Yoga Studio Bounces Back From Pandemic with SEO Results

We asked our favorite members to give us some reviews on the Google and Yelp platforms. It was as easy as sending out a simple email. And overnight, we got a bump in local visibility…AND some great feedback from our favorite cheerleaders. (BTW – these became GREAT snippets to add as a p.s. to emails we started sending.)

We decided to anchor our activities to investing in organic traffic. The only way to win that game is to post consistently. We decided on a once a week strategy. Looking at our traffic in Google analytics, it wasn’t surprising to see that our community is very interested in health and wellness topics. Knowing we also needed to encourage members to visit more often (especially those who were purchasing a package of class passes), we pursued health content that promotes the benefits of a consistent practice. The goal was to make sure the content was genuinely beneficial to our members while encouraging them to visit the studio more often.

We posted content pulling from health experts like Dr. Gregor who wrote “How Not to Die.” In his book, Dr. Gregor suggests 90 minutes of moderate exercise or 45 minutes of vigorous exercise a day to reach optimal health. That fits perfectly with our 90 minute hot yoga classes or 60 minute HIIT pilates classes. We also pulled principles from Tom Brady’s recent book on his method for staying at the top of his performance game and protocols suggested by Stanford neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman for increasing mental and physical stamina. Each topic speaks to consistent practice and encourages members to join us for class 2, 3 or 5 times each week. And we have science to back how that will make their lives better.

While we’ll continue to find and promote these health and wellness items, we’ll also be putting together some content to highlight some of our differentiating features of our studio vs our competitors. We’ve already put together an article about our river rocks showers and how members can use those for acupressure before or after their practice. Our content plan includes topics like the rainforest shower head, the top-of-the-line air purification system, our mobile monitored heat and humidity system, our cleaning process and more. We’ll really be digging into all the ways practicing at our studio is the best possible experience.

There are a few keys to the success of our emails. The first is numbers. We’ve been in business for years, so our email list is large. However, our population shifted during the pandemic because of our rigorous policies around safety and cleanliness. So, we made a strategic decision to only try to attract people who had trusted us while the stakes were high. We realized they were like-minded with our philosophy around sacrificing some freedoms to put the safety of our neighbors first. Those members are more likely to understand when we implement a new policy or take longer to relax some standards. And it just makes our lives and operating the studio easier.

Tip: If you’re wondering why that philosophy of speaking to fewer people works, we were pulling from The Pumpkin Plan by Mike Michalowicz.

Because we got more focused about our audience, it meant our emails were going out to only 1,000 – 1,500 people vs the full 3,500 – 4,500 people that are on our email list. That felt a little scary marketing to fewer people. However, we were standing firm on our decision to attract the right people who would value our services and stay for the long-term.

The second key is reusing content. We didn’t have unlimited funds to spend on content creation, so we decided to double down with the content we were already creating for our blog posts. We would take a VERY SMALL snippet from our posts and use them to craft an email. The email would then point the member to the blog post on our website. That way our members would see the content AND the blog content would also attract new organic traffic from a similar audience. The emails were very familiar in tone because they were targeted to people who already practiced with us. While the blog posts were geared more toward everyone who might stumble across us.

The third key is consistency. Since we have been using our blog post content, our rhythm has been to send these emails out once a week. Our members get other notifications about classes they’ve booked or billing. So, once a week felt like the right amount of contact so they don’t feel overwhelmed, but they still hear from us regularly.

Earlier in the year, we knew we had competition coming to town. We had a little money to spend in advertising, so we started local google ads that would serve us up in our area for key search terms related to the kind of classes we provide. The idea was to at least show up ahead of our new competition.

When we were able to rev up the marketing engine a few months into the year, we decided to go organic but support our organic traffic with ads for people who were interested. The BEST thing we could do is both. However, that’s not in the budget at the moment, so we’re focusing. And we’re hopeful that the results we get will allow us to put some money into the search terms again to have the best of both worlds.

For now, we’re concentrating on traffic we’ve already attracted through our organic content and our emails. That means when someone visits the content on our website, they get some ads that serve as reminders about what we offer as they browse the internet for other things. So, we’ve sent them an email, or they found one of our articles through searching for specific health and wellness content. Then they visit the website. And once they do, we show up now and again as a reminder while they search.

The conversion rates on our retargeting ads are about 25% higher than the conversion rates for general search related to “hot yoga” or “pilates near me.” So, we know we’ve made the right choice there. That’s basically because we’re serving up ads to our warm audience vs someone seeing us for the first time. Again, we’d eventually like both, but for now, we like the bigger bang for our bucks.