[00:00:00] James Breese: Strength Matters Media, Video, Print, Podcasts.
[00:00:06] Josh Kennedy: Today, we're talking about 10 proven SEO strategies to get your gym ranked higher on Google. But before we do that, welcome back, James, back on the podcast after your South Africa adventures, which we will do some podcasts about as well. Um, so number one, James, very, very quickly, why do you need to be ranked higher on Google?
[00:00:21] So you've got 30 seconds to answer that.
[00:00:24] James Breese: Very simply. The higher you rank in Google, the more traffic you get to your website, the more traffic you get to your website, the more chances are you have of converting that traffic into leads. And the more leads you get, the more chances you have getting new personal training clients, patients, and members.
[00:00:38] How about that for them apples? That'll do.
[00:00:42] Josh Kennedy: How about them apples? Exactly. First movie reference of the podcast. Right. Let's crack on. Number one, what's the, uh, what is the first proven SEO strategy to get yourself
[00:00:51] James Breese: ranked higher? So very simply, you can understand what keywords are. Like what are people searching for?
[00:00:56] So a key words in technical speak is the words that [00:01:00] people are actually physically searching for in Google. For example, let's, we're talking about gym owners today. So gym membership near me, those are keywords, right? They're four keywords. They're what we call long tail keywords. Short tail keywords are like one or two words, but long tail keywords tend to be four or more.
[00:01:18] So a highly searched. Uh, topic on Google is gym membership near me. I don't know anybody in gym land who owns gyms in gym land. It's like Barbie land. Cause I'd watch that movie again on the, on the plane the other day. I want to go to this gym land. Exactly. You're in gym land is magical mystery place, right?
[00:01:37] So they have this thing called no content whatsoever. For gym membership near me. So you need to answer questions related around that. So when people are searching for gym membership near me, what are they looking for? Most likely price. So looking for the price of gym membership near them. That's what they're looking for or other gyms near them.
[00:01:57] So keywords are the topics [00:02:00] relevant to helping you find or be found On Google that you need to have on your website. So, for example, I would suggest having a page all about your gym membership, which uses the word gym membership throughout it. And then you have blog posts all about gym membership too.
[00:02:16] How to choose the best gym membership. What gym membership is right for me? All this type of stuff, because it all relates back to it. And people searching for these things will find you on the Googles. How about that?
[00:02:26] Josh Kennedy: Find you on the Googles, love it. Number two, uh, write compelling title tags and meta descriptions.
[00:02:31] So what on earth is that? Go.
[00:02:34] James Breese: So when you get into your website, when you're writing blogs, you've got to have these things. So if you, if you go onto Google Chrome and you hover over one of the tabs, Josh, you can probably do it now, right? If you hover over one of the tabs, right, you will see. The title of the, of the page.
[00:02:52] So for example, we're using Riverside FM to record our podcasts at the moment. You should see Riverside. fm studio, right? That's what, [00:03:00] that's what you should see at the top and then below it, or if you hover over it, you should see a description of what it is too. So those are the descriptions you see on Google.
[00:03:08] So in Google, you type into Riverside FM in Google, you'll see the title for the top link and a sub description of what's going on there. So therefore you've got to write compelling title tags and meta descriptions that are relevant to what the content is on the page. So let's go back to gym membership, right?
[00:03:25] So let's call it the best gym membership in London, right? That's the, that's the, that potentially could be the title or something on that, on that title tag. Third space, perhaps. Third space, yeah. Or for example, third space is a gym in London, third space dash gym membership, right? That could be a title tag because it talks about what it is.
[00:03:43] It's a gym, it's a title tag. And then join the third space with our best ever gym membership program. Whatever you want to call it, depends what you want to call it, but that's the subtitle. So titles and meta descriptions is the geeky words for making sure people can find the content into it. If you don't know what it is, maybe [00:04:00] I'll write a blog about what it is later down the line.
[00:04:03] Josh Kennedy: Do that. Number three, optimize images. Now this is probably something that people don't think a lot about. They'll get like, you know, not, not just images, but also videos. Like let's whack a quality video at the top of the banner. And then that makes your page ridiculously slow. Is that where we're going here, James?
[00:04:18] Is that what this
[00:04:19] James Breese: is about? Yeah, exactly. That's the biggest problem. So page speed is the most important thing. It's one of the most important user experience factors when you're doing a website, when you're creating content. So one of the things that people write, they'll spend ages writing the perfect content, they'll just upload images willy nilly onto their website.
[00:04:36] So if now on iPhones, for example, using my iPhone as example, you can record in raw, or you can edit, create video images in raw, which are like 300 megabytes for an image, right? And people want to get the highest quality image, then they upload it to the website, but it's not optimized for the website. So it takes ages to load.
[00:04:54] So you've got to optimize your image. Both in terms of like size to make it as small as [00:05:00] possible, but the quality as high as possible. So it loads faster, but also to explain to people what that image is all about. Because you can't, Google can't, well, maybe it can do now because AI is coming into it, but you can't, Google can't really read an image.
