Super Librarians and Choosing the Right Keywords!

This last weekend I was presenting at CanFitPro Calgary conference on the topic of an effective personal training website and how it fits into your personal trainer marketing plan.

One of the things we talked about in detail was about keywords and optimized content. Now if you don’t currently have a website there is likely plenty you need to understand in addition to keywords but this will still be a very relevant place for you to start. In fact relevancy really is our topic.

First let me give you a warning. If you’re working with a website designer make sure you ask them about keywords, make sure you know exactly what they are providing and feel comfortable with the answers they’re giving you. You should understand a little better by the end of this post but in my experience most local website designers have great photoshop and programming skills but no real comprehension of how to build a website that will quickly be noticed by the search engines and ensure your potential customers find you.

Ok relevancy. Remember the old dewy decimal system at the library? The index cards that had all the books organized by title and subject that gave you a number to which shelf you would find them on, well this is essentially exactly how the internet works. Now the search engines are like super librarians, when you type in a word they go hunting for all kinds of options related to that word or series of words. Let’s take (Your Town) Personal Trainer for example. Search engines will find domain names with that series of words, then it will look to see if the pages assigned to that domain have programming tags that correspond to those keywords then it will look further and skim through the content to see if those words are listed in sentences. It doesn’t end there, file names, video titles, image titles and descriptions and so on. The more times that same keyword string is mentioned the more relevant search engines feel that is to your query, this is one of the ways they will “rank” you and decide who gets listed first.

It’s far from being the only way, after all it’s a big world and there is now a lot of information competing for the top spot. A few of the other things that contribute to rank are:

• Age of your site
• Number of pages on your site, and the natural growth of the site.
• Back links, or people linking to your site.
• Reviews, and more.

So anyways, how to pick keywords. Start by asking yourself the following, what would my potential customers likely be typing into a search engine to find more information?

Here’s a few ideas:

(Your Town) Personal Trainer, (Your Town) weight loss, (Your Town) boot camp, (Your Town) personal training, etc.

From there it may stem into people looking for more information on subjects that ultimately pertain to or make them good candidates for your services. Some examples might be:

Low fat recipes, how to lose the last 10 lbs, best way to lose weight, best exercises for weight loss, etc.

These secondary keywords are really good indicators of the type of content it might be good to have on your website, but here’s a way you can get a little more clarification. Visit www.google.com and type in “external keyword tool.”

It should be one of the first link that comes up. This tool for PPC users can be very useful in deciding how to position your website. Follow the steps to set the search parameters for local and your country, then enter a few of the keyword ideas above.

You’ll find that some may have more search volume than others, now here’s where you have to be crafty. Realize that bigger is not always better, for instance in a major centre like Toronto, the key word stream “Toronto Personal Trainer” is likely very competitive, let’s say on the keyword tool it comes up as 8900 or something. Even though there is a lot of people searching for this you are going to find there are also a lot of websites listed for this, making it harder for you to reach the first page quickly.

What you may want to look for in this case is variations that have 300-1000 monthly searches, these key word streams will be much easier to rank for. In fact try searching a few, you will begin to notice that completely different listings show up on the first page, this is a good indication there isn’t as much competition, thus a few carefully crafted pages using that keyword stream in the title, description, file name, etc will ensure you quickly reach the first page. Do this for 5-6 less competitive variants and you can give your website an immediate boost in its ability to generate visitors and potential leads.