Martial Arts Marketing Advice

Search engines are today’s yellow pages. Chances are your martial arts school’s next potential student is going to use a search engine to find you rather than the yellow pages. If the first page of a search receives roughly 50% of the traffic, you are missing out on a lot of potential students if you aren’t on the first page. We call this Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short. It’s a newer concept, but entire companies have been built by getting into the top positions for certain search terms.

In order to get your martial arts school website to attract more students, we have to first figure out which keywords apply to your school AND receive the most traffic. Those are the ones we want to target. We accomplish this by essentially doing two things: First we modify the code on your existing website (or build you a new site that’s already optimized) to target these chosen keywords, and Second we begin a campaign to get other websites to link to yours. Sounds simple enough...

As you get into the detail of how keywords are measured, tested, chosen & targeted, it begins to look more like a giant math equation than a marketing project. It can get complex quick, but here are a few keys to remember:

Stay away from flash on your website. It looks good, but does not do well in search engines.

The longer the keyword phrase, the easier it will be to attain a top ranking.

Anyone who promises the #1 search result is lying. Most companies who know what they’re doing can get you to the first page, but they shouldn’t guarantee anything more than that.

Whenever you link to another website it’s kind of like voting for them, and the one with the most votes wins the search engine battle. You want other sites to link to you.

Focus on Google, the others are gravy. Google gets twice as much traffic as Yahoo or MSN.

Focus on the local search options. Targeting students more than 10 miles away usually isn’t good practice for a martial arts school.

The one RED FLAG that you do need to be aware of is what’s referred to as Black Hat SEO, these are essentially techniques that some websites use to spam search engines in order to appear higher in the search engine rankings than they really should. Watch out for techniques such as putting white text on a white background to make it appear invisible, or submitting your website to websites for link exchanges when the other website has nothing to do with yours. There are hundreds of techniques like this, so if you’re working with a search engine optimization company who is doing things that you don’t feel are quite right, question it! You have to protect your investment in your website.

Overall, this is a low-cost method of marketing that will get you exposure to a very large base of potential students.

Bonus: Keep in mind that the students finding you on search engines are actively LOOKING for you! This means they are interested in finding a school like yours and very likely to signup compared to other marketing mediums. These are the easiest sales you will get!