[00:05:14] So you've got to explain to people what that image is. Because if you see images on the right hand side of the Google search bar, people are searching for certain images all the time. So they help you try and find things and it leads to more traffic to your website based on certain images. Blah, blah, blah.
[00:05:26] So optimize for speed and optimize for the alt text, which is the image description of what it's all about.
[00:05:33] Josh Kennedy: Old tech. Now you're getting, you're getting technical now. Remember there's people who, who aren't that, uh, technical techno savvy, like me on the podcast listening. So, uh,
[00:05:42] James Breese: it's the text you wrote on the image on your website.
[00:05:45] Josh Kennedy: Andrew, you kind of already mentioned this. James, in the last one, number four is enhanced page loading speed. Uh, Andrew, I'm going to bring you in on this. How important is page speed to you, especially when you're searching for coffee shop?
[00:05:57] Andrew Wallis: Hey, you hit the nail on the head. You want, you want [00:06:00] speed. And this is a pressing issue that I've got with my own personal website at the moment in that I'm nodding my head and listening intently.
[00:06:07] When James was saying about images, because I've outsourced a lot of info, um, having, uh, VAs doing blog posts, but they've gone and put these heavy images in which has slowed it down. So it's an issue we've got to address because if it's not loading within milliseconds, somebody's going off and looking at the next, um, result in the, in the, in the Google search.
[00:06:30] So we, we've got to think about the user experience and make it as seamless and as quick as possible. And by putting. And, uh, the, um, a focus on to reducing the size of images and things like that is going to help optimize that speed and reduce loading times then.
[00:06:49] Josh Kennedy: We're terrible nowadays. Aren't we? With the amount of time we're prepared to wait for something.
[00:06:53] Website takes too long to, you know, more than a couple of seconds loading. You're like, no bored. Do you remember, this is going slightly off [00:07:00] topic, but either of you, um, play games where you had to load it on a tape.
[00:07:03] James Breese: Yep. Atari's Commodore 64s. That'd
[00:07:06] Josh Kennedy: take forever. You'd sit there for, you'd sit there for 10 minutes and it'd load on the tape and then it'd get to the end and go, and then it'd crash.
[00:07:14] And that'd be the worst. So page speed. I
[00:07:18] Andrew Wallis: know. I had a ZX81 and you'd have to hold the, uh, the actual module in place to an exact angle so that it would load properly. Oh, go. Gone are those days.
[00:07:29] Josh Kennedy: Yeah. You don't know you're born guys. If you, if you missed out on that number, number five, again, keep this simple, stupid James been building an internal linking structure.
[00:07:40] What is that?
[00:07:41] James Breese: Yeah. So you want to, if you write a blog post, right. You want to help people find other useful content to make them stick around on your website. So for example, they read a blog about gym membership, and they may want to read something about how to get started by joining your gym. So a [00:08:00] link is a, an internal link is a link to something on your own website from within another page or a blog.
[00:08:06] Post, and that helps Google find more information. It helps people stick around on your website longer because they want to see that. As a result, it will boost up your rankings accordingly because the stickier your website is, the more people stick around, the more Google can see that and the more they like that.
[00:08:22] So that's essentially, so an internal linking structure allows Google to help find your pages for people, monitor them, be aware that they exist. But also remember that Google, it costs Google money to crawl your website. So they want to find each page within three links maximum before they cut out. So you're going to try and think of internal linking to link within all these pages with no more than three links between each one.
[00:08:45] Complicated
[00:08:46] Josh Kennedy: this website stuff in it. Um, the next one, either of you on this one, uh, number six, improve user experience that we kind of mentioned that in terms of like. Page loading speed as a user experience as well. Uh, who wants to, uh, jump in on this? Don't mind.
[00:08:58] Andrew Wallis: I'll start. [00:09:00] Yeah. For me, um, it's more so on any page on your homepage, but equally on your blog pages and your service pages and the likes that you want, you've, you've got to provide the right information that Google's looking for, but equally.
[00:09:15] What the, uh, the visitors looking for and to display it in a manner with breaking up text with images. Um, good looking, good quality headers and, and these days, even more so, it's important to make sure it's mobile friendly because too often I'll go onto a website and you're having to scroll left and right to try and read it because they've not taken into account that, uh, the page Design, uh, pieces for, for mobile, uh, which is
[00:09:48] Josh Kennedy: key.
[00:09:49] Awesome. James, come back to you. SEO friendly URLs. What are
[00:09:53] James Breese: they? The URL is when you post into the top part of Google search, for example, strengthmatters. [00:10:00] com or strengthmatters. com forward slash blog. Now, most people, if they're using WordPress or they're using other websites, they don't edit these numbers, these, these titles.
