SEO for personal trainers who sell products or services online
In part one of our DIY SEO for Personal Trainers we stepped into the foundational process that local personal trainers – that is, trainers who provide fitness services in a specific city – could take to get some traction within the search engines. In today’s post, we will focus on how other personal trainers can monetize their businesses if they sell products and services through their website.
For example, some trainers sell specific online training packages whereas others sell protein powder and others sell books, marketing materials or get rich quick guides. Whatever it is that you sell online, SEO can help you do it.
Rather than provide a general overview of what it takes to help you rank, let’s instead look at three examples of what three successful personal trainer websites have done to monetize their sites.
1. Fitness Mentors
Fitness Mentors sells educational materials to personal trainers (or those that aspire to be) that help them to pass important certification exams. Specifically, the site sells personal training exam study guides, practice tests, audio lectures and other education-related products that help to simplify the methods in which trainers can study, and pass, these often challenging certification exams.
Understanding that the certification body itself will always have a competitive edge over study products related to their exams, it is challenging for a site like Fitness Mentors to gain some of the search engine traffic and rankings that the actual certification body enjoys itself.
To drive traffic to their website, Fitness Mentors decided that the best approach would be to offer a free study guide centered around some high quality “keywords” that their research found generates a lot of search engine queries. Note: You can research keyword search volume using Google’s free keyword research tool.
Here’s the process that followed after they did the above:
- Created the best of its kind free personal training exam study guide on the internet.
- Contacted 100’s of personal trainers, websites that covered personal training examination studying, and used Facebook Groups and social media to spread the word about the new study guide.
- Asked these contacts to send a link to that study guide page by referencing it in their articles about good personal trainer resources.
The end result was that the site began to get a lot of exposure and the links that were built to it – a major search engine ranking factor – helped the site begin to rank for the keywords they found had a lot of search volume.
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Monetizing the site from SEO
By now you’re probably wondering how the site makes money off the free study guide they worked so hard to rank. Well, as Fitness Mentors also sells premium study materials that are not free, the traffic and trust they gain from the credibility of their free guide often results in visitor’s spending money on the premium stuff.
SEO Takeaway
Sometimes your website’s products or services are unlikely to have much search volume. When this is the case, creating content that does get a lot of search volume and introducing those visitors who end up there from that content to other products or services can be a good way to monetize a site through SEO.
2. Roman Fitness Systems
Roman Fitness Systems is a popular website that originally started as a fitness blog and then turned into a profitable ecommerce site. The site generates most of its revenue from its online coaching packages but also sells some books and accessories within their online store.
The fitness blog component draws parallels to Fitness Mentors personal trainer study guide in that it uses content to draw people in. The site, over time, developed a large blog community that also spanned into a large social media community but the focus always was, and remains to this day, the almost daily blog content that gets picked up by the search engines for something call “long-tail search.”
Long-tail searches are Google searches that are very specific and usually contain five or more words. For example, let’s say a searcher typed in something like “Do I need to eat 100% organic 100% of the time?” into Google. It’s quite possible they might find the site’s blog on The Organic Food Hierarchy: How to Eat Organic & Save Money Doing It because some of these words are contained in the post.
The idea here is that about 75% of searches are completely unique so it’s not always possible to predict how searchers will find you using the aforementioned Google Keyword Planner tool above. This is why creating a lot of content, and good content that does have a keyword focus, can actually drive a lot of long-tail traffic to your site.
Monetizing from the SEO
Ok, so if you read a blog about organic food how does that lend itself to you buying products from this site? The answer is trust. When a reader who does a Google search, finds a blog they find authoritative and trustworthy, they might even check out some more pages and find themselves staring down one of Roman Fitness Systems online personal training options. The credibility of the site’s writing seems to be working, it has been featured on big time sites like Men’s Health, the New York Times and Shape.
SEO Takeaway
You can create a lot of traffic to your website by creating a really well thought-out blog and building your audience. This is definitely something that does not happen overnight, but if you are passionate about sharing information online and have some writing skills, you can develop a following. This following can be introduced to your products and services and you can convert your readers into customers all day just like this site does.
3. The Personal Trainer Development Center
The Personal Trainer Development Center, or PTDC, is also a blog-focused website that focuses on personal trainer marketing ideas and strategies at its core. What the site does right, and what helps tremendously with exposure, is that it pulls a team of well-known personal trainers to write for it. These trainers, in turn, share the content they have written and drive more traffic as well as social shares.
This kind of attention does not go unnoticed by the search engines, and the site is rewarded with high rankings for many searches related to personal trainer marketing.
Monetizing from the SEO
With all these high quality personal trainer articles written by highly respected personal trainers the site gets a lot of traffic. This site does a good job of capitalizing on that traffic by providing its readers free value adds in exchange for their email (ex. 6 High-Impact Ebooks for Getting High-Paying Clients).
On the site, and through an extensive email marketing campaign (most people don’t buy from a site until they have been there around seven times), the site provides links to books they wrote on personal trainer marketing on Amazon. But here’s the kicker; in addition to selling the books on Amazon and monetizing those, the site is on an affiliate program with Amazon so that any book or product that sells as a referral from the PTDC website also generates revenues as well.
SEO Takeaway
If you have relationships with industry leaders who are well respected and have large online followings, have them contribute to your website and push their audience to it as well. From there you can sell your products or services through the site or by an ongoing email campaign.
SEO for Personal Trainers Overview
The recurring theme here with these three sites – and most profitable sites on the web – is that you have to provide something of value to get the attention of the search engines that in turn gets the attention of visitors. Content is the focus of all of these sites and can be your main asset too. After you create something great, don’t forgot to spend an equal amount of time doing outreach and letting others know about the great resources you’ve created.
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