Whether you own a large-scale fitness facility or a boutique personal training studio, establishing or claiming your gym’s Google Business Profile is critical for enhancing your brick-and-mortar business through local search engine optimization (SEO). In this blog, we will explore how your training studio’s Google Business Profile can significantly impact your local search ranking and the various features available within your profile. Additionally, we will review strategies to optimize your profile to better shine in front of potential clients and help you rank favorably.
Note: If you are new to the concept of local SEO for gyms, we highly recommend reviewing our blog, Leveraging Local SEO to Dominate Your Fitness Studio’s Neighborhood, to aid you in better understanding the concept and tactics involved.
Gym Local SEO and Your Google Business Profile
For fitness owners looking to try their hand at SEO, starting with the Google Business Profile is one of the easiest and most effective places to start. From the cost (free) to the direct enhancement of the user experience it gives to members and potential leads, building out your profile should be a straightforward decision.
A few factors are at play when looking at your business profile from an SEO standpoint. Most online search traffic comes from Google, and many users favor mobile usage. User experience and Google Business Profiles are ranking factors for local SEO. When comparing options to enhance your gym’s local SEO and generally benefit your business from a marketing and usefulness aspect, you really can’t go wrong investing time and energy into turning your profile into a marketing tool.
Unfortunately, many training studios already have a business profile established for their business (whether they’ve claimed it or not). Therefore, the local SEO ‘profile market’ tends to be saturated with businesses. That is why properly building out and optimizing your profile is critical. Many fitness studio owners tend not to go the extra mile when claiming their Google Business Profile, which leaves them in the pile of mediocrity regarding user experience, helpfulness, and gym local SEO ranking value.
Information and Features Available Within Your Gym’s Google Business Profile
Before diving in too fast with optimizations, reviewing all the features and information available to you as the business (and profile) owner is wise. For starters, some of the most basic and critical information is the business name, address, website, phone number, hours of operation, and primary/secondary business categories. We recommend having these fields filled out and published as soon as possible. Many users viewing your profile can find the answers to questions based on this information. It also grants them options to contact your facility or visit your site for additional information. Additionally, Google uses this information to help place your business geographically, making it the starting point for your gym’s local SEO process here.
The next features are unique because they can be both company-generated and user-generated. These include pictures, reviews, and questions. When working on your facility’s profile, it’s important to keep this point in mind because there are ways you can blend and leverage this information to help your fitness establishment stand out, both for the user and your gym’s local SEO rank.
Finally, the remaining options are setting up messaging, publishing posts, loading products or services, and designating any special attributes (amenities, accessibility, payment options, etc.) for your training center. This section of options is some of the more underutilized by businesses. That said, each one can be tremendously valuable to the right user and, therefore, also carries some level of local SEO value for your gym.
Optimizing the Google Business Profile to Boost Your Gym’s Local SEO
Critical Elements of Google Business Profile for Gym Local SEO Optimization
- Business Name—This should be the correct name of your business.
- Address—Location information needs to be accurate, especially if you are in a suite, on a specific floor, or in the front or rear of the building.
- Website—Technically, you don’t need a website for your profile; however, having a website for your fitness facility for marketing and general SEO is a massive advantage. Therefore, we highly recommend having one and linking it to your profile.
- Phone Number—Although it may not be necessary if you have a website, we highly recommend setting up a dedicated phone number for your business. You can find more information on this topic in our Utilizing the Phone Within Your Fitness Facility blog.
- Hours of Operation—These need to be accurate and properly structured. Additionally, if you close for specific holidays, shut down for vacation, or have otherwise inconsistent hours, we stress that you make sure you reflect that in your profile information.
- Primary/Secondary Business Categories—Selecting the proper primary and secondary business categories will help Google and customers quickly identify your type of business, which ultimately can affect what types of queries you will be shown in.
Enhancing Gym Local SEO with Business and User-Generated Content
- Photos—When setting up and editing your business profile, you can upload your own photos and set the cover/featured image. Properly chosen cover photos can help drive your audience’s interest. Users can also load images for your fitness facility, so keeping an eye on postings is also good. You can also request the removal of customer photos if any violate the terms.
- Reviews—Community-driven reviews are a great consumer resource. When ranking local businesses for relevancy in user queries, Google uses this information to a degree, so having many quality reviews that rank you well can be an advantage. Further, owners can respond to reviews as well, which can not only help boost your local SEO value but also allow you to add additional search term value to the reviews section.
- Questions—Anyone can submit and answer questions to the business profiles, and people can vote to find them helpful. That said, owners can not only respond to questions in a way that answers them and drives traffic to a specific page (like membership rates, hours of operations, etc.) but can also submit questions themselves. This can be a good marketing opportunity to drive awareness of services, features, or other sales points that may go unnoticed by users browsing the business profile only.
Going the Extra Mile for More SEO Traction
- Enabling Messaging—This feature allows customers to message your business directly, similar to a live chat feature. This can be a great tool for owners who are active within their business and don’t mind putting in the effort for this additional customer service-style feature. However, it can be removed from your profile if messages go unresponded to for more than 24 hours.
- Publishing Posts—Similar to social media feeds, posts can serve as a great marketing opportunity for your business. Whether you are running promotions, upcoming events, or making large announcements, company posts can be a nice additional resource for potential clients reviewing your profile.
- Products and Services—Adding in these types of resources your facility has to offer can help drive more understanding and information about your business to those inquiring. This can be a great marketing opportunity as well as a sales tactic to implement this information.
- Identifying Special Attributes—While the list of available attributes is impressive, selecting ones that appropriately fit your facility can help your studio stand out. From accessibility options to available amenities, attributes can be displayed prominently on your profile, and can be a potential deal-maker for some individuals.
Beyond the Profile: Enhance Client Conversions for Your Gym
Once you have access to your fitness facility’s Google Business Profile and want to start capitalizing on your gym’s local SEO efforts, tying your sales funnel is the next step. When designing your website and business profile, focusing on where you want your traffic to flow from a sales perspective (aka your conversion page) is essential to optimizing your online sales/goal completions.
Whether you add specific services or products to your business profile or direct users to your membership page from the Questions & Answers section, building your content in a way that naturally drives people into your sales funnel is key to effectively growing conversions.
Further, ensuring your website pages are designed and optimized to promote sales funnel flow and conversions is foundational. Success or testing can be done here by viewing traffic flow reports, dropout rates, and goal completions. Running A/B tests on pages, landing pages, or even form designs can help in the long run as well.
Making A Splash
Designing your Google Business Profile in a way that enhances your gym local SEO is one of the easiest ways to help training centers stand out on a local level. By pairing up this effort with a well-crafted sales funnel, website, and marketing campaign efforts, you can help position your business favorably. With continued efforts, you may find your facility in the top results to those running queries like “gyms near me” or “personal training facilities in my area.”
