sites, and it also wants to see other websites linking to your site. The more links you can get from other sites, the more Google will see you as an authority figure and the more it will reward you. 

WARNING: links must be genuine, if you try and spam google it will punish your site. The links you get must be on highly quality sites and relevant to your niche. For example if you are a personal trainer it would be good to get links from other health and fitness blogs, and personal trainer websites. 

To do this you can write guest blogs for people. Type in ‘fitness blogs’ into Google and reach out to other health blogs and ask if you can write an article for their site in exchange for a link back to your site.

In terms of you linking out to other websites… that’s really easy to do all you have to do is create an anchor text within your blog articles and then copy and paste the link of the site you wish to direct people to. 

#5 Google Business Page 

For small personal training businesses it’s really important to have a Google Business Page – this is another way to help give your rankings a little boost. Having a Google business page will allow you to register your company address (i.e. where you do your personal training sessions), and provide other useful information to potential customers, such as your phone number, opening hours, pictures of your facility, transformations, etc – it’s basically like a mini website. 

Another huge benefit to having a Google business page is that customers can review your business online, the more reviews you can get, the higher the likelihood that you’ll rank highly in Google Maps – this is really important for local businesses. 

Want more help growing your personal training business? 

If you want to earn more money, get better results with clients, and grow your personal training business then i’d 100% recommend checking out my latest ebook – I share all of my secrets, tips and strategies – which i’ve learned over the last 7 years since starting LEP Fitness. The book is 85 pages and full of knowledge bombs, that if applied will take your personal training business to great heights. 

Thanks for reading,

Nick 🙂