The Easy Way for Any Fitness Business To Rank #1 in Google...for Free
In this episode of the Marketing Muscle Up Podcast, host Richard Toutounji and Operations Manager Ev Chapman discuss practical, cost‑free strategies for fitness, wellness, and personal training businesses to dominate Google search results using Google My Business (GMB). They walk listeners through claiming a GMB listing, the critical role of accumulating and responding to reviews with keyword‑rich replies (including service terms and suburb names), handling negative or spam reviews, fully completing and regularly updating business details, using GMB posts/offers as short‑lived blog content, maintaining fresh, high‑resolution photos with descriptive filenames, and cross‑posting reviews between Google and Facebook. Throughout, they emphasize that these DIY tactics outperform many paid agency promises, generate consistent local leads, and provide long‑term, sustainable visibility without spending money. The conversation ends with a call to action for listeners to seek a personalized three‑step strategy from ComMarketing if they need further assistance.
Chapters
Okay, a website is, is probably kind of useless if it can't rank in Google. It doesn't matter how beautiful it is or how well it's built. Clients want it to be seen when people search for it.
Welcome back to the Marketing Muscle Up Podcast Show. I'm Richard Toutounji. The host of this show, also the founder of ComMarketing. We help you grow your fitness and wellness studio, personal training, and gym business. And today we want to talk all about the concept of Google My Business, the free platform that Google gives you to rank your business. And in today's ep, I've got Ev Chapman, Operations Manager, ComMarketing, joining me. How you doing, Ev?
I'm great. I'm looking forward to talking about Google My Business and SEO or DIY SEO.
DIY SEO. Yeah. Yep. It's an interesting game, SEO, search engine optimization. What's your first memory of ranking in Google, Ev?
Maybe it goes back to when I had my own agency and You build websites for people and then they're like, how do I rank this as number 1? And you're like, oh, I don't know.
No, no. They say, how come it doesn't rank number 1? Isn't that the better question?
Yes. Yeah. So I think that was probably my first kind of real realization that, okay, a website is probably kind of useless if it can't rank in Google. It doesn't matter how beautiful it is or how well it's built. Clients want it to be seen when people search for it.
Yeah, exactly. And Google My Business, if you haven't yet claimed it, it's a free listing. Anybody can claim it. The easiest way to find this, if you haven't already, simply go to Google, type in your business, whatever your business name is. Yeah, just type in ComMarketing or ABC Fitness or know, Harry's Gym. Oh, it's not Harry's Gym, it's Harry's Hot Dogs, I think, if you're in Sydney. Whatever your business name is. And on the right-hand side, if you're on a desktop, it will show your business.
Yes.
It will show you some pictures, website, directions. It's got reviews there, offers, a whole bunch of things. Now, if it doesn't show you that, it's okay. You can go and claim that. And it says claim the business. And you should be able to claim the business if it's yours. If someone else has claimed it, we have problems. But most of the time it should be okay. So if you haven't yet claimed it, it's totally free to claim. And I want to take you through a few things because like everything in marketing, what happens, an agency comes along and sometimes you might get calls from people and says, hey, we can rank you towards the top. And I just want to let you know about what, you know, some simple things to get it ranked. And some things you can avoid and ensure that, you know, you don't have to get ripped off by someone telling you that you've got to, you've got to use them to rank it.
Yep.
That's, that's what I was thinking of today.
I think that's a great idea. I think we've all had those calls or emails. Oh,
they don't, they don't stop. They don't stop. And, and the reason why you get those calls and emails, you know, because when there's a new product that Google brings out or Facebook brings out, it means that every single agency can do their spin on things, and rightfully so, because there's a lot of people that don't want to do it. But because you listen to this podcast, I know you want to do it. So I want to share with you some really quick strategies that you can do to improve your rankings. And I guarantee if you do this, you will not ever, ever need an agency to say that they're going to do a better job, because that's total rubbish. They won't do a better job than you can do, because I'm going to tell you why. They'll never be able to do a better job than you you can do, and this is the reason why. Okay. Number 1, in Google My Business, Ev, there is a thing called Google Reviews. Now, the key, the number 1 key to rank to the top of the page is to ensure that you have as many reviews, real reviews as possible.
Yes.
As possible.
And does it matter if they are current? Like, is it better to have current ones?
