Gym online reviews are an essential function of their digital presence for fitness business owners working to market their company in the modern landscape. Whether you’re a brick-and-mortar facility or an online trainer, most of your audience will typically utilize online searches to learn more about your fitness business, different options available/competition, or even reviews and rankings.
Ensuring that you lead with your best foot regarding your online presence and working to capture your positive client reviews will help boost your overall brand reputation and impression. Therefore, we will dive into the topic of gym online reviews and how best to leverage them for your fitness business’s online marketing.
Reviewing, Establishing, and Putting Out Fires
Before getting too wild with starting a review push for your fitness clients, it’s best to get the way of the land and understand precisely what gym reviews are out there already. Searching for your business name in a search engine can usually bring up the common sites hosting reviews for your online coaching business or fitness facility. These sites might include Yelp, Google Business Profile, Facebook Business Page, or even the Better Business Bureau®.
Once you’ve found your business’s presence on the various sites that might have reviews, it’s time to review the information. Depending on your rankings, you might find yourself mostly looking at decent to good reviews or potentially reading through some vocal upset customers.
Suppose you find yourself in the former category with happy customers. Great work! It’s time to establish a presence on the platforms that don’t already have a profile or reviews made. For example, if there are reviews on Google but you haven’t set up the account, you may want to claim your gym’s Google Business Profile. Similarly, if your business is not on Facebook or Yelp, it might be worthwhile to set up profiles for your coaching business there as well.
However, if you find yourself in the latter category and you are looking at upset, angry, or disgruntled customer reviews, it’s time to do some damage control. Depending on the platform and assuming that you’ve already established or claimed the business account ownership for the profile, you typically can respond to customer reviews as an employee or owner within the business. That said, it is a worthwhile task to go through and personally respond to each unhappy customer with an apology, acknowledgment of the issue, and an update to remedy the situation.
Replying to these negative reviews can do a lot of good for your business. For example, it can help smooth out bad experiences with past customers that may sway them to come back or give it another try (odds are they won’t, but it’s worth a shot). However, the more significant reason to respond to these poor rankings is to give better impressions to potential customers reading these reviews that you care about your fitness facility and are willing to address and respond to these disgruntled patrons.
Responding to Reviews to Boost SEO
Similar to our point on responding to negative reviews, it is a best practice to respond to reviews in general. These responses can help work within your gym’s search engine optimization (SEO) strategy, but the replies require more work and thought besides a simple “thank you” to reviews.
Since we’ve already discussed the public relations work surrounding negative comments, let’s focus on the positive ones. These are often the 5-star reviews someone will leave, and too many owners think it’s mission accomplished and move on. Unfortunately, they are ignoring great local SEO and keyword opportunities.
By choosing specific keywords that you are trying to rank for in your responses in a way that comes across as organic, you can help boost your fitness facility’s keyword relevance profile. Further, some speculate this additional activity (especially on the Google Business Profile reviews) will positively affect local authority/ranking scores.
Like the negative review point above, regularly posting responses from your personal training studio in the comments can also positively influence your potential clients. It can help convey that you engage with your community and are active within the business.
Capturing and Diversifying with Gym Online Reviews
Once you’ve managed to claim or establish the online channels for reviews, work damage control on the negative comments, and leverage local SEO tactics on your replies, the next step is strengthening your overall review numbers. But before we go too far into this aspect, it’s worthwhile to reinforce the point that a perfect 5-star rating isn’t necessary, nor should you lose sleep over a few negative reviews. You are heading in the right direction as long as most of your ratings are favorable and your average is above four stars.
Okay, now that we aren’t hyper-focused on achieving a perfect score, let’s not fixate on making a gigantic push for new reviews. Yes, that’s right. We want to grow but don’t want to do it too fast. Sometimes, when businesses do these extensive campaigns, they push for reviews, and the timeline surrounding them hits a substantial spike. Search engines like Google may block or reduce the value of the scores from these.
Therefore, rather than doing sporadic promotions to grow your review numbers, focus on implementing business review requests into your sales, marketing, and customer service processes. From a sales process perspective, you can use the end of an event or challenge to ask for a review and testimonial and leverage that time to help sell them on another package or membership to continue on their successful journey. Similarly, adding review requests to marketing materials like emails or texts to clients or even verbally asked (with easy links or QR codes) in person at your facility by staff.
Building these requests naturally into your business systems and processes will help you achieve a more organic trickle effect with reviews. This consistent stream of reviews acts favorably from a local SEO point of view and helps accumulate a healthy stockpile of quality reviews over time.
Finally, the last point to mention in this section is focusing on more than just one review channel. Collect them wherever your clients are willing to give them. Of course, Google will be the primary focus for many owners, but Yelp, Facebook, and other similar-style sites that allow reviews are also suitable for capturing and growing reviews. This expansion will help give a universally good impression for prospective clients finding your training facility and feed into business rating aggregating systems that some search engines have already implemented.
Leveraging Your Fitness Reviews Further
The last topic we will cover in the blog is maximizing your efforts with reviews for your training facility’s benefit. This revolves around using client reviews and testimonials in your marketing materials, website, and even the facility’s ‘sales area’ to help establish a social proof element for your business.
Having reviews prominently displayed on your website can help drive more comfort and stronger feelings toward purchase for leads considering your facility. While these may not be a driver of new clients, these can work in your favor for helping leads convert within your sales funnel if they are on the fence. Sometimes, hearing or seeing real people’s stories based on their goals, pain points, or interests and how your facility has helped can be a better closing marketing piece than anything you could write on a flyer.
Making A Splash
Online gym reviews can be a powerful tool for your fitness business, depending on how you collect and leverage them. When done correctly, they can serve many purposes. From helping local SEO and public relations to a marketing and conversion tool, reviews of fitness facilities can serve as a quality multi-tool for your business with minimal maintenance effort once you establish it in your processes.
