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March 2008 Health club and fitness center websites that never change are like neglected
houses...dimly lit, with cobwebs in the corners. Is your
website collecting dust?
These five spring-cleaning tips will get your website ready
for visitors.
1) Review and update your wellness center website's content.
First,
check your existing content and delete or correct anything
that's no longer accurate. Those five-year old pictures of
your grand opening? Retire them. Pictures of
long-gone personal trainers and dietitians? You know what to do. Then, add something new each month. Ideas to get you started: Q&As written by your
staff, polls and surveys, member case studies, client photo
galleries, and recipes and fitness tips contributed by
customers. For more ideas about keeping your website fresh:
Keepin' It Fresh: 18 Customer Communication Strategies For Wellness Businesses
2) Look for incomplete or outdated meta tags and broken
links.
We review hundreds of health club, fitness center and
wellness center websites every year. Almost all have two
or more of these problems:
Missing or duplicate page titles: the title that your site visitors see in the
browser. Search engines like Google and Yahoo look at page
titles when determining search results. Give each page on your
site a unique title. Don't just use "TooFit2Quit Health &
Fitness Center" on every page.
Click image to see full-size Missing or
duplicate page keywords: the words and phrases that people are
likely to use when searching for the kinds of services you
provide. Choosing the best keywords helps people find your site
when they use search engines. Again, tailor the keywords for
each page to what's actually on that page. Don't use
identical keywords for every page on your site. Alt-text
information on
all images: a short text description that appears if a visitor's
browser doesn't properly display images on your website. Search
engines also consider this data in reporting search results.
Your web developer should add alt-text information to every
image on your site. If you maintain your own site,
add it to
the <img> tag as shown here.
Broken links to material on your site or to other
sites. Use
LinkTiger's free
site to spot link problems, or ask your web developer to do it.
Or use LinkTiger to check up on your developer's accuracy and
attention to quality control.
3) Streamline a process or
two.
First, identify the information your customers most frequently
request or the forms they typically use.
Examples include
cardio cinema schedules, yoga and group fitness schedules,
PAR-Qs and other health risk assessments, food and exercise
logs, and "cheat sheets" (healthy grocery lists, top-ten lists
of superfoods, exercises you can do at your desk or in your
car). Then, convert paper schedules and reference information to web pages
so that customers don't have to call your front desk. Convert
forms to PDF-formatted files and post them on your website using
a
free tool like CutePDF Writer or
Nuance's
PDF Converter (about $50).
For larger health and wellness businesses,
consider converting PDF forms to online forms that feed data
directly to your customer database.
4) Take your website's vital statistics.
If you don't have easy-to-understand data about what people do when they visit your site,
follow our instructions on how to install Google Analytics
so that you can tell how long they stay on your site, which
pages they find most interesting, and other key information.
If you already have easy-to-use site statistics, schedule time
on your calendar each month to actually review this data.
Look for trends and
analyze the response to new content.
5) Make it easier to
find your site.
Unless your wellness business operates
exclusively online, you need to attract local customers, right?
Compare your website to this
checklist of local search tips for your health and wellness
website. Implement just one tip each month and quickly reap
the benefits of greater Internet visibility.
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