Web Design, Development & Marketing Strategies: August 2007

After doing some consulting work with a personal trainer I was recently contacted by a collegue of his, also a personal trainer, and also in need of some help with his online marketing endeavours. Jonathan Ross is in fact one the top personal trainers in the US. He currently has two main sites; Family Fit Plan and Aion Fitness. He also runs a couple of blogs and is considering various new projects.

Jonathan's situation would be similar to many local service providers who aren't getting the expected returns from their online marketing. This is basically a summary of my observations and recommendations for his sites:

Family Fit Plan

This site ranks well in Google for “family fit plan” and “family fitness plan” but these keywords don’t attract many searches, as checking them on Keywords Analyzer drew a blank. It doesn’t rank well for other keyword phrases mentioned in meta tags and at the same time there isn’t much demand for these keywords either. In other words, they are keyword phrases which aren't searched for very often. Being at the top of the rankings is nice, but it doesn't actually achieve anything if no one is searching those keywords.

So, a new keyword strategy is required. “Family fitness” has good volume, but KA shows there is even more demand for “lifestyle family fitness” and “California family fitness”. Plus there is less competition. So these would be good to target, unless they are connected with a trademarked product or service. “Kid fitness” was another possible contender, having a favourable supply/demand ratio. The idea is to target keywords which are being searched for in decent volumes but don’t have as much competition. Tools such as KA and Wordtracker are indespensible in this regard.

Visually, the overall design and layout looks fine. It's clean and easy to read. Jonathan built the site himself using XSitePro. I’d add some improvements to the navigation such as links to the home page from sub-pages and a footer with links to each page. I’d also add a sitemap and a contact page, which is easy to do in XSitePro.

The site's main objective is to sell Jon's book - Family Fit Plan, and has PayPal "buy now" links set up to do this. My advice to Jon here was to use Clickbank as a payment processor (which includes a PayPal option) and sell the book as a PDF with instant download. The advantage in using Clickbank is you have an instant commissioned sales force ready to drive your sales.

I’d consider replacing the audio on the home page with a video. Video is the thing these days. It’s been proven to increase conversion rates. I use a program called Easy Web Video to covert video files to a format suitable for the Web.

To do well in the search engines this site really needs more content. That’s where Jonathan and his collegue Doug have an advantage, they are able to write good content. Jon has submitted some articles to article directories, which is great, but at the same time he needs to add unique, original content to his own site on a regular basis. Running a blog is a great way to add content to your site, but it must be hosted on your own site and not Blogger.com, which is what Jon is doing at the moment. It’s pretty easy to switch to hosting on your own site. You just create a directory on your hosting account and change a few settings in Blogger.

Although I currently use Blogger on this site I believe WordPress is a much better platform and is more search engine friendly. I’ve started using WP on another site of mine and have been very impressed, so I may eventually migrate this blog to WP as well. If your hosting account has a program called Fantasico, WP is very easy to set up. My WP blog was set up in this manner. It's hosted on HostIcan.

Aionfitness.com

This is a template-based site which Jonathan manages himself using a Content Management System (CMS). He's currently paying US$39 a month. Design, layout and navigation on this site are fine, but SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is poor. Google have only one file indexed (a PDF). Live (MSN) have only 4 pages indexed and Yahoo have none. The main reason for that is it uses dynamic URLs. If you run your mouse over the navigation links you'll notice the long URLs with a ? in them. Search engines can have trouble with these, and there’s no site map with plain, static URLs for the engines to follow. Result: with the exception of a few pages on MSN the engines basically don’t know this site exists, so it’s never going to rank anywhere.

This is a good example of a site which, on the surface, looks and functions fine. But it's not getting traffic and achiving the objectives the owner had for it. Jon is the type of guy who likes to do things himself, so my advice on this site was to ditch the current CMS hosting plan and switch to either Site Build It or XSitePro. My preference in this case would be for Site Build It. SBI is more suited to content sites, especially for small business service providers, while XSitePro is better suited to sales and affiliate sites.

As with Family Fit Plan, some keyword research needs to be done and some basic on-page SEO. Take note of the title - "Aion Fitness -Jonothan Ross". No targeted keyword phrases. Yes, "fitness" is in there, but generally people aren't going to search for "Aion Fitness - Jonothan Ross". Nor are there any targeted keywords in the headings, links or body text. Pretty basic stuff. Switching to SBI, which is what Jonathan's collegue Doug used for his site, will correct all of those problems but still allow Jon to manage the site hilmself. What's more, he will be paying LESS than $39 a month.

Also, SBI have recently introduced a new module called Content 2.0. What this basically does is allow user-generated content, and will provide organic, hands-free growth. And search engines just love organically growing sites.

At this stage I don't know if Jon will be taking my advice but if he does it will be interesting to follow the progress of these sites.

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small business website design

web design

seo

sbi

I was recently contacted by a personal trainer working out of South Florida. Doug had built a site using XSitePro to sell his "Fitness Now & Forever" course but needed some help with some formatting issues. Main problem was Doug had used MS Word to create his page, which was then converted to HTML and imported into XSitePro. Big mistake. Word makes terrible HTML and adds a lot of proprietary code. NEVER use Word to create HTML. It's just not the right tool for the job. The problem was pretty easy for me to fix - just import the code into Dreamweaver and then use Dreamweaver's built-in tool for fixing Word-generated HTML, and then pasting that code back into XSitePro.

If you're building a site from scratch with XSitePro just use a simple text editor like Notepad to put your text together (or type your text straight into XSitePro) and then use XSitePro's formatting tools to design your page. Leave Word for print documents.

Anyway, as well as cleaning up the formatting Doug asked me for help getting traffic and improving conversions. My first suggestion was to convert his course to a PDF file and use Clickbank to process payments, rather than just have PayPal "buy now" links. That's something we're still working on. Doug has had some other professional fitness trainers read his book and recommend a few changes. Once those issues have been sorted we will complete the conversion to Clickbank. One of the biggest advantages of using Clickbank is you will have an instant commissioned sales force ready to promote your product.

The other thing I suggested was that he build a content site to attract targeted visitors via natural search engine results and funnel them to the sales site. The fitness/weight loss industry is very competitive and getting natural search engine traffic to his sales site would be very difficult. As you can see, Fitness Now & Forever is basically a one-page sales letter and using PPC (pay-per-click) search engine marketing would likely be much easier to get traffic.

So my recommendation to Doug was to use Site Build It to build that content site. He had all this knowledge and experience which is just what you need to build a great content site, and SBI was the ideal tool to do it. As it turns out, I was preaching to the converted. Doug already had an SBI site that enjoyed top rankings for his targeted keywords "South Florida Personal Trainer". This site supplies him with a constant supply of targeted leads for his consulting business.

Doug has done a great job with his content site. One of the keys to it's success is the amount of unique content he's added which he's also syndicated via article directories. This strategy has provided good quality links to his site. But it's also proof positive that the SBI system works, especially for local, small business service providers like Doug.

What we intend to do now is make the sales site much more visible on the content site. But all in all, a great way to use two different tools - Site Build It and XSitePro - to market a small business online.

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