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This article is for educational purposes and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice. For specific advice applicable to your business, please contact a professional.
You’ve gone through the initial stages of starting your personal training business, from writing a business plan to getting licenses and permits. Now you’re ready to get online with your own fitness website.
Digitally savvy clients expect that they can interact with your business on their own terms, any time, anywhere. One key channel that clients can use to contact you, to book appointments, and to learn about your business is your website. Clients often do research online before they select a new trainer, and your website is an opportunity to own your narrative.
Here are seven steps that can help you build out your personal training website:
1. Register your domain.
If you don’t have a website, you need to purchase your domain. Some website-building platforms allow you to claim a domain, or you can use a separate domain registrar. Your domain could be your business name if it’s available, your personal name, or something that fits your fitness brand and location.
A good domain name should be short and easy to share. Avoid using numbers, hyphens, underscores, and symbols that are difficult to remember. Connect the domain name to keywords tied to you and your business. If your business name isn’t available, consider an alternate domain extension, such as .fitness, .nyc, or .training.
You could also include the name of your town or neighborhood in your domain. Be sure to check search engines and consult with legal counsel to ensure that you don’t run into trouble by choosing a domain name that may be confusingly similar to another business’s brand.
2. Pick a website builder.
There is a wide range of approaches for business websites, from self-hosted services to booking platforms that make it easy to build a site with no coding required.
Square Online helps you grow your business with a professional, beautiful website. The easy-to-use site builder allows you to integrate your appointments so clients can book online 24/7 with friendly, automated reminders. You can also sync up your point-of-sale system if you sell fitness equipment as part of your business.
Here are some tips to help your personal training business website stand out:
- Put yourself and your offerings front and center.
- Show yourself in action.
- Make booking an appointment simple and easy to find.
- Tell your story.
- Think through the online client experience.
- Make effective use of white space.
- Establish a color palette to simplify design decisions.
- Let your design speak for your brand.
- Use images that showcase the lifestyle of your target consumer.
- Stick to a clear message.
- Highlight client testimonials and reviews.
3. Build out your website pages.
While you can customize your website to your specific offerings and needs, here is a list of essential pages or features for personal fitness businesses to get you started:
- Home page: Make it clear who you are, what types of services you offer, and what makes your offering unique.
- Appointments: Give clients a clear way to book a session with you. If that requires an intake form or an initial conversation, outline your process. This is also a good place to break down your pricing structure.
- About page: Use this page to tell the story and mission of your business. This is a great place to let your personality shine.
- Contact: Tell clients where you train, where you will travel, and when you’re typically available Share your email address, phone number, social media accounts, and any other relevant information to get in touch.
- Blog: Keep your website fresh and create content that is relevant to your business and areas of expertise to building authority on search engines. Consider a page for updates and posting content about your business, community, or industry.
- Testimonials and reviews: Highlight what clients have said about your business, including client-approved before-and-after photos, reviews of specific types of training sessions, and details on what makes your business appealing.
- Privacy policy and terms and conditions: Outline the rules of your website and how you use any client information you gather.
- FAQ: Give clients a simple way to learn key information about your business in one place.
- Buy buttons: This is a clickable button that enables your clients to pay for your services or products on any website page quickly and easily. You can use it for single sessions, subscriptions, or discounts.
4. Implement best practices for search engine optimization (SEO).
For personal trainers looking for new business, ranking in search results helps prospective clients find you and can increase your credibility with them. You can find a full SEO guide for small businesses here. Tips include:
- Pick a short and memorable domain name.
- Do some keyword research. Which search terms do you want your website to appear in from search results? How competitive will it be to rank for those searches? You can find a lot of useful information directly on search results pages, or you can explore free keyword tools.
- Create descriptive URL slugs related to your page content, which can help you with link-building and social sharing.
- Create a custom title tag for every single page and post, and include one keyword that is relevant to the content on the page in your title tag.
- Write meta descriptions — short pieces of text that summarize the content of your page — that are compelling and include relevant keywords and important terms such as brand names.
- Take advantage of an internal linking strategy to build authority and create easy site navigation.
- Set up and optimize your Google My Business listing. Square has partnered with Google to simplify linking your profile to your online store, which can help your business appear in local searches.
5. Create a content plan.
Having a content-rich site with a blog is one of the most effective techniques to attract an engaged audience online and rank well on search results. A strong content library with fitness tips can help entice new clients to check you out as you grow.
Here are some tips to get you started:
- Post fresh, engaging content regularly — 40- to 500-word blog posts three to five times a week.
- Figure out the most relevant topics for your present and prospective clients. Look at what’s trending and post your own spin on it.
- Think of the questions people are typing into search engines that are relevant to your business and create content to target the answers. For example, if you work in a cold-weather city, a series of posts during the winter about at-home workouts could resonate.
6. Promote your website.
Once your website is up and running, let people know about it. Post on your social media accounts, and consider running a promotion for the first wave of clients who book a training session. You can also use your customer directory to craft an email newsletter with your updates, latest offerings, and new blog content.
And don’t forget about word-of-mouth marketing. As you engage with clients in person, let them know about your website and what it has to offer.
7. Track your website metrics.
Just like you use your internal dashboard to track the success of your services, you’ll want to use an analytics tool to check in on the health of your website. How much traffic is your website driving? How much of it comes from search? What are your most popular and least popular pages?
Square Online has a reports page that can help you answer these questions as you look to grow your web presence.
