Marketing can be intimidating. It’s vulnerable to put yourself and your business! You may think that the worst case scenario of marketing is to not find any clients.
But you’re wrong! There’s a worse outcome—people hearing out about your business, but not being able to find your website. Or people clicking a link on your site and getting a 404 error. Or searching Instagram for a fitness professional in the region and not finding your profile. Or trying to use Google Maps to get to your studio and having the address be wrong.
Don’t miss out on leads like this!
Keeping your web presence up to date and consistently optimized is a must to maintain your competitive advantage for your fitness business—whether you’re online only or a hybrid business! You need to make it as easy as possible for people to find you, to follow, and to purchase.
The good news? Follow this list and you can optimize your web presence in less than an hour.
Step One: Audit Your Links
Go to your website and start with your homepage. Click everything.
- Menus—Are they operating properly?
- Body copy—Is it all correct? Are buttons and hyperlinks working?
- Services—Are they accurate? Are they up to date?
- Footer—Are all your social platforms represented and accurate? Don’t forget to add TikTok!
Step Two: Align Social Channels
If you aren’t leveraging your brand properly on social media, you are leaving money on the table.
Increase brand awareness with an aligned online presence. Use your photography, logos, and brand identity (think fonts, colours, styling) to become recognizable. From there, brand awareness and loyalty will develop.
When was the last time you checked to ensure branding is consistent throughout all of your social channels? Go to all your profiles. Do the links work? Are the photos high-resolution? Are they appealing? Are they all aligned? Are you promoting your latest programs in the bio?
Pro tip: Tweak your Instagram name field (not the handle, leave that as is!) to better aid discoverability. Rather than your full name or brand name, try “[Name]|[Niche] Online Personal Trainer” or “[Name] | [City] PT” —both will allow people searching for your city or expertise to find you.
Step Three: Check Online Listings
Whether you are listed on Google My Business, Trainerize.Me, Yelp, or other platforms, it’s important that every listing is maintained.
Your contact information, your address, your branding, your photos. Check those links too!
When contact data is accurate and consistent, you represent your brand with professionalism that sends positive indicators to search engines as well as customers.
Step Four: Test the User Experience for Your Newsletter
Current and potential clients know that by signing up for your newsletter, they’re trading their contact information for a free product/service—your knowledge.
Show respect for their “payment” and make sure to consider what you’re giving them in return! To start, spend some time testing your newsletter user experience and making adjustments based on your findings.
- Subscribe to your own newsletter. Was it easy? Did you get welcomed in? Is what you’re offering on the signup page accurate to what you deliver?
- Read it from the perspective of your customer. Is it useful? Friendly? Easy to read?
- Try to unsubscribe. How easy is it?
Pro tip: if you’re already subscribed to your own list with [email protected], for example, sign up again with [email protected] for testing!
Step Five: Check your Metadata
Start by googling your brand. What does the search-engine results page look like? Is it up-to-date? Does it represent your brand the way you’d like it to?
Next, share a link to your website on your Facebook page. What does the link preview for that page look like? Is the copy correct? Is the image accurate to what the page offers?
From there, manipulate page and post metadata to better reflect your search terms, your brand, and your pages’ intent. You can download a plug-in like Yoast for this or just manually go through your pages in the back end of your site.
It’s 2022—don’t let your digital presence slip in an increasingly digital world. As any fitness professional knows, putting in the hard work now will help achieve your goals sooner than you think.