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January 2008
January's a great time to win new customers - if they know about your fitness business.
Ever searched for your city’s health clubs on the Internet?
You
probably found nothing but generic directory sites stuffed with junk
links and sleazy ads. If you were lucky, you spotted an actual health
club website….only to find out that the Miami club you discovered is
really in Florida – nowhere near your Miami, Ohio home.
That’s because
less than 30% of small businesses have incorporated local search into
their marketing plans. “Local search” describes Internet searches by
prospective customers who want to find a given type of business in a
given city.
You wouldn’t post a sign for your business in an
alley. Yet failing to optimize your website for local search means that
even people who search for a club or wellness center in your city probably won’t spot you.
Implement just one of these tips each month, and before long you'll reap the benefits of better Internet visibility:
1) Make
your website friendly to search engine “spiders”.
These spiders crawl websites gathering the information that search
engines like Google and Yahoo use to create their indexes and provide search results to users.
Confirm with your web developer that your site has unique meta tags and keywords on every
page. Use heading tags like <h1>
to format headlines and sub-headings on every page.
2)
Include key business location data on every page of your website.
Display your business name, street address with city, state and zip, and
your business telephone number with area code on every page.
Present this data as text, not embedded in images, because search engine
spiders can’t “read” images.
3) List your business with all
the major search engines and directories.
Look up your
business in Google/Google Maps, Yahoo, SuperPages, MSN, YellowPages,
Switchboard and Citysearch. If you’re not listed – or the information is
incomplete or incorrect – most of these sites allow you to submit or
correct your listing yourself at no charge.
4) Encourage
members to review your business online.
Google, Yahoo and
MSN allow users to submit ratings of local businesses they’ve
patronized. Businesses with more ratings tend to appear higher in
search results. Avoid the temptation to “stuff the ballot box”. It’s
easier to detect than you think and the search engines may demote your
business in search results.
5) List your business on the
websites of local organizations.
Examples include local
civic groups, the Chamber of Commerce, tourism and convention bureaus,
and more. Make sure they provide an actual link to your website.
More inbound links to your site increase the chance that your club or
fitness center will
show up higher in search results.
6) Verify your listing
information on local phone directory websites.
Simply confirm that it's up-to-date.
7) Buy a paid
online yellow pages listing for your health club or fitness center.
Most online yellow pages offer a free bare-bones listing.
Consider
upgrading to the one-page paid business profile that they also offer.
8) Confirm your whois address data for your website domain.
Your “whois” data (available at
www.whois.net) should reflect your business address. Google
and other search engines consider this data when deciding which results
to serve up in response to local searches.
9) Trade links
with other local businesses.
Increasing the number of
inbound links to your website improves the likelihood that you’ll show
up higher in search results.
10) List your business on
vendor websites.
Check with your vendors and suppliers to
see if they maintain a list of current customers on their websites. If
so, make sure they include your club. Just remember that they need to
provide an actual link to your website, or the listing won’t affect
local search results.
Implement just one of these tips each
month, and before long your club will reap the benefits of better
Internet visibility. |
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