It’s probably fair to assume a common goal for most gym owners is to have their facility show up as one of the first options when potential clients search for gyms near them. But how do you, as the owner of a studio or gym, make that happen? Search engine optimization!
In this post, we will dive into three free tools you can utilize with your website and marketing campaigns to test your website for search ranking, as well as keywords and phrases you are showing up for.
Mobile Friendliness Website Test
There are two tools we commonly refer to for quick and dirty tests on search engine optimization (SEO) checks with gyms. The first is Bing’s Mobile Friendliness Test Tool you can access here, which is a basic page where you can enter your fitness facility’s website URL, and it will test whether or not your site is mobile-friendly. For most gym owners, their website will probably pass this test, especially if you’ve built it on a common platform like Wix, WordPress, Squarespace, etc., as most of these platforms and templates are pre-built with responsive designs for computer, tablet, and mobile formats. If your site shows it is not usable on mobile, that will be an indicator for you as a first step to optimizing your business for SEO.
This is a straightforward tool to get started with; however, this information may be integrated into other SEO tools since mobile-friendly is a core aspect of ranking. Depending on your level of comfort when working on your website, this might be a great starting point to know what you might be getting into before jumping in too deep.
Website Performance Overview
The other Google-based tool we use more heavily is the PageSpeed Insights tool. Again, by inserting your studio’s URL into the webpage it will test your website for common page performance indicators that SEO algorithms factor from when ranking sites. Once the test is complete, there are two tabs below the URL bar that will show results for mobile and desktop. Each results page has the same categories for testing: Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO, and they rank by percentage on how well your site performs (note that mobile and desktop results will probably differ as their testing standards vary). Each section of the page will give you a breakdown of issues or pain points and some insights into the problem to help you start with your project to fix the problems.
When testing your site on PageSpeed Insights, it’s helpful to understand the metrics it is factoring for. The four primary Core Web Vitals included in this test are Largest Content Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
Search Engine Insights for Your Gym
If you are new to SEO and haven’t necessarily focused on optimizing your website content for keywords and phrases, a great place to start is by ensuring that you have your target audience identified. With your gym’s audience and niche in mind, you can utilize a site analysis tool (such as SpyFu) to see the results of organic keywords you rank for already, competition in the space, top-performing pages, and even backlink profiles (links on other websites that point back to yours).
These types of tools can give you some great insights as to where your website is currently doing well with keywords and can be a good start-off point as to where you would like to grow in your rankings. Making sure to focus on keywords and phrases that align with your fitness facility’s strategic points of distinction can also help you get more bang for your effort.
Making a Splash
Search engine optimization is a long-term project for gyms and studios as it involves consistent work and tweaking to keep up with algorithm changes and best practices. While this may seem daunting for many fitness facility owners, remember that SEO is a very strong form of marketing and can help position your website to your target audience when they are searching for a problem that you are their solution for. While this shouldn’t be your only form of marketing either, organic search is a “free” form of natural marketing that plays well into a strong marketing campaign and structured sales funnel process to help drive traffic to convert into clients.
Don’t forget to head over to our Free Learning section of the website, which has in-depth write-ups on many marketing and business practices, specifically for gyms, studios, and fitness facilities.