Yeah. You should always get new ones regularly because then Google says, okay, this business is still in business. And it shares that towards the top. So I would kind of put in the diary once a month to ask somebody to rank, to get a review for your business. So if you had, you know, get a whole bunch of reviews early on. And the best way to get reviews is really ask them, can you write a review? You can send them a direct link. So you just click on the review link in Google, right? Yep. Click on that. And then you can literally copy and paste the URL
Yep.
And then give that to someone, say, hey, just click here and you can send us a review. It's very simple. Very simple.
And that is the easiest way to get reviews is just to ask. There isn't actually— oh, there's lots of fancy software and stuff like that, but actually most people are just not in the mind frame to give you a review unless you ask them to do it.
Yep, totally. So just ask, just to send a review and just ask them. So you have a conversation, then send a link. text message or emails and link. And so do a review. Now, when somebody does give you a review, make sure you reply back to the reviews. This is a bit of a ninja move here. Reply back to the review. And then in the reply, make sure you use a keyword. And a keyword means generally in your business, it would mean the service that you do. So personal training or group fitness or exercise or gym. And you can also include the suburb that you're in as well. So you might— someone say, hey, It was so good to have a training session this morning. You reply back and you say, it's great to have you here, Ev, training in our gym in Blacktown. So looking forward to your continued growth. Right? So you're putting a keyword, your suburb, and your specialty in the return sender on the view and make sure that you like it.
That's great. Yeah.
Yeah. It's good. And that's what the agencies will do. Well, they won't do, but It's the fastest way to get reviews. Yeah.
Okay. But what about bad reviews?
Well, bad reviews— How
do you feel about those?
Unfortunately, going to come if you do anything or you don't do anything. Bad reviews are just bad. Bad reviews are going to happen. It's going to happen less in our industry. Reviews are going to happen like more like for your takeaway shop or if you're a restaurant, you're serving so many customers and you have one bad night and you know, that they're gonna put you on the stakes and, you know, burn you alight. But in the fitness industry, we generally, uh, know most of our clients, right? And so we generally have less bad reviews in this industry because we're a one-on-one industry. And so you generally get less, but sometimes you'll get, um, bad— like, you know, I remember getting a bad review because we rented out someone's office like 8 years ago, and then 4 years ago they came back.
3 years later.
They said, hey, it leaked in my office, or something like that. And how's that my fault? Anyway.
It was also 4 years later, which was like so random.
Anyway. So then I spoke to him. I said, listen, this is nothing related to what we do here. You were a tenant and it was flooding in the roof and ruined some equipment. It's like, okay, cool. That's a different story. Anyway, he removed it.
That is usually the things that people Leave bad reviews over,
like totally
not things that are out of your control,
out of
control kind of thing.
Yeah. A lot of time you just want to ring them and you want to approach them and you want to say, hey, I'm running a business here. This is not good for business. You're running a business. If that's the case, or they may know somebody, is this the way to do it? Occasionally there's some spam reviews. You can go to Google and say this is a spam review, or Facebook, and this is the same thing with Facebook. And you can do your best there. No promises. Sometimes the spam reviews stay on there. Just keep writing to them. That's number one. Reviews is really important. Number two is really important to fill in obviously your description, your address, your your opening hours, as much content as they give every line you want to fill in because we know why people use Google is because Google is a platform that the algorithm is really good. That's why people use it, right? So fill in all that stuff. Keep it current. Things like that. Don't, you know, if you change, change your address, all those kind of things. The other thing that's relatively newish from Google, Ev, is there's a thing that they call offers and, you know, what's happening. So it's like a little mini blog that goes on in Google My Business. So it doesn't last, offers, and then there is a way that you can, it's like a mini story or blog.
Posts or something.
Posts. Yeah, posts. They last, I think, at least 7— I think 7 days they disappear or something
like
that. A short period. It could be 7, 30 days. They're always changing. And keep those active and current. And you could just take the content from a post or a social post and put that across there. So again, put in your diary to make sure that you keep them updated and current. Again, like we just said, ensure there's a keyword in there. A keyword is your business service. You're a gym, you're a personal trainer. your suburb. And that's all you need to know. And everything else that you write will be better because it's organic words that you use. You don't have to go to what keywords you're using. Just keep it simple. If you're going to write the word fitness and weight loss and health, and that's what Google's looking for, looking for organic posts, most important. And—
Organic posts.
Organic posts, organic posting. And then finally, we've got photos. Photos are important. Yep, photos are important. So if you haven't yet updated photos, update them. Delete anything that's old and it's not your brand anymore. That's fine. You can keep them, but you can delete them too. And keep your photos current. And what people look for, you kind of want to— you want a person to see what you do really fast in a photo. So make sure the photo is current to what you actually do. Yep. And that's the best thing for photos. You can't really go that wrong with photos. Just make them clear, precise, clean, high-res images.
