If you have a yoga studio, you’re likely wondering how to bring in new clients so you can keep your doors open. Without digital marketing, you’re hindering your efforts to bring in more students. When your ideal client searches online for a yoga studio to attend, you won’t be discovered. The best way to get discovered is knowing how to find and implement yoga keywords in a process called SEO or search engine optimization.
At Yogaprenuer Collective, we’ve helped yoga entrepreneurs start, build, and maintain yoga businesses. In this article, we’ll share some of our industry insights — the keywords for yoga studios we focus on for our clients and how we implement them.
However, before we get into the specific yoga studio keywords we use, it’s important to understand why SEO is beneficial for your yoga business.
If you want help using yoga keywords and getting organic traffic, schedule a free coaching call with the Yogapreneur Collective today.
Benefits of Yoga Studio SEO
As we mentioned above, it’s common in today’s digital world for people to search for their desired service or product before purchasing. If create content that’s not optimized around relevant yoga keywords, such as “yoga classes in NYC,” you won’t get the lead. If you’re not in search results, no one knows you exist.
Yoga studio SEO brings in organic traffic. This means you didn’t pay for it like pay-per-click (PPC) or a billboard. Once you put up a page and it starts ranking in search engines like Google, it could drive leads for years to come.
To get ranking on Google, one of the biggest factors is optimizing around the right yoga keywords and optimizing correctly.
How to Find Yoga Keywords Through Keyword Research
Optimizing for any yoga keyword won’t necessarily help you. If you aren’t targeting the right keywords with the right search intent, you’ll waste your time and money. The yoga keywords you need to target are what we call long-tail keywords. These are keywords that are more niche and specific to target the people who are close to conversion. More specifically in your situation, you’ll want to target people who are close to attending a yoga class.
Let’s break this down. If you optimize a page around “yoga,” you won’t get in front of the college-age girl on campus who’s looking to start attending yoga classes each week. People with more generalized questions, such as people searching what yoga is or the history of yoga, will find your page. This may bring traffic to your website but it won’t bring relevant traffic that will actually convert into real clients.
In comparison, let’s say you’re based in Iowa City, and your ideal students are college students. If you optimize a page around “yoga classes in Iowa City” or even “yoga classes in Iowa City for college students,” you’ll get in front of people who are in your location specifically and are looking for the specific type of yoga class you offer. Now you’re presenting yourself as a solution for your ideal client who is actually close to converting, not someone who wants to know when yoga started.
Keyword Competitiveness
The other thing you need to consider when conducting keyword research is competitiveness. Another big problem with general keywords is they are often way too competitive. The ranking pages for these queries often have high DRs (domain ratings), which is a number to reflect the authority of a website. These pages also have a lot of backlinks (other websites linking back to their website). Both of these factors impact ranking and determine if you can compete or not.
Competitiveness matters because you could find the most relevant long-tail keyword, but if other pages are more authoritative than you, you’ll still never show up. It’s important to have both boxes checked — relevancy and competitiveness.
There are several tools you can use for keyword research, including Ahrefs and Google Search Console. You can also do it more manually in Google itself by using Auto-Suggest and the People Also Ask tools.
Types of Yoga Studio Keywords
There are multiple types of yoga studio keywords you’ll need to target in your online marketing plan if you want to scale your yoga studio.
Local SEO
Local SEO targets people in your area. These keywords are especially important for yoga studios if your business is local. If you’re based in NYC, someone from Texas isn’t going to travel for your Tuesday night yoga class. You need to get in front of the people who are actually capable of attending a local yoga studio.
These yoga keywords often look like [yoga class/yoga studio] + [location]. You could get even more specific than this with something like the following:
- [type of yoga class] + [location] — hot yoga in Iowa City or kids yoga in Iowa City
For location pages, you won’t just make a single one for your exact location. You’ll make several to target nearby locations that people would feasibly travel for. It’s best to start with locations that have higher median incomes, as this will target people with more expendable income that can be used toward local yoga classes.
Ecommerce
Are you selling yoga products like pants, mats, towels, or even protein bars? The e-commerce side of your business also needs to be optimized with relevant keywords. Be sure to continue using long-tail keywords here. You don’t want to target “protein bars” or “yoga mat” as this will be way too broad and likely too competitive.
