Are you focussing on the wrong search terms?

Personal Trainer websites are generally quite poorly optimised for search engines.

BORING!!!

OK I am going to try to make this BLOG posting vaguely interesting cos most people really want to switch off when it comes to this stuff, and really I couldn’t agree more with you…

IT IS REALLY BORING!

I’ve been told that sex sells and placing stuff like pictures of cute girls or ripped guys will get people to read your post. Of course you would never catch me doing this so here is my contribution for “eye-candy”

OK now I have your undivided attention, I’ll talk to you about google…

What do we want from Google?

We want to appear when someone searches for something that is relevant to what we do and who we are. Really that is all there is to it with Google. There is little point appearing for the search term “Britney Spears” when our service is “Real Man Strength Training in NYC”

Certain search terms are really difficult to get top rankings with, unless you devote your entire life to doing everything right for this specific search term. For example the term “Fat Loss” has a huge level of competition and would require a lot of geek work and a certain element of luck to get to the top of Google.

Why don’t I Want To Appear Top For Fat Loss?

To be honest with you, your website doesn’t want to appear at the top of google for “fat loss”, especially if you are a real man strength expert in NYC. As soon as someone clicks on your site and sees that it is not relevant to what they are looking for, they’ll just click the back button!

So why is it that when you put keywords in to website, do you use the term “fat loss”?

It is pointless and unnecessary!

Whoa there I am getting boring again!!!

Urm, how can I make this interesting again… I know lets talk about money…

Filling your local bootcamp makes you a lot of money, so what search term will your prospects search for?

Fat Loss (your city)

Bootcamp (your city)

Workouts in (your city)

Now tell your web guy to set the following things on your web sites front page to include these search terms:

• title tag
• description tag
• keyword list
• H1 tag
• image file names
• image alt tags
• first paragraph content

Really that is it. Make you web page relevant to these search terms and google will love you, and your clients will find you.

In marketing terms you are looking for the “long-tail”, ie. the search terms that only the people in your local area are going to search for, not the generic, highly competitive search terms. Fewer people will come to your site, but they will be much more likely to be interested in you and your site.

Now there are a few other factors including site link popularity, and link quality and all that kind of stuff, but when you are looking at the long tail your sites optimisation is much more critical.

An Experiment For You To Try

OK, how can I finish with an interesting close so you remember what I have put here and you might actually apply it to your site today?

Here is an experiment for you, go check out your competition on google, by doing a search for “Personal Trainer xxxx” where xxx is your local town/city/area. Click the top entry and view their site.

Now right click and select the view source and see how they stack up on the list of items I gave above… How do they look… usually not that great… see how easy it would be to get to the top of google! Go do it!

Tim

P.S. Let me know how you get on, tell me what your site needs, tell me which bits you don’t understand. comment below.