Services Ordered:

After assessing the client’s current website and needs specific to their gym, we recommended several services that would help us drive more new leads for the business including:

• SEO
• Local SEO
• PPC Management
• WordPress SEO
• Technical SEO
• Link Building
• Blog Management
• Lead Generation
• Social Media Consulting
• Facebook Marketing
• Onpage Optimization
• Dallas SEO

The Solution:

Our new client faced three major obstacles.

1. The business is highly competitive in their area and getting more competitive each year.
2. Gyms get most new clients between January and February.
3. Their website did not allow us to track conversion data and the client did not want to change to allow for this.

This presented enormous challenges to reach success before the next busy season, but has also provided ongoing complications over the ensuing years since then (see “OnGoing” below).

To achieve success we would lean on two of our marketing strategies:

• Go Where They Are Not
• Hello Alesia, It’s me Julius

And a multitude of marketing tools including:

• Google Analytics (UA and GA4)
• SpyFu
• Local Falcon
• Whitespark
• Website Announcement Bar
• Local SEO Dashboard – provided by us
• Rocketship Indexing system – provided by us
• Asset Cleanup Pro – provided under our WordPress Plugin Library
• WP Rocket – provided under our WordPress Plugin Library
• Imagify – provided under our WordPress Plugin Library
• Gravity Forms – provided under our WordPress Plugin Library
• Advanced Spam Filter for Lead Generation – provided under our WordPress Plugin Library

We started our approach by examining where our competitors were not and finding ways to use that to our advantage. Then we plunged the client into a lot of SEO work during the off-season in preparation for the coming year. We repeat this pattern yearly to keep driving gains and keep competitors at bay.

Most competitors did not built specific pages for each amenity targeted to the desires of gym goers in the local area nor were they running advertisements about these amenities. This allowed us an opening to gain new clients at a lower cost with higher intent than the NFL team and major gym brands were probably able to do. We avoided fat head keywords like “gym” in our approach as well.

1. Fix Poor Performing Google Ads

Our team quickly identified a few key problems and set out to correct them across SEO and PPC. For starters the gym’s ads were appearing for keywords in Google that did not match what they offer due to the “keyword themes” Performance Max uses and how it worked at the time. An example was “woman only gym near me”, a keyword where the intent appears to be to find a gym without men. We also identified core problems with their location data, specifically that since they took over a failed gym and rebranded it – aggregator systems were constantly reviving that old brand’s location data and claiming it was still located there. Finally, unlike all of their localized competition the website had little to no content on it and had essentially 0 inbound linking domains pointing to them.

We quickly went to work and built the client brand new ad search campaigns in Google Ads that reflected their offerings better and were more targeted at keywords their real potential customers might use instead, shut down the Performance Max campaign, and reported the major issue to the Google Ads team which they ultimately used to help improve the system. The search ads showed an immediate boost in qualified traffic to the website.

2. Initial SEO Work

Our SEO team built out new pages of content focused on specific services the locals were looking for and compared them to the surrounding offerings from other gyms showing how our gym was better in multiple ways for someone seeking this amenity. This helped lead to several #1 rankings in standard Google SERPs and brought in a flood of new customers looking for a gym with a specific amenity they desired. For example a page highlighting their pool, sauna, child card, etc…

3. Digital PR and Link Building

We immediately started working with reporters and journalists to get the client’s brand covered, ultimately landing several incredible local media backlinks and getting a few national mentions each year from bigger media brands, most of which linked back to the gym’s website. These Digital PR and link building efforts were a major key to victory for the client landing links from DA/DR 70 to 95 with relative frequency allowing them to get closer in topical authority to the larger brands they compete with.

4. Local SEO Cleanup and Optimization

For Local SEO we focused hard on cleaning up the citations for the old gym and replacing as many as we could with the new gym. This work was more difficult than most other similar projects given the old gym’s long history in the exact same location, however, ultimately this quirk worked in our favor since we were able to get many of the old listings updated which were no doubt already indexed in Google and being used to improve Maps rankings.

5. Technical SEO Awareness

During the start of our campaign our SEO team noticed Google began deindexing content on the web or making it harder for new content to get indexed. We built a proprietary internal system to notify us when a page was removed from the index and to work to reindex it quickly. This work bore fruit as well for the client since we could assure most of the informational content on their site would stay indexed. Our team’s proactive approach to monitoring technical SEO situations, and building custom tools when needed to resolve problems allow this small independent gym to compete against the biggest brands in the world many of which were within a 2-block radius of their location.

5. The Lead Generation Fix

The client was using the free Hubspot form to collect leads and did not want to pay the costly fee to upgrade but also had this deeply ingrained in their internal processes and did not want to pull it out. As a way to compromise we built a copy of their site in WordPress and noindexed the pages for PPC (Google Ads) only. Then we installed our Gravity Forms license as part of our WordPress Plugin Library and tracked their inbound PPC leads this way. Doing this also allowed us to optimize their Google Ads campaigns to improve the quality of leads and reduce the cost of gaining new higher quality leads over time.

To help fight automated contact form spam we used Google’s reCAPTCHA and to fight manual contact form spam we used our Advanced Spam Filter for Lead Generation, a client-exclusive solution that helps us block manual spammers to reduce junk in contact forms and keep email systems from labeling you website domain as a spammer.

6. The SEO & Marketing Plan

This gym exists in one of the hottest gym markets in the world and competes against all of the major gym brands including LA Fitness, Life Time Fitness, 24 Hour Fitness, Anytime Fitness, Crunch Fitness, Gold’s Gym, Cowboys Fit (the Dallas Cowboys), F45 Training, Orange Theory Fitness, Planet Fitness, Metroflex, Monster Gym, EōS Fitness, Club Studio, and Retro Fitness all within an extremely short drive of the gyms location and most tightly clustered in the same neighborhood of the suburb.

We believed to win the client had to focus on being locally owned and independent, while building links for topical authority, creating content to convey knowledge, and gaining great reviews from happy customers to build trustworthiness and credibility.

To gain links to the site to power SEO we used a variety of tactics. Those include:

• Having the Client be a Resource for Journalists
• Having the Client be a contributor to a relevant publication
• Cold outreach to gain links to Content from related sources

The website had to:

• Include great photos of the gym
• Have service pages for each amenity
• Include testimonials / reviews
• Make it easy to become a lead for the sale team
• Call out failings of other offerings nearby or one up them (i.e. cleaner sauna, more squat racks, no advertisements inside, etc…)

The Advertisements had to:

• Focus on specific amenities
• Show how happy other members were
• Highlight benefits instead of membership costs

7. Ongoing Work

SEO and Digital Marketing never end. As mentioned earlier the client is under constant pressure from fierce competition that is only getting hotter as more and more newly built or high-end gyms move into the area. Gyms also deal with a lot of issues during our modern times; like social media content creators, or members who are upset that the gym is too busy, fake negative reviews pushed by local competitors, etc…

Here are many of the things we have done to help aid the ongoing success and growth of this independent gym.

• Had dozens of negative reviews removed from Google and Yelp that were likely fake.
• Obtained high-value links from prestigious websites.
• Gained value from social media conversations.
• Helped client discover new amenities members were seeking and found ways to incorporate those.
• Found a new way to make the website load even faster, implemented it.
• Monitored, fixed, and improved Technical SEO to win through various Google updates.
• Helped client gain value from a web app solution they procured.