Improve online sign posts to your website

You need to think of a website as no different to a physical poster you might put up in your local town. What information you put on it and where you place it is crucial to getting people to see it and action it.

If you put a poster outside a womens gym advertising a mens only class then it will be ignored. If you put a poster outside the same gym with a clear message about a womens only class then you're more likely to some interest.

We have visited over 1000 Brazilian Jiu Jitsu websites in our travels to craete Submitsu. The vast majority have the same structure:

• 1. Home page
• 2. About / Linage
• 3. Timetable
• 4. Classes
• 5. Memberships
• 6. Free Trial
• 7. Contact

Clubs that offer more than just Jiu Jitsu obviously have other pages too.

This is a good start but if you want to maximise your presence and dominate your competitors you'll need to improve on this structure and add more pages.

There are two main things you can do to really stand out from the crowd. Firstly, add more specific pages to your website for areas outside of what you are currently sign posting.

Secondly, focuus those pages with localisation in mind. As you are a physical business in a town or city you can make your content tailored to that area.

Lets take a look at some specific examples.

The more posters you put up the more likely you are to get noticed. But, two important factors are 'don't be spammy' and 'make sure the poster is relevant'.

Most women aren't going to search for 'bjj near me'. They are more likely to search for 'womens self defence near me'. Although search engines do quite well with synonyms, a whole bunch of other martial arts will show up in this search.

You should create a dedicated page on your website for womens self defence with the title and slug to focus on 'womens self defence in [your town / city]''. There, you should talk about the benefits of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu as a form of self defence and detail the other benifits too.

You should think of this page as a sales page. Add things like testimonials and images / videos of your club (specifically women) training.

Adding this page to your website and tweaking it over time will bring a new avenue of students to your club.

Parents are going to be searching for 'kids martial arts near me' rather than 'bjj near me'. So you will want to brand out and have a dedicated page or two for your kids classes, if you offer them.

The title and slug for your page should be aimed around the words 'marial arts in [your town / city]'.

When building out this page and its content you should focus on what a parent might be searching for. This might be things like 'discipline', 'confidence', 'fitness', 'anti-bullying' and 'fun' for children.

Again you should think of this page as a sales page but this time for parents. Add testimonials from parents and images / videos of kids training (obviously you'll need to get permission from the parents at your club).

From these two examples you should get the general idea of what you need to do. We have a list of other areas you can focus on to inspire you. However, you should give some though to what people might be thinking (or searching) that your club makes sense as the answer.

As you might of noticed in the examples above we mentioned localisation [your town/city]. This is really important when designing pages for your website and is something majorly underutilised by most clubs.

If you include your town or city in the title, slug and headings of your page then you are more likely to show up in local searches. This is because search engines will know what you content is about more.

You must do this with grace however, search engines are very good at detecting spammy content. But, changing some titles and headings throughout your website to include your town / city will help you get noticed in those localised searches.

If you speak to your web developer they should be able to help you with this. They should know about H1, H2, H3 tags and how to use them effectively along with the meta tags and titles. You will just need to instruct them on what you want you want those to be.

Grab a word document and start drafting out some ideas for new pages you can add to your website. Think about what people might be searching for and how you can make your club the answer.

Once you have those ideas, speak to your web developer about how you can implement them and what information you will need. You will definitely want to include some photos and videos of your club in action, so if you don't have those already - you should work on getting those.