The Ultimate Guide to Running a Corporate/Fitness Blog for a Gym, Studio, or Health Club

As the use of the internet has mitigated the traditional practices of PR, blogs, like fitness blogs for gyms, have become the popular medium for press releases and customer communication. Not to mention the importance of SEO in driving traffic to your site, leading to more member sign-ups. In this article, we discuss the benefits of running a blog, what content to share on a corporate and fitness blog for a gym, studio, or health club, and some tips for making your blog the best it can be.

Specific Benefits of Running a Corporate and Fitness Blog

People are highly accustomed to being marketed to. Marketing infiltrates the majority of our lives. We consume marketing tactics from social media to music streaming services to the signs and the billboards we pass by every day on our way to work. Marketing is everywhere we look.

As consumers become more desensitized to and unexcited about the traditional forms of marketing, it’s important to spark conversation and communication with the consumer. Blogs are the perfect form of communicating with the customer. It also opens the opportunity to build a whole content marketing strategy around that form of communication.

When other articles refer to your content and provide a backlink to your site, Google notices and recognizes you as more of a credible source on the topic. Thus, your ranking and domain authority increase! You can even outsource the writing.

You can measure how well your site ranks by monitoring its domain authority. Domain authority is a score given to your site between 0 and 100. This score increases as your site become more referenced. When other sites link to your content, then your authority on those topics to Google increases.

Blogging is marketing packaged in a much more valuable manner as opposed to just pitching the product or service directly to the consumer. Information and discourse about membership at your gym build more value than a simple pitch through an ad. It raises more awareness for your business’s brand and gives the reader more information about how a membership there could be beneficial for them.

SEO

What is SEO? SEO stands for search engine optimization. This is how your website and internet presence appears when people search for certain keywords that revolve around your service, business, or industry. To optimize for search engines is to strategically publish content and build your site around the keywords and information that people search to find information relevant to your business.

When creating content built around the keywords that people use to find information, Google crawls and indexes those pages. Blogs help index your gym’s pages around 434% more.

But wait what does it mean when your pages are indexed?

When pages are indexed, it means that the “Googlebot” has crawled your page and made note of it in its vast database of web pages. Once a page is indexed, it can then be shown to people upon their search. The goal is to create more indexable content pages for more opportunities for your website to be put in front of potential members’ eyes. In other words, write articles for people to see and let Google do its creepy crawling all over your work.

Google establishes your website as an authority on a topic and ranks your site and content based on how relevant they are to keyword searches.

Establishes Credibility

Your brand is something that will stick in the minds of the members your gym or studio attracts. Therefore, if being a source of valuable information is associated with your brand, then you will be better remembered in the minds of the members and potential members who read your blog.

Credibility for any business is established in many ways. In terms of web presence for gyms, it’s important to have a well-designed website, as this is often the first point of reference for people looking for a gym to purchase a membership.

Drives Traffic to Your Site from your Corporate and Fitness Blog

Site traffic is one of the most important key performance indicators for marketers. The more site traffic you get, the more opportunities you have for converting potential members into paying gym members. According to HubSpot, a blog attracts 55% more visitors to your site.

Basis for Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing as a whole requires strategic campaigning through multiple different mediums with connected messages, content, and themes. Blogging provides a steady stream of content that can be oriented to guide the customer through the stages of the marketing funnel.

Educate your Members and Employees

Not only is a blog good for communicating with members and potential members, but it is also good for keeping your employees in the loop. Keep them updated on fitness industry trends and information that they should know to make them more valuable employees. Keeping your employees educated on everything from fitness to nutrition to business insights helps them to serve your gym or studio better and also communicate with members more insightfully.

Types of Content to Share on a Corporate or Fitness Blog

The content you develop for your gym or studio’s blog must be quality, planned, and SEO optimized. More importantly, you must write content with the searcher’s intent in mind. What is your target market searching for? How can you answer their queries? Can you direct them to your fitness business from that answer? How can your fitness business BE the answer?

Corporate Blog for Announcements (PR)

Blogs are great for making announcements about your business. As mentioned before, most companies have corporate blogs for press releases and outreach about the news and inner workings of your business. This helps media outlets discover you to share your updates with your community.

Positive press is massively important to any business. More eyes are on your gym or health club when you have reported on your opening, updating, or renovating on any local media outlet.

Additionally, corporate blogging assists in communicating with your employees, board members, and just about anyone else who has an investment in your gym.