[00:10:11] So Google likes to read stuff. It doesn't want to see numbers. So a lot of people have blog posts, ID 5679224. It doesn't really help tell Google. I love that blog. It was great. That was a great one, right? My favorite too. So you have. You have these random numbers and like endings and all sorts. It's just gonna be clear and simple.
[00:10:33] You've got to keep it down to like a few, as few words as possible. It tells people exactly what it is. So, for example, again, let's go back to the gym membership blog idea. So it's called strengthmanners. com forward slash gym membership near me. You with me? So it's a very simple, easy to understand phrase.
[00:10:51] It's like matches what the keywords and title is. It matches the keywords in here. It's all consistent to allow Google to help people find it. You need to optimize it. You need to think about that and [00:11:00] helping you get ranked higher. And that's the whole point.
[00:11:02] Josh Kennedy: Fantastic. Number eight, earning authoritative backlinks.
[00:11:07] I didn't know what these were until you mentioned this to me a couple of weeks ago and removing bad backlinks. How'd you earn good backlinks? Yeah.
[00:11:14] James Breese: So you want. Again, one of the highest indicators that Google can trust you is that when other websites who, uh, have a high authority domain, um, and that means they're very considered really high by Google.
[00:11:27] I'll give an example. Google out of a hundred, scale one to a hundred, zero to a hundred. Google is ranked a hundred. Amazon's about a hundred. Apple's about a hundred. They're the biggest brand names in the world. So you want to have a domain authority as high as possible. So what you want to do is have these websites.
[00:11:42] Who are similar to you guys in the fitness and health space, link back to your website. Cause the more links back to your website from other websites, the higher Google likes to rank you. So you've got to try and build an outreach backlinks. One of the fastest ways to get backlinks is to go onto other people's podcasts.
[00:11:58] That's as simple as that because they'll [00:12:00] link to your website, link to your show, whatever it is, and start to build you backlinks like that. But you want to get people who are ranking higher than you ideally. to link to you, not people who are ranking lower, because that doesn't give the same authority.
[00:12:12] But links are links. However, you're going to think of good links and bad links. There's lots of people and companies out there who are, what we call, scraping your website and using your links to be posting from their websites. They're using black hat, dark ways of doing things. We don't like them guys.
[00:12:29] Those guys are scum, subhuman scum in the words of Alan Partridge. So you've got to try and remove those and tell Google not to follow those things. Cool.
[00:12:38] Josh Kennedy: Uh, number nine, this is a really, really important one. We've mentioned this quite a lot, create useful content. You've got to be helping your, your members and people who are searching for
[00:12:48] James Breese: you.
[00:12:48] Right. So super simple. Let's go back to members who haven't even joined you yet. If you're helpful right from the start and telling, talking about gym membership near me, what's the best gym membership near me? Well, [00:13:00] what's the cost of gym membership near me? All these types of blog posts, they're going to read them.
[00:13:04] They're going to like you. They go, well, they're pretty helpful. They're helpful like this. I wonder what else they've got. They start to read other things that help them in their weight loss journey and building strength, running a faster 5k time, whatever it is you've got on your website. They want to stick around and learn more about what the problem they're trying to solve.
[00:13:20] The first problem is that they're in the market for gyms. They want to understand what gym membership options there are. So therefore you're being helpful. And then you start to develop this conversation. They may learn stuff more about you. The only way to start developing this conversation, this trust, is creating helpful, useful content.
[00:13:37] And blog posts are a great way on your website for people to stick around. You can then throw in videos and other stuff later on down the line, but keep them on your website, answer their questions, become extremely helpful, and answer the questions that people are asking in Google, not what you think they're asking.
[00:13:54] Josh Kennedy: Fantastic. And last but not least, number 10, SEO best practices. James, what are SEO best [00:14:00] practices?
[00:14:00] James Breese: Crikey. How long have you got? Uh, I've got
[00:14:03] Josh Kennedy: about 30 seconds.
[00:14:05] James Breese: SEO best practices are very simple. You've got to have a holistic approach to writing content to be found on Google, which means write great content that's fast loading, that's easily searchable and easily digestible in people that can, they can read it and makes sense to Google.
[00:14:23] You've got to write in language that not only works for your. Users or your potential customers, but it works for Google too. And that you've got to optimize those. So those who SEO best practice title tags, good URLs, fast loading web pages, make sure it's linked on Google search console. If you don't know what that is, you need to find out what it is.
[00:14:42] But the point is, you know, you've got to do all these, there's so many things, but it just makes sure it's good content. That's fast loading and can be easily found by Google. Fantastic.
[00:14:51] Josh Kennedy: Thank you so much guys. That is 10 proven SEO strategies to get your gym ranked higher on Google. That is it for today.
[00:14:58] Please don't forget to rate, review, and [00:15:00] subscribe. And if you want help getting more clients or patients or even help with your SEO, then book in for a free 15 minute strategy call with us by going to strengthmanners. com forward slash strategy.