Guest post by Alan Jones of Doing Words 
If your Pilates business has a website, you’ll already know that having a website is just the first half of the challenge of marketing your business online. The second half of the challenge is encouraging visitors to come to your website (if you’re really paying attention, you’ll have guessed that the third half is getting them to pay for a product or service from your website!).
Let’s address the second half of the challenge: encouraging people to visit your website, and let’s look at two useful and free tools Google provides: Google Insights and Google Advanced Search.
Google Insights
Google Insights shows us how people use Google to search for products and services related to Pilates (or any other topic.) By understanding what people search for and how many people search for it, we can be a bit more strategic about how to market a website to potential visitors.
Google Insights analyses a portion of Google web searches to estimate how many searches have been done for the terms you’ve entered, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time.
On the results page, you’ll see a graph with the search volume, indicating interest over time for your search terms, plotted on a scale from 0 to 100; the totals are indicated next to bars by the search terms. But the numbers are ‘scaled’ and ‘normalised’. What does this mean? It’s a little complex, but basically, if you see that “Pilates” last month scored “60″ it doesn’t mean there were 60 searches for the keyword “Pilates”. Instead, it means that the number of searches for the keyword “Pilates” was at 60% of its highest ever volume.
Try entering the name of your own business as a search term, and most likely you won’t see any results at all. That doesn’t mean nobody is searching for your business — Google limits the keywords it works with to keywords with a certain minimum volume of searches, people don’t search for most Australian Pilates studios often enough for that to be included.
But there are lots of useful things you can learn in Google Insights. For instance, if you look at a few years of data, it’s possible to see a recurring trend whereby searches on Pilates keywords halves every December and peaks every January.
Use the View, Zoom in function to enlargen these images.
That trend in the data probably coincides with the trends you see in your own business, but it’s interesting that the search volumes follow the same trend, because it suggests people use the internet as the way they find and shortlist the Pilates venues and trainers they’re interested in. Having a website is worth the time and expense.
The same trend suggests there’s no point in spending much money on advertising on search engines during the months of November and December. But if you’re going to advertise, it looks like late December and early January are the times people are looking for a new Pilates program.
You might also notice that while “Aero Pilates” isn’t yet in the top five search keywords, it is the fastest-growing Pilates-related keyword (growing by 170% in the past 12 months.) Should you consider offering Aero Pilates to your clients? If not, you can still benefit from this growing interest by adding something on your website about what your opinion on Aero Pilates and why you’ve decided not to offer it to your clients. In the process, you’ll mention “Aero Pilates” in your website copy a few times and that will help your website come up more often in searches.
To be continued.
