Spring-Cleaning Tips For Your Website

March 2008

Health club and fitness center websites that never change are like neglected houses…dimly lit, with cobwebs in the corners.

Is your website collecting dust?

These five spring-cleaning tips will get your website ready for visitors.

1) Review and update your wellness center website’s content.
First, check your existing content and delete or correct anything that’s no longer accurate. Those five-year old pictures of your grand opening? Retire them. Pictures of long-gone personal trainers and dietitians? You know what to do.

Then, add something new each month. Ideas to get you started: Q&As written by your staff, polls and surveys, member case studies, client photo galleries, and recipes and fitness tips contributed by customers.

For more ideas about keeping your website fresh:

Keepin’ It Fresh: 18 Customer Communication Strategies For Wellness Businesses

2) Look for incomplete or outdated meta tags and broken links.
We review hundreds of health club, fitness center and wellness center websites every year. Almost all have two or more of these problems:

Missing or duplicate page titles: the title that your site visitors see in the browser. Search engines like Google and Yahoo look at page titles when determining search results.

Give each page on your site a unique title. Don’t just use “TooFit2Quit Health & Fitness Center” on every page.

Click image to see full-size

Missing or duplicate page keywords: the words and phrases that people are likely to use when searching for the kinds of services you provide. Choosing the best keywords helps people find your site when they use search engines.

Again, tailor the keywords for each page to what’s actually on that page. Don’t use identical keywords for every page on your site.

Alt-text information on all images: a short text description that appears if a visitor’s browser doesn’t properly display images on your website. Search engines also consider this data in reporting search results.

Your web developer should add alt-text information to every image on your site. If you maintain your own site, add it to the tag as shown here.

Broken links to material on your site or to other sites. Use LinkTiger’s free site to spot link problems, or ask your web developer to do it. Or use LinkTiger to check up on your developer’s accuracy and attention to quality control.

3) Streamline a process or two.
First, identify the information your customers most frequently request or the forms they typically use.

Examples include cardio cinema schedules, yoga and group fitness schedules, PAR-Qs and other health risk assessments, food and exercise logs, and “cheat sheets” (healthy grocery lists, top-ten lists of superfoods, exercises you can do at your desk or in your car).

Then, convert paper schedules and reference information to web pages so that customers don’t have to call your front desk. Convert forms to PDF-formatted files and post them on your website using a free tool like CutePDF Writer or Nuance’s PDF Converter (about $50).

For larger health and wellness businesses, consider converting PDF forms to online forms that feed data directly to your customer database.

4) Take your website’s vital statistics.
If you don’t have easy-to-understand data about what people do when they visit your site, follow our instructions on how to install Google Analytics so that you can tell how long they stay on your site, which pages they find most interesting, and other key information.

If you already have easy-to-use site statistics, schedule time on your calendar each month to actually review this data. Look for trends and analyze the response to new content.

5) Make it easier to find your site.
Unless your wellness business operates exclusively online, you need to attract local customers, right?

Compare your website to this checklist of local search tips for your health and wellness website. Implement just one tip each month and quickly reap the benefits of greater Internet visibility.