When you start looking into the world of search engine optimisation (SEO), it can seem baffling. There are rules around on-site, and off-site SEO, coupled with technical SEO which has to be built into the very foundations of the fitness website itself. Confused much?

It seems like it’s set up so that only SEO specialists can even understand it, let alone use it to their advantage! Let’s keep things extremely simple with starting and finishing strong. Meaning; how the starting and concluding paragraphs of what you write play a role in mastering SEO.

SEO stands for search engine optimisation and it’s a way to make your website and the content you publish on your blog get returned by search engines like Google when a user searches for something you provide or write about.

For example, if a potential client searched for a personal trainer in your location. They’d find your website and hopefully get in touch with you.

When the content you write performs well on Google, your personal trainer website is what gets comes up when people are searching for information on how to accomplish their health goals.

Being on page one of Google positions you as a go-to expert, an authority in your field. Most importantly, it creates a source of revenue through personal training leads coming into your business. 

One of the ways SEO works is to write your content around specific keywords and to weave a relationship around these keywords within your website, and between your website and other respected websites in your niche.

Since keywords are so vital to SEO, can we not just aim to write the keyword more times than anyone else that’s published content around that topic? Well, no.

It’s not acceptable to just write the keyword over and over again because the artificial intelligence that Google uses to scan through your site is too clever to get tricked by “keyword stuffing” and that can actually damage your ranking on a site. It’s a little like Goldilocks – not too much, and not too little.

Here’s how to do it, step by step.

Using headings and subheadings is a must when you type. Google, like a human reader, will scan through what you’ve written looking for the keywords so it knows how best to categorise your post.

You don’t need to use your keyword in every heading, but it’s best to use them in at least the heading and one of the subheadings. Here’s an example of how we did that with an SEO post for one of our clients.

Set your subheadings to H2 level. This might seem minor, but it’s how Google knows you’ve put together a well-structured article. This makes it easier for Google to understand and rank your content and that’s the entire point of SEO.

SEO is a complex topic. One that people make entire careers out of. So finding a way to keep things really simple is going to be key to doing it at all. One of the most straightforward ways you can do this is through “top and tailing” your article.

First, decide a keyword for that piece of writing based on your niche, and what problems you’re solving for them with what you’re writing. You can do enough of your keyword research on Ubersuggest for free. Give your title a H1 formating. That means in Google docs, highlighting the title and clicking: format, paragraph styles, heading 1. Or in Microsoft word, highlighting the chosen text and clicking heading 1.

Next, pay particular attention to your “firsts”. That includes first 100 words of your opening paragraph. You should aim to include your keyword in the first 100 words. If you turn on your word count to display as you type, you’ll know when you’ve hit it. 

In Google docs, you can find this in tools, word count, display word count while typing. In Microsoft Word, you can find it in tools, word count. If you highlight the first paragraph, it will tell you how long your word count is for the highlighted text.

Alt text is a setting that most website design platforms offer to help you tell Google what an image is about. Google can’t understand images so it relies on the alt text to help identify what the images are. For example, if you were to add an image of an orange, you’d use the word “orange” in the alt text to tell Google that the image is an orange.

Adding your keyword to an image alt text is a great way to tell Google that not only is the article about those keywords but so are some of the images. Like this:

The last paragraph of your article is likely to be a conclusion or something similar to draw together your thoughts and ideas. In the last 100 words, it’s important to try to include your keyword again. This is not only important from the perspective of structure and flow but also to have the greatest impact on SEO.

Most blogging platforms enable you to add meta data to your fitness article. Meta data is simply a title and description of your blog. Meta data is used specifically by search engines to quickly understand what you fitness article is about.

Naturally, it makes sense to include your main keywords in the meta data to help your article rank higher in Google search when someone uses those keywords.

If it still seems complicated to use SEO and you’re not sure if you’re doing everything you should, here’s a short checklist you can use each time you publish.

• I have a well-researched keyword picked out for this article.
• I have included the keyword in the first 100 words.
• I have included the keyword in one of the main heading.
• I have included the keyword in the final paragraph or conclusion.
• Onsite SEO: I have included an internal link to something else on my own website.
• Offsite SEO: I have included an external link to a trusted website in my niche.

The most important factor for SEO is to write great quality content which is useful for your target audience. While it’s useful to talk about keyword research, and top and tail paragraphs, Google’s AI is now intelligent enough to recognise when you’re regularly publishing content (around once a week is perfect) that your audience is interested in and regularly engages with.

Having a small number of broad topics, called pillar content, that you talk around and publish related and niche posts about, called satellite content is a certain way to be recognised as an expert in your field.

Linking to these related documents inside your personal trainer website is a way to create internal links to help your readers find your related topics easily and keep them on your website for longer.

Having outbound links to other trusted websites that also publish content around those same areas helps to establish you as a respected authority in your niche, that publishes well-researched ideas.