Running a fitness website is a valuable commitment that can offer fulfillment from initiating positive changes in other people’s lives — and a lot of revenue, too. With nearly half a million websites operating in this niche, getting noticed can be rather challenging.
Quality content should be your priority to outshine the competition. Read on to learn how to create a content strategy that drives traffic and gives you a competitive advantage in a rival field like fitness.
Why Does a Good Content Strategy Matter For a Fitness Website?
As the trends of wellness, nutrition, and fitness expand and people gain more consciousness about their health in recent years, the demand for fitness content, services, and products also increases, birthing more fitness websites.
Demand led to a growing market size and toughening competition. Surviving in this crowded market requires your target audience to notice you, and that’s where content plays the biggest role.
A successful content strategy can help your fitness website:
- Appear at the top of relevant SERPs and receive lots of targeted traffic
- Increase brand awareness and recognition as more people will be able to find you online
- Enhance trust levels and proven credibility that can set you apart from the competition
- Achieve higher engagement rates and conversions
- Improve brand loyalty
- Provide scalable growth
8 Steps to Building an Effective Content Strategy for a Fitness Website
A solid content strategy plan that taps right into your prospects’ needs and resonates with them is a roadmap to bringing your site the success it deserves. But how do you make this a reality?
Follow the tips below to develop and implement a strategy for content creation that delivers the most benefits.
Step 1: Define Goals
Think about your objectives for your site through your content creation and marketing strategy. They must spread to short-term and long-term perspectives and be SMART (aka Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound). Define smaller milestones to accomplish.
For instance, some objectives you may want to target are expanding and diversifying your web traffic, building brand awareness and credibility, and increasing conversions. Whatever targets you are pursuing, defining them in advance will help you write a detailed strategy that moves you closer to your goals.
Once you have goals, conduct a thorough content audit to see where your content stands and understand the steps to undertake to achieve your targets.
Step 2: Understand Audience
Research your target audience to gain a deeper understanding of what content can resonate with it best.
Start by collecting info about your current customers and analyzing it to detect shared qualities and create your buyer personas, prospects to delve deeper into their interests, and psychographics. Lastly, research your primary competitors' target audience.
After your analysis, detect the demographics, psychographics, interests, values, needs, and other preferences of your prospects and use this as the baseline for your content plan.
Step 3: Analyze Competitors
Watching and analyzing the tactics, campaigns, audiences, and results of your direct and indirect competitors can provide you with priceless insights for your strategy. When it comes to surviving the competition, your competitors are your best teachers.
Unless you haven't profiled your competitors yet, look up the name of your product or service on search engines. The top results shown in SERPs will likely belong to your primary competitors.
To gain the most comprehensive overview of your competitors, gather background information about them, including their histories, locations, and company sizes. Study and assess their approach to marketing their services — including through content — to identify strengths and weaknesses and use them to your benefit.
Analyzing your competitors’ content tactics will enable you to detect growing market trends, as well as the gaps that you can use in your strategy.
While doing this all manually is possible, we recommend leveraging the best digital marketing tools to handle competitor analysis. Specialized tools will help you tap into a larger volume of data without spending too much time. The information you receive from such tools is also well structured, which makes it easy to integrate into your own approach.
Step 4: Choose Content Types
Popular content types that might be used on your fitness website, as long as they align with your audience and deliver value, include:
- Blog posts
- Infographics
- Ebooks
- Guides
- White papers
- Case studies
- Video content
- Podcasts
- Webinars
- Press releases
- And many others
So, how do you decide what content formats are suitable?
The short answer is that diversity is a good thing; hence, different types of copy might all be suitable. A tangible content diversity can give you a number of perks:
- A more structured and accessible site
- An opportunity to reach a broader audience
- A chance to cater to different user preferences
- An easy way to match your content to each phase of a customer journey
Want more benefits? A common method of content diversification implies transforming old content into varying formats. Let’s say you have a blog article that generates a lot of traffic — which indicates its relevance to your prospects, then turn it into an infographic and gain even more traffic.
This way, you can extend the outreach of your most effective content pieces, ensure a stronger impact, and gain a higher engagement rate.
Long story short, seek diversity in your content for the best outcomes. But remember to maintain a solid balance and carefully pick content types that match your audience’s needs and interests.
