Rank a Local Business Website: Personal Trainer Perth Case

Summary

This transcription provides a comprehensive update on a local SEO project for a personal trainer in Perth, focusing on strategies to improve Google search rankings.

Local SEO Project: Personal Trainer Perth

Project Goal

• Help the personal trainer (the client) rank in Google search.
• Get more customers for his business.

Current Status & Progress

Google Maps Rankings

• Significant Improvement: Maps listing is now ranking for "personal trainer Perth" + the client's name.
• Radius Expansion: Ranking radius has expanded significantly within a week.
  • Previously, only ranked directly around the business location.
  • Now, achieving #1 to #3 rankings for "personal trainer Perth" in a wider area.
• Key Driver: This improvement is primarily attributed to new customer reviews.
  • Recommendation: Focus on acquiring new reviews as a strong ranking factor.
• Review Response: The client has responded immediately to all reviews.
  • Recommendation: Respond to reviews as quickly as possible. Studies show that responding to 100% of reviews can lead to a 16.4% increase in conversion rates (MapLift 2025). 93% of consumers read online reviews before making a purchase (BrightLocal via Searchlab 2026).

Website Rankings

• Underperforming: Website rankings are fluctuating and generally poor.
  • Currently ranks #90 for the exact keyword "personal trainer Perth."
  • This is considered "not good enough" and "too slow."

Next Steps & Strategies

Brand Activation / Foundational Branding Strategy

• Objective: Teach Google about the brand identity to improve rankings, especially since the brand name is the main keyword.
• Benefits:
  • Deeper understanding of the brand by Google.
  • Quicker ranking improvements.
  • Increased trust with Google, even for non-exact match brand names.

Key Actions for Brand Activation

1. Schema Markup Deployment

   • Purpose: To explicitly tell Google about the brand identity, social media properties, and review platforms.
   • Process:
     • Download schema markup template (markdown format).
     • Download relevant website pages (e.g., FAQs, About Us) as markdown.
     • Upload all markdown files to an LLM (e.g., ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini).
     • Prompt to LLM: "Create local business schema markup based on template. Take data from the markdown files. Make sure to remove empty fields and list them separately later so I can find that data."
     • Essential Data to Include:
       • Google Maps listing (categories, link).
       • Additional types (e.g., Wikipedia references).
       • Alternate name, brand name, disambiguating description.
       • Location (with Wikidata reference).
       • Price range.
       • "Same as" business profiles (for directories, review platforms).
       • Email, phone.
       • "Knows about" (services).
       • Address, geo-coordinates.
       • ABN (Australian Business Number).
       • Founding date.
       • Currencies.
       • Number of employees.
       • Certificates.
       • Aggregate Rating: Crucial for displaying review stars (e.g., from Google Maps).
     • Validation: Use validator.schema.org to check for errors.
     • Troubleshooting: If validation fails, provide the error message/screenshot to the LLM for correction.
     • Successful LLM Tools: ChatGPT, Claude Opus 4.1, and Google Gemini 2.5 all successfully generated valid schema markup.
     • Tip: Use the most specific schema subtype possible, such as HealthAndBeautyBusiness rather than a generic LocalBusiness, to better align with Google’s expectations (Schema.org LocalBusiness, Google Search Central).

2. Backlinks

   • Action: Obtain a "kickstarter backlink" from a relative's UK business website.
   • Additional Strategy: Partner with local businesses (e.g., physio clinics, cafes, running stores) for "Partners" page backlinks. Sponsor a community event (e.g., fun run) to earn editorial links from local news sites. One link from a respected local news source like PerthNow is worth more than 50 generic directory links (Searchlab 2026).

3. Business Directories

   • Status: Delayed, contributing to slower search rankings.
   • Action: Get these online as soon as possible.
   • Integration: Add directory links to the "same as" property in schema markup.
   • Priority Directories for a Perth Business: Global must-haves (Google Business Profile, Yelp, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, Facebook) and Australian powerhouses: White Pages Australia (DA 78), Yellow Pages Australia (DA 71), True Local (DA 68), Start Local (DA 45). Industry-specific directories like ServiceSeeking, Oneflare, HealthEngine can also help (HiAgency).