Fitness Blog

Workout/Exercise information

Keeping your members and employees informed on different topics within exercise and fitness is imperative. Writing on this topic and focusing on keywords will help you rank better when people search for gyms in their area.

Nutrition Information

It’s possible that your place of business sells supplements as well as gym memberships. For anything that is available for sale in your gym or studio, you should write content on it. This will help buyers to know what you have available and how knowledgeable you and your staff are on the products.

Nutrition is half the battle in health. Therefore, writing content on supplementing nutrition with a fitness routine will help you rank better. It draws in more traffic and keeps your content well-rounded.

Apparel and Fitness Equipment

This category of topics to cover will keep your blog on top of popular trends that potential members would search for. Perhaps they need to buy a better-looking outfit before hitting the gym for the first time. Maybe they want to do a little bit of research on how to use gym equipment before hitting the machines.

Whatever the case, this category attracts readers who would potentially convert to paying members if given the right information.

Structure of Blog

The structure of a blog is very important to how Google crawls your articles and places value on them. It’s also important to make user navigation easy so that they can find the information they need/want with ease.

Create categories for content and only assign one category per article. Use tags to further narrow down the topic of the article so that users can see it when they search on your blog.

Many entities use WordPress for hosting their blog. In fact, we use WordPress for this FitSW blog.

(Hint: always link back to your own site, other articles on your site, or the member signup page in some way. It helps with SEO and getting more conversions!)

However, you can also have it embedded within your site. For best results from the effort of creating and managing a blog, make sure that it originates from your domain. For example, find our blog at www.fitsw.com/blog. With the domain of your website as the main URL, Google will recognize the content as your company’s. When your content is referenced, this increases the domain authority for your website. This boosts the overall traffic to your site.

Structure of Corporate and Fitness Blog Articles

Having a consistent structure for blog articles is massively important to how Google will crawl the page. Using headers with the keywords that you have chosen for the article will help Google understand the content by section.

Understanding and digesting the content by section is important for Google to do:

1) Because it can then deliver specific answers to users

2) Because Google gets a much better idea of how relevant the content is to the gym, studio, and health club industry and index it accordingly.

Think about the questions that appear in the “People also ask” section when you make a search. Google’s crawl through your

Answer questions people might ask on the topic of the article to help Google pick out key phrases and answers. Therefore, your content displays in not only one search rank, but in multiple, if it answers common questions around the topic. To find out what questions people are searching for or other relevant keywords on a topic, use software like SpyFu. Keyword research tools help you develop your content around what people commonly search for. The more common the searches and the less content available on those searches mean more room for your fitness blog to place its input.

Consistency

Consistent, fresh content is what will make your website continuously rank higher. Google particularly appreciates consistently new pages to crawl and index. More pages indexed, once again, means more opportunities to get your business and brand in front of potential customers leading to more traffic and more conversions.

The more I use ‘crawl’ in reference to Google the creepier it sounds. But it’s true! Google is constantly crawling around your website filing it away in its oh-so mysterious script to reference and rank and show to people when it sees fit. Your job with a blog is to make sure that it consistently sees your content as fit for showing to the people who take interest in topics revolving around gyms, health clubs, and studios.

Content Marketing Strategy for a Fitness Blog

Approaching running a corporate and fitness blog with strategy is key to generating success for your efforts.

70% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing. (HubSpot, 2020) The best thing about it is that it costs significantly less to market your content from a blog than any other form of marketing.

Use tools like SpyFu to find keywords that people are searching for within a topic to build out valuable and highly SEO optimized. From there link internally to other content on your blog to boost SEO and to your website to boost conversions.

Use the content you create and embedded downloadable content within THAT content to then share and build campaigns through social media and email marketing. Essentially narrowing down the customer journey funnel from awareness to conversion.

Awareness begins with the content in front of them and leads to them making the decision to purchase a membership at your gym.

We’ll reference HubSpot here in this section one more time for content marketing strategy because this information is just too helpful!

Overall

Blogging is imperative these days for the success of any business’s web presence. Not only that, but your competition will be generating around 50% more leads than your business if you are not utilizing blogging and they are.

The world of SEO and content strategy is continuously evolving, but it’s important to hop on the wagon as soon as possible. There are people out there who are just waiting and dreaming of the day that YOU convince them to become a member of your awesome gym, studio, or health club by reading your fitness blog!