SEO for Personal Trainers and Gyms: 3 Local SEO Tactics

Do you run a fitness business and need to learn SEO for personal trainers? These 7 powerful tactics will teach you to use local SEO to get more personal training clients from google.

What is Local SEO for Personal Trainers?

Ranking on google gets harder every year, and smaller businesses like personal trainers struggle to compete with the likes of PureGym. But google strives to bring searchers the most relevant results. And these days, being physically closer to the searcher can give you a real edge – which helps to bridge the competitive gap between huge, national companies – and smaller, local businesses. So the 7 tactics below will help you to take advantage of this opportunity to get more clients.

1. Personal Trainer Keywords

Whether you’re a lone personal trainer, or you run a gym, you’ll need to know what people are searching for to find you. By using relevant fitness SEO keywords, personal trainer keywords, or gym keywords – You can attract these clients.

Keyword research is always the first step when it comes to SEO, but people will often overlook the user intent behind each keyword. “User intent” is the intention of the searcher. The user’s intent could be to:

• Buy something
• Learn something new
• Get a freebie

And if you’re using SEO to get new training clients or gym sign-ups, you’ll usually want to focus on keywords with a high buyer intent.

Buyer intent keywords for personal training

For example: “hire a personal trainer in South London” may seem a bit long and specific – But when it comes to keywords, it has a much clearer intent behind it than “personal trainer”.

When you optimise your website for a particular keyword, many of your visits will come from long, convoluted, specific searches. And if you’re one of the only people targeting that specific keyword – you’re much more likely to be bumped to the top of the search engines for that particular term.

Whereas if you simply optimised for “personal trainer”, you may come up for fitness SEO keywords like “personal trainer courses”, “how to become a personal trainer”, “female personal trainer”…

And to be honest, they’re all great personal trainer keywords… but probably not the kind of people you’re looking for.

It’s also worth noting that if you use tools to estimate the number of monthly searches a given keyword receives – Know that the data will often be totally inaccurate when it comes to local search. I’ve ranked for tons of local terms that google claim to receive zero searches – But in reality, they’ve been able to create a steady flow of local traffic. Not huge amounts. But it certainly adds up!

Examples of personal trainer SEO keywords

• personal trainer
• top personal trainer in [city]
• personal trainer in [area of city] – more on that later.
• best personal trainer in [city]
• [city] personal trainer
• hire personal trainer in [city] – high buyer intent
• fitness coach [city]
• best gym in [city]
• personal trainer for weight loss

I’m sure you see that there’s a pattern, and you get the gist. So let’s move on…

2. On-Page Local SEO for personal trainers

On-page SEO is all of the stuff that you do to make your pages relevant to your fitness keywords. You’ll also want to include your local keywords. If you’re doing your personal trainer SEO for the entire city – It’s a good idea to mention some of the smaller local areas within the city.

Not many people are likely to search “personal trainer near alexandra park” (in Manchester). But if the searcher happens to be near Alexandra park when they search – guess who’s gonna pop up first.

Here are a few things you’ll need to bear in mind for your on-page SEO…

• Make sure you mention multiple keywords on your page.
• Your main keyword should be in your main headers <h1> and <h2>.
• Make sure your content makes sense – The amount of time people spend on your website affects your ranking, so user experience matters.
• Include pictures – at least 1. And add your keyword to the alt tags. Google doesn’t know what’s in your picture, but they can get better context using your alt tags.
• Use links
  • Link to authoritative websites in your niche.
  • Link to other pages on your own website.
• Control your meta tags. E.g. Page title and description.

There are a ton of other on-page factors… But the biggest part of SEO is:

3. Off-page SEO for personal trainers

Off-page SEO is the stuff that you do outside of the page that you’re trying to rank. This means making sure that other pages on the internet link back to your page. AKA Backlinks.

This includes your own website, but the much larger part of your backlink strategy will involve 3rd party websites. A backlink is essentially a vote / endorsement.

Every time google shows your website in the search results, it is basically recommending your website to the searcher. And google only wants to recommend websites who can be trusted. And one of the best ways that they can do this is by recommending websites wh are already being endorsed by a ton of other websites.

But as you can imagine… Not all backlinks are equal. A well-known, high authority website such as the BBC is going to give you much more “link juice” than a backlink from your next door neighbour’s cousin’s blog about his dog. And then getting links from particularly disreputable or spammy websites can do more harm than good.

And since we’re talking about SEO for personal trainers – you should also note that relevance of the backlinks will also matter. So if your neighbour’s cousin was blogging about gym equipment, getting a link from him probably wouldn’t be a bad idea!

Different types of backlinks for fitness businesses

“Link building” is a HUGE topic, and if you’re not an SEO professional, it’s probably best to keep it simple. But let’s get this out of the way:

When it comes to link building – Quantity AND quality matter.

SEO is a funny industry, in the sense that we trad a thin line between giving the search engines that they want – Relevance and value for users; and manipulating the search engines for our own purposes. And if we get caught doing the latter – we’ll lose our rankings – and in countless cases, SEOs using shady aka “black hat” tactics have lost their livelihoods.

So when I say that quality and quantity matter – I mean that you need to give google what they want, so where possible, your backlinks should be:

• Relevant – fitness related websites, personal training websites, health and beauty etc…
• In-content – You can’t just spam the comment sections of people’s blogs all of the time. A genuine, high quality endorsement should be within the main body of a website’s article or page content.
• Plentiful – The more
• Natural-looking – As I said; a backlink is like an endorsement. And an endorsement loses its value when it looks fake, or as if it was paid for. People should want to endorse you based on the value of what you offer. Or at least that’s how it should appear to the search engines.
• Diverse – This is a continuation of “natural-looking”. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t want ALL of your backlinks to be super relevant, high quality, or perfect. Because if they are… It starts to look artificial. So “pad out” your backlinks with lower quality mentions, such as comments and forums (still non-spammy).

How do I get backlinks for my fitness SEO keywords?

• Search for fitness and personal training directories in your local area. When it comes to local SEO – the locality of the websites giving you your backlinks makes a difference. Make profiles on industry-specific and area-specific directories.
• Comment on relevant websites. As I mentioned, this shouldn’t be your main source of links, but diversity is a good thing.
• Ask higher profile fitness websites and blogs to link to you. In order to get them to do so, you’ll need to offer something f value. E.g. A set of fitness videos that their readers will find useful.

Summary of SEO for personal trainers…

1. Do your keyword research to find personal training keywords in your area
   1. Choose keywords that are relevant, and have high buyer intent where possible.
2. Optimise your web pages for your fitness related keywords
   1. Make sure you use mata tage, images, links and keyword-rich content.
   2. Make sure your pages are optimised for user experience (and actually getting them to take your desired action).
3. Get backlinks. Relevant personal training and fitness backlinks.
   1. Commenting on other people’s (fitness / health and wellness / relevant) blogs. Comments must be relevant and valuable.
   2. Asking for links from relevant blogs. This way you can get in-content links.
   3. Directory links.

So there you have it – Some actionable tips you can use to start getting free traffic from google to your personal training business. And while these tips could work for you if you’re willing to stick at it… Remember that SEO for personal trainers, (and pretty much any industry these days) can take time, and it could be months before you start seeing any real results.

But if you’ll have a much better idea of what it’ll take to start getting per personal training clients from SEO by getting a free SEO report. We’ll take the time to look at your website and that of your competitors to help you to map out a plan to start taking customers in your area.

Get your free SEO report using the form below:

[wpforms id=”186″ title=”false” description=”false”]