You’re growing your fitness business and you’d like to spend your marketing dollars wisely. You might be giving serious thought to doing SEO yourself to save some money that you could invest elsewhere in your business. The question is – is DIY SEO what will really help? Do the benefits of DIY SEO truly outweigh the risks and difficulties involved? Can you do it as well as a full-time, dedicated fitness SEO expert?
No – that’s what we say, and we have reasons. Let’s look at it from your perspective. Why do people come to your gym or fitness-related business? Aside from the fact that your gym has machines and equipment, your visitors also come to your gym for guidance. There is great abundance of fitness videos, articles, e-books and home gym machines, but people choose to go to a gym because they also get access to personalized assistance.
You can take on a ton of free resources and SEO strategies, but will they work out for you? How much are you willing to risk by going it alone, rather than with a fitness SEO specialist next to you?
What’s your capacity?
We all get 24 hours in day, 7 days a week. Our ambitions may be voracious, but reality says we can’t do it all. It’s necessary to prioritize. Ask yourself this one question, and answer in all honesty – Do I have enough time to grow my business and learn and/or do online marketing minimum 3 to 5 days a week? What would your day look like:
- Check emails
- Manage the instructors
- Answer inquiries & complaints
- Resolve complaints
- Solve user problems
- Manage online reviews
- Manage your social media profiles: respond to queries, add photos, share something, etc.
- Take various calls every 15 minutes it seems
- Make various calls every 15 minutes it seems
- Elaborate on that late-night idea you had to attract more users
- Develop your AdWords – monitor the metrics, fine-tune as appropriate
- Find a service for a machine that started to malfunction yesterday
- Meet up with a potential partner
- Do a screening interview with a potential instructor
- Do research and write a blog
- Do prospecting for guest blogs – search tens and tens of sites to find potential candidates
- Find new keywords to use in your blog post and guest posts
- … Okay, we’ve got to catch our breath.
Point – isn’t it more efficient to have a fitness SEO expert manage the AdWords, the blog posts and guest posts, backlink acquisition, press releases and keyword prospecting and other aspects of SEO for fitness businesses? If you lift more than you actually can, the weight might just squash your business flat.
There’s more to the game than meets the eye
Imagine a race in which winners never cross the finish line. Instead, the finish line is a line of 10 treadmills and they run for as long as they can. That’s it. The winner is the one who can take that longest. That’s the race for Google’s first page.
Try halting on a running treadmill, and you’ll fly right off it. Google is working every day on perfecting their algorithms and changing the rules of the game (they only inform you of the biggest changes). They wouldn’t make money otherwise. So, do you have time to focus on your business and keep track of the constant updates and tweaks in Google’s game?
Hardly anyone does.
If you only chose to do AdWords, it would still take you a lot of time and effort to always stay up to date with all the features. Falling behind the updates in AdWords or Google search could mean wasting your hard-earned money + falling from Google’s grace. A Google penalty could have your site knocked-out of result listings faster than you could blink.
What’s the risk of doing your own fitness SEO?
You are an expert for your company, you know fitness, you know how to talk to your gym users and prospects, and you know how to network in the world of fitness professionals. But do those offline skills automatically translate into online skills and knowledge of search engine optimization, web and graphic design, user experience and behavior, analytics interpretations and lead generation? It’s a rhetorical question, so we all know that’s a negative.
You could be trying to pump up your SEO knowledge and skills, with no results to show. Why? Because the image you have of your website may be missing a bunch of pieces. Without a fitness SEO professional, you could overlook key points of your digital marketing, for example:
- How long does it take for your website to load across devices?
- Are your call-to-action buttons effective?
- Does your website make you look authoritative?
- Is your website design optimized for different devices?
- Are your contact forms effective and functional?
- Are your paid ads showing up for relevant terms and locations?
- Is your website copy written to be informative and optimized for search at the same time?
- Does your website keep visitors on task or does it make them bounce right back to search results?
Don’t sweat over your fitness SEO
No Sweat Marketing is here to help you get to Google’s page #1. You get years and years of combined experience and relevant expertise to improve your website’s performance. Let us work on your site so that it can do what it’s meant to – bring you more leads and more business. Call us!