Step 5: Plan and Create Content
After the prep work, move on to the content creation process. There are several things you must understand at this point:
- Consistency is the key to effective marketing. This spans consistency both in the posting schedule you follow and in the quality of your content. By maintaining such consistency, you’re securing more traffic while also emphasizing your credibility through the uniformity of quality.
- Trends drive success. Keeping up with up-to-date media trends in the fitness sector can help you ensure that your content is in the right direction and that you detect promising content ideas with nearly no effort. Leverage tools like Google Trends to know what your audience is currently interested in the most and don’t forget to tailor trends to your unique brand’s voice.
- The structure is empirical. Proper visual hierarchy and structure in your articles give readers an idea of the specific type of content. It also makes your posts more readable and can drive more engagement.
- Scheduling is a must. Scheduling is a content management best practice meant to reach audiences at the optimal time. The “optimal time” is when they are the most active and more likely to notice your copy and engage with it. Conduct thorough research to determine your readers’ top activity times and make sure you plan publications for that time. Consider scheduling your content to match different big dates and events, such as universal holidays, like Christmas or Easter, and your own key events — for example, branded fitness challenges. Doing so allows you to stay on one page with your readers and get them even more engaged. Leverage management tools like Trello to create your own content calendar handle these tasks easily. And also be sure to learn how to back up Trello to secure all your planning data.
- Evergreen is good. Don’t neglect the value of evergreen copy when detailing your content strategy. Evergreen web copy is timeless content, which remains fresh and up-to-date for a long time, which also means that it continues bringing you traffic and conversions years after publication.
Step 6: Optimize for SEO
Search engine optimization should take a special place in your content strategy. These days, SEO is the key to ensuring the best content performance, as it helps you ensure your target customers find you on the web easily through organic search.
To use this in your content strategy, research keywords and select the ones that work for your brand best.
To do this, come up with a list of ideas that align with your industry. Use specialized tools like Google Keyword Planner to find a large number of relatable keywords. Analyze the search volume and competition of different queries to select the ones that have the highest potential. It’s recommended to select queries with mid to high search volumes and low competition. If you want to find more keywords, analyze which queries your competitors use.
Once you select keywords, use the following on-page SEO best practices to optimize your content strategy by:
- Integrating one primary and some additional keywords into every article
- Inserting your primary target keywords into meta titles and descriptions
- Optimizing your headings and subheadings with relevant queries
- Avoiding keyword stuffing — always ensure your keywords naturally fit into your content
Step 7: Promote Content
If you want to drive traffic to your fitness website and convert visitors effectively, simply knowing how to create a content strategy and implementing it is not enough. For maximum outcomes, promote your content effectively so that it reaches more prospects.
Here are tips on how to maximize your content marketing efforts through promotion:
- Use off-page SEO. Try different tactics to receive backlinks to your site from trusted sources. This will help you rank higher in SERPs and gain more exposure for your content. Some tactics that can be used include guest blogging, share-worthy content creation, and backlink monitoring to find and fix any broken or lost links.
- Leverage the power of partnerships. Collaborate with other fitness brands and sites, as well as industry influencers, to create shared content and reach a larger number of prospects.
- Get active on social media. Audit and optimize your brand’s profiles on popular social media networks. Create a publishing calendar to ensure the regularity and consistency of your social media presence. And use high-quality publications to engage your prospects and promote your content through social media.
Step 8: Measure and Analyze Performance
After you implement your content strategy in life, your work doesn’t stop there. To reach your content goals and receive the maximum outcomes, measure and analyze your efforts consistently.
To do this, set up analytics tools of your choice — for example, Google Analytics. Use these tools to track your core content marketing metrics, like web traffic, engagement, and conversion rate.
Continuously monitor these and other metrics and analyze the performance data. Based on the metrics you receive, define which parts of your content strategy work well, then adjust your strategy respectively.
Summary
These days, exceptional content is the key to brand visibility, authority, and conversions. So, whether you are running a fitness website or operating in any other industry, you need a solid strategy to reach your growth goals.
Luckily, after reading this article, you know how to create a content strategy that brings you to your objectives. Use the tips we shared with you to ensure the success of your fitness site!