4. Social Media Setup

   • Existing: Facebook, Instagram.
   • New/Improve: LinkedIn page.
     • Observation: The client has a personal LinkedIn connected to the "Personal Trainer Perth" brand.
     • Issue: The LinkedIn brand page is not yet indexed by Google (site:operator check).
     • Action: Get more followers on the LinkedIn business page to encourage faster indexing.
     • Integration: Mark up LinkedIn profile in schema markup.

5. Review Platforms

   • Examples: Trustpilot, Proven Expert.
   • Action: Set up profiles on these platforms.
   • Integration: Add these to the "same as" property in schema markup.

Tools & Techniques Mentioned

• Google Maps: For local business listings and reviews.
• intext: operator: To find where Google has mentioned a website (e.g., intext:personal trainer Perth yourdomain.com).
• site: operator: To check if a specific page or domain is indexed by Google (e.g., site:linkedin.com/company/personal-trainer-perth).
• Cloudways: Recommended hosting platform for WordPress, e-commerce, Laravel.
  • Features: Enterprise integration to Cloudflare (saving $20/month), malware protection, email add-on ($1/mailbox/month Rackspace email).
  • Offer: 25% off link in comments for first three months.
  • Pricing: Reasonable server costs (e.g., 1-2 GB RAM for $28/month).
• Markdown Format: Preferred format for transferring data.
• LLMs (Large Language Models): ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini (specifically Opus 4.1 and Gemini 2.5 mentioned).
  • Use Case: Generating and troubleshooting schema markup.
• validator.schema.org: Tool for validating schema markup.

Key Takeaways & Recommendations

• Reviews are paramount for local SEO: They significantly impact Google Maps rankings and radius expansion. Aim for an average rating of 4.5–4.9 stars (a perfect 5.0 can actually reduce click-through rates by 12% as it appears “too perfect” MapLift 2025). Target 2–4 new reviews per month to show consistent activity.
• Respond to reviews promptly: This has a proven positive impact on rankings and conversions. Respond to every review within 24–48 hours, being specific in positive responses and empathetic in negative ones.
• Brand activation is crucial: Explicitly teaching Google about your brand through schema markup and consistent online presence builds trust and improves rankings. 46% of all Google searches have local intent, and "near me" searches have grown 400% since 2020 (Google Trends via Searchlab 2026).
• Schema markup is a powerful tool: Use it to provide structured data to Google, especially for local businesses and aggregate ratings. Use the most specific subtype (e.g., HealthAndBeautyBusiness) for better alignment.
• Validate schema markup: Always check generated schema with a validator to ensure accuracy and avoid errors.
• Leverage LLMs for efficiency: They can assist in generating and troubleshooting complex code like schema markup.
• Consistency across platforms: Ensure social media, directories, and review platforms are set up and linked to reinforce brand identity. NAP consistency alone is worth 27% more local rankings (Moz/BrightLocal via Searchlab 2026).
• Zero-click reality: 65% of local searches end without a click to a website (SparkToro/Datos via Searchlab 2026). Winning the Local Pack is essential to capture leads even when no one clicks.
• Client psychology matters: The primary reason people hire a personal trainer is frustration with their body shape or lack of results. The #1 selection factor is the trainer’s own physique and track record. Content should feature client transformations and the trainer’s personal fitness journey (Rushcutters Health).

