When it comes to marketing your yoga studio online, there are fewer traffic sources more profitable than Google search traffic.
What’s cool about local Google search traffic is you have an opportunity to obtain two listings on the first page of Google.
You can obtain two listings by ranking both your yoga studio website AND your Google My Business page.
This article focuses on how you can improve your Google My Business yoga studio page higher.
The good news is it’s easy to do, but you do need to take a few simple steps.
Contents
What is a Google My Business page?
The Google My Business page is essentially your yoga studio’s business listing within Google. Instead of explaining it clumsily with words, here’s a series of screenshots.
Yoga Studio Google My Business Listings for Seattle
IMPORTANT: In the Google search results, only three yoga studios in Seattle are featured. I don’t have to tell you that these three listings have a huge advantage and likely attract a lot of new students for free in the Seattle area.
When I clicked into the top listing “Urban Yoga Spa,” the following screen shows up:
The area under “Urban Yoga Spa” is Urban Yoga Spa’s “Google My Business” page.
In a nutshell, it provides basic business information.
In my view, every yoga studio should fill get one of these pages and then work on getting it to be one of the top three listings for your geographical area, which is what the rest of this article covers.
Tips for Getting Top Google My Business Rankings
Step 1: Complete all the information asked for so that your Google My Business page is complete.
Step 2: Add plenty of unique photos of you and your studio and even the local area. Notice how Urban Yoga Spa has many photos. Take care with the order you upload the images so that your best images show up on the front of the page.
Step 3: Add your studio’s business address in Schema.org output on your yoga studio website. If you use WordPress, that’s easily done with Yoast’s Local SEO for WordPress plugin (I use this for clients). What this does is it communicates to Google in an efficient way your yoga studio’s business location.
Step 4: Citations – get your yoga studio listed in the top citations for yoga studios. Over time you will want to continue adding your yoga business with other local directories and even yoga-related national directories. There are many services that will get you all kinds of citations and it’s not very expensive.
Ensure each listing is identical with respect to the name of your studio, address format, and local phone number. Yes, use your local business phone number because that also provides a location signal to Google.
Step 5: Social media pages – get your studio’s profile set up on the major social media sites including Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, and Pinterest. You don’t have to post every day (well you can, but you don’t have to). Just post once in a while which takes only a few minutes.
The key is that you have business information listed and indexed with the major social media platforms which provide yet another signal that your business is legitimate and communicates its location to Google.
Step 6: Get plenty of excellent reviews/ratings from clients on your Google My Business page.
How You Can Outrank the Other Studios In your Town/City/Neighborhood
Here’s the thing. Many yoga studios do steps 1 through 5. They’re easy to do and cost nothing to do. That means you MUST do something the other studios don’t do to signal to Google that you deserve a top Google My Business page ranking.
What is the one thing you can do that separates you from the other yoga studios in your area?
ANSWER: It’s getting more excellent reviews from clients on your Google My Business Page. That’s it.
If you search for yoga studios in any city, you’ll see that the top rankings go to yoga studios with plenty of excellent reviews. Sure, in some cases a yoga studio with fewer reviews may outrank a studio with more reviews, but overall it’s safe to say that if you get more high-quality reviews than the other studios in your area, you will outrank them.
Examples of top-ranking yoga studio Google My Business pages:
To Note: In some cases, the yoga studios with the most reviews didn’t get the top spot, but overall, yoga studios that get in the top three have plenty of excellent client reviews (i.e. the clients give good reviews).
In other words, if you get a lot of reviews, but they’re bad, that will definitely not help you.
Therefore, when you endeavor to get your clients and students to provide reviews, you want to ensure you end up with overwhelmingly positive reviews.
IMPORTANT: Do not hire a service to post fake reviews. This is unethical, potentially illegal and it could very likely hurt your rankings in the long run. You must play by the rules.
What are the rules?
It’s simple. You need to do all you can get encourage your clients and students to leave great reviews on your Google My Business page. Moreover, you want to encourage the clients who you are certain will leave a great review.
How you can get excellent reviews on autopilot
While you can manually contact students and clients asking them for reviews, there’s an easier, faster way that almost entirely ensures only excellent reviews are posted. After all, if you get plenty of bad ratings, Google won’t rank your Google My Business page at all. Therefore, it’s imperative you get positive reviews.
Here’s how you do this…
There’s a software you can use that syncs with most scheduling software. What this software does is automatically sends your clients/students an email after they attend your studio.
The email is in a series of steps.
The first step is the review filtering step. Basically, it asks for your students to rate their experience on a scale of one to ten. If it’s a good rating, a follow-up email will be sent asking them to leave a review. In that email is an option to post the review to your Google My Business page.
Talk about brilliant, right. This software not only automates getting more reviews, but it does so in a way to help ensure only positive reviews are posted to your Google My Business Page.
=> Click here to learn more about this software
Final Consideration
One final thing to note, often Google search will order results, IN PART based on proximity. This is especially the case in large cities where there are many neighborhoods and dozens of yoga studios. Therefore, you may have the most reviews in the city, but if someone located in the north part of the city is searching for a yoga studio, Google may give ranking preference to studios close to the searcher’s location (i.e. north part of the city).
Take action (seriously)
This is not a difficult process. It’s also not expensive. In fact, you can do all of it for free. Yet, the potential benefit to your yoga studio is massive. Remember, this is a free traffic and therefore free advertising. It doesn’t get better than this.
In fact, other than having a great yoga studio website, this should be your very first order of marketing business.