SEO Optimizing Your Gym Website
When it comes to your gym website, there are many things you need to take into consideration from SEO to photography, speed, and layout. There is an endless amount of content about the subject, and you could spend days trying to figure out the strategy or path you should take on optimizing or updating your gym website.
Instead of overwhelming you with lots of information, today we’re just going to focus on three simple ways you can optimize your gym website.
Heading Tags
Heading tags are used on web pages to let search engines and website visitors know what that page content is about. They give headings to the page and the subsequent content.
Heading tags also go by header tags, head tags, heading tags and SEO header tags. If you’re on the HTML side of your website, when you’re writing the heading tags look like this:
They are meant to be used in order from h1 to h6 with h1 being the most important header tag and h6 the least important. You want to use your page keyword in at least one of the header tags for the content to be SEO friendly.
There are a few things you need to be aware of when using header tags on your website. Here is a simple list of what you should not do when using header tags.
DON’TS – What to avoid when using header tags
- Don’t use more than one h1 header tag on a page. The primary keyword on the page needs to be in the h1 tag. If you have multiple h1’s, it will look like you’re trying to target multiple keywords. Most of the time h1s are the blog post titles or page titles on a page.
- Don’t hide heading tags. In other words don’t try to sneakily stuff keywords in your headers, you’ll get penalized.
- Don’t break the hierarchy. Don’t jump from h1 to h3 when writing content your heading tags need to be in order. For your content to be SEO friendly make sure to follow the h1, h2, h3 progression.
- Don’t just stuff your keyword into all heading tags. Your writing needs to be natural, and if it looks like your keyword stuffing, Google will penalize you. For your first content draft write for your persona then for the second draft review for keywords.
- Don’t use the same header tag on multiple pages. Each header tag that you use needs to be unique to the page. For example, don’t have two pages with the same title.
Image Optimization
Images are an important part of your gym website. With images, you can bring the website visitor into your gym and portray what you’re gym is all about. Other than giving visitors an idea of how your gym looks, images are another way people can find your website via search.
Images give context to the content on the page. For example, if you have a blog post discussing the proper way to do a downward dog having an image of what a downward dog looks like would be very helpful to the reader.
Images also help your SEO. If you include an image that is surrounded by related text, it ranks better for the keyword you optimized it for.
Here are the main this you need to be aware of when optimizing your images for search.
DOS – What to do when optimizing images for your website
- Save the image for the web. Don’t upload a huge image that’s 3000 x 2500 pixels. No one is ever going to see it that big, and it slows down your website speed. Site speed has an impact on how Google ranks your website so don’t make it slow by uploading large images.
- Rename your file. Most of the time the when you save images from your camera they have a default file name like DSC numbers.jpg or if you save them from your iPhone they are photo2.jpg. You want to rename that file to be something related to the image and your content. If you’re writing a blog post about how cycling transforms your body and you have a photo of someone cycling you want to name that file cycling-workout-body-transformation.jpg.
- Add an alt text to the image. Don’t skip this step it’s one of the most important! You want to include your keyword in the image alt text, so it shows up in google results. The alt text is used in two ways: it tells Google what your image is about and if someone is using a screen reader because of visual impairment the alternative text is used.
URLs
Once you have your keyword included in a header tag and in the alt description of your image you also need to include it in your URL. Keeping your URL relevant, compelling, and concise is important in SEO.
The URL is usually automatically generated from your page title. So for example if your blog post title is The Importance of Proper Technique in CrossFit the URL would look something like yourwebsite.com/the-importance-of-proper-technique-in-crossfit. If your website URL’s includes blog categories, it might be a little longer like yourwebsite.com/crossfit/the-mportance-of-proper-technique-in-crossfit.
Ideally you want to edit the URL to something concise and clean so once you have decided on your page title change the URL to an easier to consume length but keep your keyword in mind. If the keyword in my CrossFit example is Proper Technique CrossFit, I will change the URL to be yourwebsite.com/proper-technique-crossfit. Google and a visitor should be able to know what the page content is about by the URL.
If you follow these three simple optimization techniques you will see a difference organic search for your gym website.
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