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Full Transcript

Hello and welcome to this video where we talk about local SEO. In this video, we talk about a personal trainer Perth project where we're helping a local personal trainer (the client) to rank in Google search and get more customers for his business. So this is a little bit of an update of where we are right now and also we will take together the next steps such as building out schema markup that we can deploy on the website to really tell Google what our brand identity is and that will then help to rank in particular because our brand is the exact keyword that we want to rank for. Let's dive in. So, since we last looked at this Google Maps listing, the client has gotten a lot more reviews. So this is fantastic for the rankings that will really help us in the long term. And we can see here our maps listing right now is only coming up when we type in personal trainer Perth and then the client's name at the end. If we type this in without the name, we're actually not ranking. So the good news is we are starting to rank in Google Maps. We can see here on the 15th of August a few days ago the last scan happened and we improved significantly in terms of maps rankings. So focus on this area here right now we're doing pretty well um here with a lot of number one to number three rankings for the keyword personal trainer Perth. And then one week before we can see that we only were ranking directly around our business. So here is our business registered near this area and we were only ranking here. So that radius is expanding now which is good to see that this happened within a week's time and it this would have been mainly due to the reviews. Um so you can take away from that if you get a bunch of new reviews um this is how your maps listings are going to look like because we haven't done anything else in that time. So reviews are definitely a really strong ranking factor and very good to focus on for you. the client has also responded immediately to all reviews that has also been shown in a few studies to have a big impact. So make sure you respond to reviews as quickly as possible. However, if we zoom in here on the website rankings, it's not looking very good. Um, we are fluctuating. Most of the time we're not ranking at all. And now for the exact keyword personal trainer Perth, we are coming in at rank number 90. But that's obviously not good enough and it's too slow, which is why we are going to do this. I want to call it brand activation or foundational branding strategy where we're really going to try to teach Google, hey, this is our brand name. These are our social media properties. Um, we've got reviews on all of these other platforms as well, such as Trustpilot, Proven Expert, and others. And this will really tie together the whole brand entity or brand presence for Google to understand that in a deeper way and give us rankings a lot quicker. Again, in particular, because our brand name is the main keyword. But the effect will be similar for you even if you don't have an exact match brand name because the better Google can understand your brand the more trust you can develop with Google. So in the first video we talked about these kind of things that we want to set up. So our website is here and we wanted for example a relative of the client to backlink to the website from their um UK business. That would be a helpful Kickstarter backlink to get. Then we also want to build out our business directories. Those have been a little bit delayed. So that's why our maps or our um regular search rankings are slower than expected. So we need to get these online as soon as possible. And then we also need to make sure that our social media is all set up correctly. We already have a Facebook and an Instagram, but a LinkedIn page I believe not yet. You can quickly check where Google has found your website by using the inext operator. And then we go personal trainer Perth. And this is what it looks like in text and then your domain name after this. And we can see Google knows that we have been mentioned on all of these different sites. So that's pretty good. We already have mentions on Reddit, um, on Instagram, obviously our own website, and on Facebook. So there is starting to be a brand presence in existence that Google can recognize and um put all the different pieces together and LinkedIn as well. So let's check out our LinkedIn real quick. Perfect. This is really cool that we have a LinkedIn. This looks to be a personal one. All right. And then it's connected to the brand as well which is called personal trainer Perth. Let's have a look if this is indexed in Google search for that we can do the site operator. No, this so this page is not yet indexed. I think it will be good to get a couple more followers here. Um the more followers a LinkedIn business has the quicker it will start to get indexed and then we can also mark that up inside of our schema markup. So that will be the next step here that we're trying to pull together all of these different data points for Google um to understand and to essentially rank us better once Google knows all about our business. Before we write the schema markup together, a quick word from our sponsor Cloudways for this video. Cloudways is a really good hosting platform if you have a WordPress website, if you're running an e-commerce store, or even if you use Laravel. With really cool features like the enterprise integration to Cloudflare, you can make sure that your website is super fast and you're also saving money by not paying the $20 per month that the Cloudflare pro plans are usually at. The malware protection comes in super handy to know that if you have any security holes on your website and today specifically I want to talk about the email add-on for any website. You can come here and add a Rackspace email address for $1 per per mailbox per month. And you can then even use email forwarding to create those forwarders wherever you need them to go. So you as always you will find a 25% off link in the comments below to try your