With recent changes in social media advertising, and declining trends in certain social media usage, Google should be demanding more attention from Fitness Businesses.
And there’s one big advantage of optimising the effectiveness of Google for acquiring new clients. With social media, you’re ‘pushing’ your message onto people (whether they want it or not). However, with Google, people come across your business because they’re actively searching for it – meaning they’re a warmer lead.
So here are our top nine quick tips for making the most of Google. We’ve separated these into three categories; Google My Business, Google Ads and Website.
Google My Business: Your Google Business Profile is an easy-to-use tool for businesses and organisations to manage their online presence across Google, including Google Search and Maps. You can manage it through the Business Profile Manager.
- Make sure you’ve set up a Google Business Profile, and verified it (so Google knows you’re the actual owner of the business).
- Complete all the information Google asks for, including your industry category, address, opening hours, phone number, website, logo, a link to make appointments, services offered and an overview statement about your business.
- Upload loads of high quality photos of your clients using your services. You want smiling, happy photos that match the avatar you’re trying to attract.
- A few times a week, publish a post on the Business Profile Manager. You can recycle social media posts here, and can also include things like testimonials, client feature stories, and any content marketing you might be doing.
- Set up the messaging feature so your potential clients have another way to contact you.
- Get five star reviews from all your clients and members, and respond to them all.
Google Ads:
- You should have an ongoing Google Ads strategy running in Google’s ’search network’ which consistently drives potential clients to your business. Understand and utilise campaigns, ad groups, the keyword planner tool, and conversion tracking
Website:
- Give your potential clients the information they want. In their own guide to SEO, Google advices that “Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors discussed here”. They go on to advise that you should “Optimise content for your users, not search engines”. So the advice here is that if you focus too much on trying to ‘hack’ or ‘beat’ Google to achieve SEO, you may in fact be damaging your SEO.
- Regularly update your website with new, relevant information for your target clients. Regular articles or blogs are a great way to do this, and will push your up the Google search ranking.