Instead, find a yoga keyword that targets the pain points of your target client or calls out the uniqueness of your product. Some examples of long-tail e-commerce keywords your yoga studio could use include:
- Plus-size yoga pants
- Yoga mats for concrete
- Cooling towels for hot yoga classes
- Beginner’s prenatal yoga
Blog Posts
While blog posts aren’t always necessary for local businesses, it could be beneficial for yoga studios that provide products or unique yoga classes, i.e., classes someone would travel to experience. An example of a blog post to promote an extra padded yoga mat would be something like, “yoga mats for bad knees.”
For a more niche yoga class, you could optimize around something like, “is yoga good for pregnant women.” This is beneficial to target because your ideal clients who are searching for this are pregnant and interested if yoga could help them. Your blog post would then outline the benefits of this, and then at the end of the piece, present your yoga class as the solution.
How to Use Yoga Studio Keywords
Now that you’ve learned what keywords your yoga studio needs to be using, we’ll show you how to use them on your yoga studio website to have the best chance of showing up in Google search results.
Locations to Put Keywords
There are some key places in your content where you’ll need to place your keywords. It’s important to understand that Google ranks pages, not websites. This means you’ll need to optimize a singular page around a singular yoga keyword.
Title tags are a great place to put yoga keywords. The title tag is the heading that shows up on Google for a page.
You also need to include the keyword throughout the content. However, you’ll need to avoid keyword stuffing or adding the keyword too much. If it sounds unnatural to include the keyword, leave it out. Keyword stuffing is a bad practice that can even get penalized by Google.
Your main yoga keyword also needs to be the anchor text you use when internal linking. Internal linking is when you link pages on your website to each other. This helps for a multitude of reasons, such as making your site easier for Google to crawl. For the purpose of keywords, though, anchor text tells Google what that page is about when its bots follow the link.
Other places to include the keyword that aren’t necessary but often encouraged include the meta description, h1 (first heading), and alt text of pictures.
Secondary Keywords
While the main yoga keyword is the most important, it’s also vital that you use other relevant secondary keywords. These are keywords that aren’t the head term or the keyword that has the most traffic but could still bring leads. Secondary keywords also help solidify the categorization and keyword salience of a page which helps Google see your pages.
Other Factors that Impact Optimization
SEO is an intricate process which means you could find all the right keywords and put them in all the right places and still never show up in search results. This is because there are other factors in play that could be preventing your online success.
Technical SEO
As we mentioned above, crawling is essential to get discovered by Google. Crawling is when Google discovers that your pages exist. Googlebots follow your internal links to discover all your pages, which makes internal linking vital. Additionally, if Google has never crawled your pages, it doesn’t know they exist. It can’t show a page it doesn’t know about.
Indexing also plays a role in this. Indexing is when Google knows your page exists and includes it in its index. However, it’s not always a given that Google will index your pages. In your CMS, there’s a box that’s often accidentally clicked that discourages search engines from indexing your pages, basically asking Google not to show your pages. Be sure this isn’t clicked.
If this isn’t checked and your pages still aren’t indexed, a status you can check, you can request indexing directly in Google Search Console.
Link Building
As we mentioned above, having links pointing back to your website is an important ranking factor. Think of it as a recommendation. Google sees other websites linking to you as a recommendation that your content is important. Search engines want to show important content that people will like.
This process can be done through a lot of different methods, including guest posts, vendor links, link magnets, and digital PR. Some are more guaranteed than others, and some produce more links than others. Choosing one all depends on your preferences and capabilities.
However, not all links are good links. Getting a link from a spammy website or link farm can actually hurt your chances of ranking. Think about it. If you get a link from the New York Times and a link from a spammy website, which one is Google going to value more?
Tracking Success of Keyword Implementation
So you do all the work finding the right yoga keywords, implementing them, and checking all the other SEO boxes. Now you want to see the payoff for all your hard work. There are a couple of ways to do this.
You can check the ranking of your pages manually. Just search your main yoga keyword and see where it shows up in search. If you’re more interested in the traffic to your website, you’ll need a tool like Ahrefs or Google Search Console to see this. With these tools, you can see changes in position over time as well as impressions, clicks, and more.
Schedule a Free Consultation with Business Coaches at the Yogapreneur Collective
Do you feel overwhelmed by everything that goes into SEO and yoga studio keywords? The Yogapreneur Collective has experience helping yoga studios scale their business with digital marketing. Schedule a free coaching call with one of the YC expert coaches today to talk about how we can help you find, implement, and monitor the keywords that will keep you on the first page of Google.
