All businesses are committed to ensuring the stability and growth of their business. Reaching your target audience is of the utmost importance, and search engine optimisation or SEO can position your product in front of new consumers. SEO is an essential part of living in a digital world and the activities sector if you are to become a trusted school, training, and educational partner.
SEO is the process by which you make your website more visible to your ideal client. The higher your website ranks, the more likely consumers will click on your site and buy your services. Nearly 70% of online traffic runs through Google, so it has never been more important to perform the checks that allow you to stand out from the crowd.
So how can you use SEO to generate traffic or more clicks and drive more sales for your activities business?
1. Perform keyword research to use in your copy
Optimising your copy is essential to your web page ranking for associated queries around the coaching, activities, and fitness sector. Copy produced for your website, including descriptions of your services and industry news, should be optimised with keywords and phrases specific to the sector.
Start your keyword research with tools such Ahrefs and SEMrush to begin identifying queries that are most common. You can use sites such as Answer the Public to give you a firm understanding of how consumers pose questions, so you can match your users search intent. If consumers are searching for all-inclusive childcare, you can position your content as one that offers a cost-effective option.
Begin your keyword search by making a list of relevant topics such as coaching, childcare, sports, and parents. You can brainstorm for other words that take into consideration services you would like to or currently offer. Once you have your seed keywords, then you can move on to identifying long-tail keywords or phrases to include as well.
2. Publish content that your peers want to read
Especially in the activities sector, there’s a lot of content produced that’s individual to the company or has broader relevance to the fitness sector, but it isn’t necessarily sector-specific. Your content or content strategy is what attracts visitors to your website and solidifies your brand as credible.
Content marketing is the practice of creating and sharing online content that can make you credible and raise your status as a thought leader, building interest in your services. In the activities sector, adding keywords to proposed content such as coaching skills, active care, or holiday camps will show search engines you’re a trustworthy source of information.
Use the relationships over social media or your current cohort of partners to find out what topics would be most helpful. Any feedback or frequent questions you hear from customers and educational institutions can provide you with a platform of content to choose from. Consider using formats that are commonly used, such as how-to guides, industry news, and top tips.
It’s often tempting to fill your content with those keywords, especially if you’re using tools such as SEMrush, where the more keywords you use, the higher the ranking you’ll have. It’s far more appealing to an actual audience that your content has a natural and engaging conversational tone.
Packing in keywords unnaturally can penalise you in search engines and lead to short click-through rates. You want people to stay, read, and take notice of your service, not bounce around an unintelligible array of keywords, or get the benefits of your knowledge without seeing your services.
3. Factor in link building to raise your credibility
This practice works similarly to citations on an academic article. When writing academically, you want to link your research to credible sources that show that you’ve understood and researched the topic well.
Using high-quality links that point back to your site works in a similar way. When done well, link building can improve your ranking on search engine results pages, adding an additional layer to your SEO strategy.
There are a few options to choose from, such as:
- Publishing guest posts on relevant websites or partners such as ukactive, Medium, and AfPE
- Creating content that you link back to high-quality sites
- Capitalise on newsworthy activities, so people can write about you and link back to your site
This practice can be a long and difficult process, but then so is building yourself as a credible resource in any industry. As with anything, there are areas that will come easily, and some that will be more difficult.
Start by building relationships with editors or stakeholders on the sites you’re interested in. Make sure you perform more than a cursory look at the big players to see what kind of content they’re interested in and tailor your content to them.
SEO is a vital part of your digital marketing plan. While you’re growing your activities business, it can be easy to allow areas like this to suffer. This is, however, one of the most useful ways to provide your business with the ideal customers to sell your activities services to.
