We often discuss utilizing marketing ideas to grow a gym in our blog, but one of the key factors in digital marketing is analyzing your gym’s website to ensure it is operating correctly and designed functionally. This emphasis on website structure, health, and authority can positively affect your business’s organic marketing through search engines—specifically with search engine optimization (SEO) and user experience. With this in mind, we are going to discuss five tools that you can implement into your marketing toolbox that are not only powerful but also free!
PageSpeed Insights – Google
We are going to start with the big dog in the arena of search engine platforms and talk about Google. While Google has plenty of free tools and resources available for marketers, today, we will focus on PageSpeed Insights for your gym website.
Let’s start with what it is. This web-based tool loads and reviews your fitness studio’s website and analyzes it on multiple factors (performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO). It will also run two versions of the test—one for mobile devices and one for desktop PCs. It will give you a score and a quick analysis of issues or warnings, as well as some supporting documents, notes, and resources to help fix any problems your site may be encountering.
When you go to the website tool, you will notice it is a very straightforward webpage with a box to type a URL into. We appreciate the simplicity; all you need to do is enter your website and press “Analyze.” After that, it will run for a few seconds (or minutes) and then give you a printout of your scores in the four categories and an option to toggle between mobile and desktop results. Note: results will differ between the two device types, so reviewing both data sets is critical.
As you scroll down the page of either readout, you will notice it displays more information about the findings of your website. The data is broken up into sections related to the four primary categories scored at the top. Within each category, you may see red, yellow, or grey circle notifications that break down the results of errors, issues, or warnings. Each point typically has a drop-down option that can give you more details about the result and potentially link you to additional resources for even more in-depth information.
We typically find this tool helpful for users looking to get a snapshot of their website’s health and better understand their user experience loading and interacting with the website. Understanding your mobile site’s performance is essential in the modern digital landscape. Further, understanding how quickly your page and content load, as well as the overall accessibility of your site, can be a beneficial insight into the interactions new users will be experiencing the first time visiting your website.
Website SEO Spider – Screaming Frog
This next tool is a powerful one. While many websites and SEO tools tend to be cloud-based, Screaming Frog involves a few additional steps before you can use it. Being application-based software, it requires you to install the software onto your computer to analyze websites. While we recognize that this can be a considerable pain point for owners who operate primarily off of their phones, this tool is worth the headache of booting up your laptop.
So, what do you get once you install this application, and is it free? First, it does have a free option—the non-paid version will crawl 500 pages, which is usually enough for small—to medium-sized facility owners. But let’s talk about what it does now.
Website spiders are programs that crawl through your website, reviewing code, text, links, etc., and checking for errors or documenting certain aspects or connections within them. Screaming Frog’s software does a great job of giving you a quick understanding of your website page, file, and resource structures, as well as any deadlinks, errors, or re-directs. This information can be helpful if you’ve operated your website for a long time, recently made significant changes, or have cleaned up your website pages/structure.
From an SEO perspective, this tool can help you understand where there are deadends within your site. After analyzing your gym’s website, you can change some of these pitfall sections into 301 redirects, where you can automatically divert traffic from those pages to another (relevant) page. This type of change also can have a positive effect on your SEO scores as well.
Gym Website Auditing Tool – Semrush
Like Screaming Frog, Semrush is a website crawling and analyzing tool. However, it offers a more robust analysis tool that will do a decent job reviewing and analyzing your gym’s website. Semrush is a potent tool typically used by marketers in agencies or for businesses with in-house website/SEO-focused employees. That said, you will see a lot of functionality on the dashboard when you create an account, and it can feel overwhelming. Luckily, if you are on the free version, your access will be limited, which can help reduce some of the stress of learning what all the tools do in-depth.
So, what will a free account give you access to? First and foremost, the monthly “site audit” is what we recommend signing up for. It will score your website health and list out the flagged errors, warnings, and notices found within your website’s structure. It will identify everything from missing metadata or pictures on specific pages to broken links or page redirects. With the free account, you can also perform keyword research, track a few keyword rankings, and even review your backlinks.
You may be wondering why this free account’s offering has some overlap with other tools and why we would still mention those if they are already covered here. We recommend using multiple tools when working with your website, especially from an SEO perspective, because search engine algorithms and ranking structures are proprietary in how they work, and they are updated often. With that, many of these SEO tools, websites, and applications make their best-educated guesses based on their tests, information, and results. A well-rounded perspective of your site’s performance from multiple inputs can help you have a more thoroughly examined and thought-out approach.
Website “Authority” Checker – AHREFS
Suppose you are getting into the SEO game because you want your site to display in the organic search results for your target audience. In that case, website authority will be a significant factor in accomplishing this goal. As we mentioned earlier, search engine algorithms are proprietary, so authority-checking tools realistically give you their perceived value based on how they believe the search engines are currently ranking websites and pages. That said, AHREF’s website “authority” checking tool is a fantastic website to keep in your bookmarks for your gym’s website review.
We will be the first to say that it is not perfect (none of them are). However, there are a few things that it does that we love. First, it’s free and has a solid reputation in the SEO community. But the second factor is what we genuinely dig: it is fast and convenient. When it comes time to analyze your site and do the work, these tools will often require you to establish accounts, take time to crawl your site, or not display full functionality on mobile. AHREF’s site-checking tool avoids these pitfalls. You can quickly and easily just plug your gym’s website domain into the box, which will give you back a score. Further, you can also get a quick overview of your top backlinks in your profile, which is just a bonus point to have that information available on your phone whenever you are analyzing your gym’s website.
Serpfox
The last tool we want to cover is Serpfox, a detailed keyword-tracking tool. The functionality is straightforward in that (the free account version) you can load ten keywords/phrases you want to monitor for your website domain. Once loaded, it will monitor your daily position for those keywords and give you statistics based on the daily position tracking.
What we like about this tool is that it explicitly monitors, tracks, and outputs your data daily. Many other tools tend to condense the data into average page position stats, one-week trends, or general overviews. The problem with that pre-manipulated data dashboard is that you aren’t getting the whole story, and those daily data points and trends accessible in Serpfox can give you some insights as to what may be working (or not working) in your gym’s SEO strategy when developing content for your website or building your backlink profile.
Making A Splash
Working on and analyzing your gym’s website, especially regarding SEO and refining functionality, may feel overwhelming. By implementing these free marketing website resources into your toolbox, you can set yourself up with some actionable data points and information to begin your efforts effectively.
If you have any other tools or ideas for marketing a gym that you would like to share, please share them in the comments section below. We’d love to hear what you recommend, what you use it for, and why you like it!
