As martial arts business owners, you know that every time a person lands on your website they could turn into a potential student/paying customer. Now more than ever, it’s important to make sure your martial arts website has these crucial items added to see improved success, business growth, and to beat your competitors, like Conor McGregor!
- Basic Search Engine Optimization
- Responsive Design
- SSL Certificate
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- Lead Forms
- Easily Navigable Sitemap
- Google My Business Listing
This list is important because it will help increase sessions to your martial arts or BJJ website, increase lead conversions, and make reporting on year-over-year growth much simpler. We’re going to break down each item more in-depth.
1. Basic Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization is a strategy to improve your martial arts website’s rankings in search engine results. When someone types in Google, “Martial Arts Near Me” or “Jiu-Jitsu Gym,” it’s crucial that your business shows up near the top of the search results. Just having a website isn’t enough. You need to optimize it to make sure search engines know and understand what your website is about.
Here are some basic ways to make your martial arts website SEO friendly:
- Add unique Titles/Meta Descriptions to every page. A title and meta description are what show up in the search results when someone sees your website. The title and meta descriptions are a great opportunity to include keywords you want to rank for and compelling enough to make searchers click and visit your martial arts website.
- At least 250 words on each page. For search engine crawlers to understand what your website is about, you need to have enough written copy that includes keywords throughout your text. Make sure to add a clear description of who you are, what you do, and where you are located.
- Alt text on images. Because search engines can’t read images, it’s important to write a description on each image to increase rankings.
- Put the featured call to action or form at the top of the fold. This isn’t necessarily to improve search engine optimization, but rather improve the user experience. Putting your lead contact form above the fold can significantly increase lead conversions.
- Add an SEO Plugin to your website. If your website is built on WordPress or built by our partner martial arts website company, then we recommend using the Yoast SEO plugin. It’s free and great for someone who needs simple assistance with on-page SEO for their martial arts website.
- Create a sitemap and a robots.txt file. A sitemap is a file that allows search engines to find all the pages on your website. The robots.txt file gives instructions to tell crawlers which specific parts of the website to index. For example, you would not want crawlers to index any user login pages or admin login pages to your website.
2. Responsive Design
We live in a world where people are coming to our website from different devices and screen sizes. Someone might first come to your website from their mobile phone, then decide to check out the website again on their desktop. It’s important that your website layout changes depending on the screen size, and that it is also consistent. Google also rewards sites that are mobile-friendly with increased search engine rankings.
3. SSL Certificate
An SSL Certificate offers protection and security to visitors on your website. It is essentially just switching your site from HTTP to HTTPS. HTTPS correlates with higher rankings, and Google can label websites without an SSL certificate as “Not Secure” to a user. Getting an SSL certificate is simple and affordable, so we highly suggest it.
These are just a few of the most important things your website needs to drive leads to your gym and grow your business. Download our full guide below to get the rest of our tips and recommendations!
