Improve your local SEO
It’s safe to say that in this day in age, if anybody wants to find out about something they will more than likely ‘Google’ it. This is why it’s important to make sure your martial arts business website has good Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) so that people can find it. But getting on the first results page can be a little tricky on national scale. This is why it is a great idea to focus more on ‘local’ search results, as the people searching nearby are more likely to engage with your business and potentially join a class than someone based in another country.
Nearby
When people search for something using Google, one of the first things it will attempt to do is to find places of relevance that are close by to the person’s current location. This is meant as a way of providing more convenient and accurate results, and knowing this, it is something you can use to help make sure you are one of those results.
“Great, I can start showing up on everyone’s searches nearby and get more leads! How do I get started?”
To make sure Google knows what your location is, you need to have the address for your classes accurately listed on your website. Having these same details on your Facebook page, Google+, Google MyBusiness and Google Maps page can also help to improve your chances of being found. Make sure your details are the same across all of these otherwise it may affect your ranking.
Be sure to remind people who attend lessons, especially trial ones, to leave a review on your Google and Facebook pages, as having a higher rating here can increase the likeliness that someone will click on your link over one with no reviews.
Keywords
These are something Google uses to help match what people are looking for. If people are looking for ‘martial arts’ it will try to find as many close matches to that as possible. It will look at things such as the website name, titles of pages and content on the page. As you can expect, pages with more close matches to the ‘keywords’ a person enters will get shown first.
“If I just put lots of keywords in, I can be number one, great!”
Sadly, no. Google frowns very heavily on putting too many keywords onto one page, especially if the text is short. If possible, you want to use keywords in your website’s name, home page and additional pages you may add. Having a blog is a great way to help with this also, as it allows you to create frequent content to keep your site fresh. This is another thing that Google likes to see.
Some examples for you to think about are including the name of your business, your martial arts style and your classes. It’s can also be beneficial to extend the keywords into phrases, so rather than ‘martial arts’, you could also use ‘martial arts classes’ or ‘martial arts classes for kids’ for example. You can use this tool to help give you some ideas.
Create Links
Linking is a way in which you to help improve your ranking on Google. If you can get the right sites to link to yours, it will increase the likeliness of people visiting. It is this likeness that Google will pick up on and use towards improving your ranking. Sites which Google thinks people are more likely to visit partly due to their popularity get an increased ‘search authority’, this means Google will recommend you more positively again when people search for similar keywords.
“So I can just get lots of links to my website and see an increase in visits?”
Almost, it’s important to get the right kind of sites to link back to your own. These sites need to be relevant to your business and something you are happy to be associated with. A good start would be to find local directories and add your website to them, as these websites sole purpose to try and provide useful information and links for people searching for things more locally.
Tracking
With any changes or adjustments you make to your websites SEO, it is important to make sure you keep track of everything so you know what is working. If you don’t already, you will want to have Google Analytics installed onto your website, that way you can see what impact any changes you make are having and compare it to any previous or future adjustments.
If you need help installing or using Google Analytics, we have a handy guide for you HERE.
