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How to Build a Personal Trainer Website - The Easy Way
A personal trainer website can be one of your best marketing assets or one of your worst investments, depending on how well it’s been designed and put together.
For this article, we asked Dan Salcumbe from My Personal Trainer Website what the essential steps are for creating a fitness website that actually gets you more clients.
Here’s what he had to say:
If you’re just starting out and don’t have a niche or a solid company name just yet, using your name as a domain name is ideal.
You’ll always have the same name so even if you switch to a more specific company name later, you still own your own name.
If you have an established business and you’re buying a domain name for the first time, there are a couple of roads you can take.
The first is your actual business name. A brand specific business name makes it easy for people to find you and of course, looks professional.
The other option is a keyword specific domain. Google still uses the words in a domain to understand what a website is about so if you train clients in London and your domain is www.personaltrainerlondon.com, this will give you a slight edge in terms of ranking on Google.
The route you go ultimately depends on the marketing strategies you want to focus on.
The theme is a huge branding decision and the best choice will very much depend on the type of client you’re trying to attract.
For example, if you serve clients that are over 50 years old, a theme with all the bells and whistles, parallax scrolling, and hamburger menus won’t be ideal. Over 50’s want clean, simple, and easy to navigate.
However, the younger generations might find these “wow” factors more appealing. Just make sure not to go overboard with the jazz hands because these types of effects reduce your site speed.
If you’re designing your website yourself, be sure to stick to the theme layouts. They were created by professionals and, unless you’re a design wizz, will most likely be better than trying to adjust and resize everything yourself.
Every website will have a similar set of main pages. That’s because over time, we’ve used the internet in a certain way and created things that become standard practice.
Your main pages should adhere to these standard practices so as not to confuse people. That means Home, About, Service, Contact, and Blog pages should be easily visible in the navigation.
If you have lots of services, they’d go in the sub navigation under the Services header. Make it easy for website visitors to find what they need.
Each individual page should then be divided up into sections that highlight a main point. Adding relevant images or icons to each section also makes it easy for those who prefer to scan pages than read.
While it’s common knowledge that the content of your website should speak to your ideal clients, what a lot of people don’t know is that most of it won’t get read.
Seriously. Studies by the Nielsen Norman Group showed that 78% of people generally only read the headers.
With that in mind, make sure your headers highlight the information in the subsequent paragraph below for those that do want to dig deeper and read more thoroughly.
For SEO, be sure to add your main service and location in the main header, a sub header, the first paragraph and the last paragraph of the page.
Photos help website visitors quickly identify what your site is about without having to do any “brain work”.
To reduce the amount of cognitive load a website visitor uses to understand what you do and who you do it for, present images of what you do and who you do it for. This is particularly important in the main header of your home page.
Be sure to reduce the size of your image files for optimal loading speed.
Have Fun.
Building a website should not be stressful. If it is, then you might be better off using other marketing strategies to make your money and then hire a professional to take care of it for you.
If you do enjoy designing, writing and learning a little about user experience, designing your own fitness website will be a blast.
We’ve only touched on the surface here so if you want any more tips and insights, you can dig into the Institute of Personal Trainer Website Design course by My PT Website. It’s completely free!
Are you new to personal training? Read these articles to get started on growing your business:
About the Author:
Dan Salcumbe
As well as owning his own successful personal training company and founding the Institute of Personal Trainers, Dan also owns and operates My Personal Trainer Website, one of the worlds most successful personal trainer website design and fitness marketing companies.