Yeah.
Everything like that.
Bright, not dark. Yeah.
All those things. And check those photos and go, yep, okay, that's good. And then—
And should you update them on a certain schedule or?
Yeah, you can keep updating photos and I believe there's some videos in there as well.
Okay.
I would update them regularly when you've got new content updates. So if,
you
know, if you go on there and it looks like they haven't updated anything since 1990, you got problems. You know, people think you shut down. So keep it updated. And before you load into Google, you can actually change the name of your photo. You can actually change the name of your photo, what it's saved as. And my recommendation is to save the image name again and describe what is in the image. So you're not going to say, you know, fitness in Blacktown. So if it was a picture of a trainer training a female in the gym, you would say female training trainer putting a client through their fitness session. That's describing the image. Got it. So when somebody you know, goes to audio Google and wants to find a specific picture, they'll type in long word or they'll audio their Google Home to say, this is what I want to find. And so describe the pictures before you load them up. Don't just say image 1, image 2, image 3. That's going to really work too. And then keep getting those reviews in. Keep getting the reviews in. Keep them regularly. Yeah.
Seems easy.
It is easy. It's one of the— if you're really bad at marketing and you hate marketing, you hate— you're listening to this 122, 123 episodes and you think, oh my gosh, I'm still not motivated with marketing. Well, this is by far the easiest thing to do. You can't go wrong with this. It's a lot of fun. You can't stuff it up. It's a lot of fun.
I'm glad to hear that because I never really thought about SEO as being fun.
SEO is definitely fun. Do you know why it's fun, Ev?
Why?
Because it doesn't cost you any money.
Well, that is true.
I mean, that's why you do these. It doesn't cost you any money and you generate leads. And you can also see the stats. You can see how many people clicked on it and all those things. And if you are like, if you're in a physical location, this is great because when people are in the car trying to find your location for the first time, They will just go to Google trying to find ABC Fitness. And if your address is not there, I'm telling you right now, they're not going to find you.
No, they're not.
So that's what it's about, owning the Google space. Make it easy, make it super easy. So
yeah,
go ahead, guys. Hopefully you're listening to this and you've got that out. And also too, just another little hack there is that Facebook's reviews also get mentioned in Google reviews. So A little bit of a tip here. If somebody's written a review for you, let's say on Google or Facebook, what you might just want to say, hey, thanks so much for that review. You're so nice. Thank you so much. Hey, by the way, do you mind if you just copy that review and put it into Google for me? Or do you mind if you take that Google and put into Facebook? So it duplicates the reviews on both platforms.
Excellent.
That would be ideal.
Yeah. Okay. That makes sense.
Totally. So, um, that's the game of SEO. And if there's an agency that says, hey, we can rank your Google My Business up, um, quite frankly, I don't— unless there's some good proof that they can do anything more than I just said, I would probably keep that money in your back pocket.
Yeah, uh, I think that it is better in your back pocket than in an SEO agency. Totally,
totally. And these little hacks and tricks that again help you to generate, you know, leads from multiple sources, not just one. We know that the best way to generate leads is from referrals. And if they've seen you, they've been referred, the first place they're going to do is Google your business name. And we know that conversion metric is going to be way more than a Facebook lead. So sometimes we don't need thousands of leads, we need the right ones that are walking through the doors. Yeah. And this is a great way to do that.
Yeah. And it's a long game way to do it. It will last for a long time rather than when you have Facebook, you either turn it on or off and when it's off, it just stops working.
Yep. Totally. So team, that's what this one is about. Very simple, very tactical. Get it going and learn how to take back control of, uh, your business, uh, marketing results. If you need any help on that, and if you want to sort of see, well, how that looks in the bigger picture, my recommendations is to jump on commarketing.com today, book yourself a marketing muscle-up, and, um, we can give you a 3-step strategy plan to move your— to move your fitness business forward in these these different times. So if you are experiencing a lack of leads, if you are experiencing anything inconsistent leads, and you do want to stay in this game long term, not short game, definitely jump onto there and we could take it from there.
Yeah.
Awesome. Well, thanks, Ev. Catch you next time. And if you always listen to this your first time, welcome. So good to have you here. We'll catch you again on the Marketing Muscle Up podcast show. Bye for now.
