One of my passions is fitness. When I made the decision to move to back to Las Vegas, ranking my business in Google was essential as there’s certainly a transition process with businesses in a new city, and the earlier I can address SEO, the better. To avoid any confusion, SorianoMedia (where I’m writing this blog post) is my digital agency, where I focus on digital marketing and SEO. I also offer personal training – because it’s my passion, and what better way to make money than doing something you love?! These are my website: Our goal is to rank for “Boxing Trainer in Las Vegas” or “Personal Trainer in Las Vegas”, but these tactics will work for any city. I’ve done this over and over again, and I’m sure this will work… especially for a relatively low competition local keyword like “personal trainer.” Feel free to search for us to see where we’re currently ranked, you might need to add the URL paramenter “&near=Vegas” (without the quotations) to the end of your Google search URL. This localizes your search results, because Google’s search is location dependent.

Here’s exactly what you need to do to rank for “Personal Trainer”…

    1. On-Page SEO / Technical SEO – The number one thing is to optimize on-page ranking factors, the most important being Title Tag, and content on the page. Take a look at our websites as an example, our title tag contains the same keyword, “Personal Trainer in Maui.” And we have a lot of content on our home page, this helps Google determine what our website is about. I’d say that’s 80% of on-page SEO. Here are a few other ranking factors to consider:
        • Mobile Friendly Website – Google Search Console can help you determine any mobile issues.
        • Site Speed – Google has a PageSpeed Tool that can help you determine how fast your website is, and what you need to work on.
        • Internal Links (We’ll discuss in-depth in the section “Promote Your Blog Post” below)
        • Meta Description – Although it’s allegedly not a ranking factor, a good description should improve your CTR, which many studies have demonstrated that is indeed a ranking factor.
        • Cull through pages – If you installed a demo website, be sure to delete the demo content once you’re done with it because you can run into duplicate content issues (big no-no for Google).
    1. Local Citations – Google My Business, Yelp, Apple Maps and Bing are the important ones. But there’s plenty of lists online if you want to build more (it does help). An optimized Google My Business profile (with reviews) is hypothesized to be the biggest ranking factor for local businesses. Niche directories/citations can be helpful, but sparse in the fitness industry. Local directories specific to your city are very helpful.
    1. Blogging – Backlinks are the #1 ranking factor, and to generate backlinks you need linkable content. Think less click bait, and more link bait. There’s millions of generic fitness posts out there, if you want to stand out you have to provide the best content on a specific subject. You also want to target long-tail keywords, as this niche is extremely competitive. One example would be a blog post I did:
    1. Keyword Research – “ClassPass Review” has about 390 searches per month according to Google’s Keyword Planner, and “How does strength training improve body composition?” has 320 searches per month. I’d categorize these as great long-tail terms to target. Starting out, I’d recommend targeting long-tail keyword phrases under 1000 searches per month, anything higher and you’re competing with mainstream fitness publications, which are tough to outrank.
    1. Keyword Optimization – There’s a few ways to do this, if you’re using WordPress (like I am), you can use a popular SEO plugin like Yoast SEO or The SEO Framework, they have rudimentary keyword optimization tools. I would, however, recommend a premium tool like Surfer SEO… I’d say the edge that they can bring is pretty significant, I’ve seen posts optimized with Surfer fly up multiple pages in Google. They have a 7-day trial, feel free to use the crap out of it for 7 days then cancel. Realistically, you don’t need that many blog posts to rank for “personal trainer” in smaller markets. A Surfer SEO alternative is MarketMuse, I use both and they’re both great (and they both have free trials). And you can use it for more than blogging, you can use it to optimize your website copy on your home page (which as I mentioned in #1 is the most important on-page ranking factor).
    1. Promote Your Blog Post – You can find yourself in a catch-22 situation with blogging, because if your website is new it’s pretty hard to rank. So you’re going to have promote your blog post (Backlinko has a list of many different methods), if you could get a single backlink to your post that would help immensely. Alternatively, when you did keyword research, pick out multiple topics that are related, and simply having keyword optimized internal links back to your website and blog posts can be helpful for ranking in Google. If you have another website (like I do with SorianoMedia), that’s an excellent opportunity to push some link juice to your personal training website.
    1. Local Links – Other than high (>50 DR/DA) editorial links, which are few and far between, local links are extremely powerful for ranking locally. For example, if you found a local news site or blog, (a) all they do is talk about your city (Maui in my case) and when they link to you that tells Google that, “Hey, this business is based in Maui.”
    1. Niche Links – A single link from a high (>50 DR/DA) is all you would need to rank in most markets. I’ve seen competitor backlink profiles and I’m confident that this is true (with maybe a few caveats). The easiest way is via guest blogging, to find blogs that accept guest posts, try a Google search for, “Personal Trainer Submit Guest Post”.
    1. Steal your competitors links – Go through the top 10 of everyone who ranks for “Personal trainer” in your city. Use a backlinks explorer tool, Moz is a popular one with a 30-day trial. Ahrefs is my personal favorite and they have a $7 trial. I’d just utilize the trial periods, you don’t have to keep a subscription. This isn’t something you need to do regularly, perhaps repeat the process in a year or two down the road. Enter their website in the backlinks explorer tool, and you’ll see all of the websites that link to them. Some of them will be easy to acquire, such as fitness directory links, local directory links, etc. That’s an easy win. And it could give you ideas of where they guest blog, etc.
It might take some time, implement these tactics and let it sit for a month and while Google crawls everything (you can submit your site and URL’s in Google Search Console). Check back with me and let me know where you rank in the comments below!