first three month of Cloudways at a discounted price and the prices when you are setting up a new server are very reasonable as well. So let's name our server here. This is the process of how you can get started. And then I would recommend the hybrid stack and digital ocean as the provider. Basic should be fine for most WordPress websites. And then you would want to start somewhere around the 1 GBTE or 2 GBTE mark for $28 per month. And you get a whole server with that where you can select the locations of the hosting platform. So give Cloudways a try if you haven't yet. And now let's write some schema markup together. So we have the schema markup template here which I'm going to download as markdown format. That's my favorite format these days of transferring um data. And so you just click download markdown here. And then you can do the same with a whole website as well. I've got an extension that I've built myself which um converts to markdown. So you can say here convert current tab download markdown and you can then do the same for other important pages. I believe we have the FAQs are on this page as well but the about us page has some different data. So let's download the about us page as well. And now we're ready to upload all of that into your favorite LLM. Whether you're using chat GPT cla or anything else. Um you simply upload the data and then you tell the LLM what to do. So we're uploading all of these files here. And now our prompt will be create local business schema markup based on template. Um take Take data from the markdown files. Make sure to remove empty fields and list them separately later so I can find that data. So the idea is here that we don't want kind of hallucinations where if we don't have the data for a specific field then the eye will make something up right that's what we want to avoid. That's why we're saying here that leave that other stuff empty. We will definitely need our Google maps listing. So for example our Google Maps categories and so on. Uh we need to collect now and I will now go and grab that Google Maps link. So, we've got a pretty decent starting point here. We have local business schema, which is exactly what we want. We have additional types as Wikipedia references. They look correct as well. I will double check that these actually work, but um this is looking good so far. Then we have the alternate name. We've got our brand name, disamiguating description. Uh the location also with a wikid data reference. That's pretty good. Price range is correct. Our um same as business profiles, we can expand these ones later once we have directories and our review platforms. We can add those as a same as email, phone, uh knows about is great. Um addresses there. Let's see the geo coordinates. They're looking pretty good as well. Uh well, I should really double check these and see if they actually end up at that address to make sure there's no hallucination. Um and then services offered. So the aggregate rating, that's something I would like to see if we can get that into here as well. So we have now updated the schema markup and we also have a has maps listing. So we integrated our Google maps listing. We've got geo coordinates. We're serving both Perth and the Junelup area. We've added our ABN, Australian business number, the founding date, currencies, um, number of employees, and now we're also about to add the certificates and the five-star rating. So, this is called aggregate rating in terms of schema markup. And once that has been done, we will check all of the uh schema markup for accuracy using a service called um schema validator. That should be under validator.sema.org. And we can then select the code snippet and we'll paste that in to make sure that everything validates correctly. And it does not. That allows me to show you how to troubleshoot this. So I would simply point an arrow here and then also point an arrow here and then provide that as an image to the AI to troubleshoot that and it should be able to write the schema markup in the correct way. Okay, so we have a fun challenge here. Um the claw AI has gone into complete meltdown mode where it's created 24 different versions of the markdown but still couldn't fix it. So we're going to try multiple different AI tools now and we're going to give the same task to fix this markup and make sure it validates. Okay. So we will try chat GPT against claude opus 4.1 against Google's Gemini 2.5. So GPT5 thinking is still working on it. Claude we started earlier. So that's done. Let's double check that in our validator. And yep, that validates. Okay, let's make sure. Okay, awesome. We've got the founder here. That's pretty cool. Let's make sure our aggregate rating is also there. Perfect. Those are our review stars from Google Maps. That has been integrated correctly. So, I would give that a pass. Claude 4.1. Um, Opus has passed this test. Now, let's see how Google Gemini does. Let's make sure we run a new test here. Yep, that looks good. That passes and aggregate rating also correct. Perfect. Very good. So, Google also passes. Now, ChatgPT, how are you doing? Closed rendering converted. Swapped to V ID for text ID. Normalized phone. Okay. Remove the broken has map. Let's see if it validates. Yep, that validates. Okay. As well. Good stuff. So, that's perfect. We now have our finished schema markup and we'll continue with our plan to deploy that schema markup uh build out more social media profiles and review platforms as well as the business directories. And with that, we should be in a good shape to start ranking really soon with that project. All right, this is it for now. I will see you in the next one where I'll give you an update on what we managed to achieve. Thank you for watching.

What's new (2026-06-19)

• Added specific statistic: responding to 100% of reviews increases conversion rates by 16.4% (MapLift 2025).
• Added statistic: 93% of consumers read online reviews before buying (BrightLocal via Searchlab 2026).
• Added recommendation on optimal review rating target (4.5–4.9 stars) and citation that a perfect 5.0 can reduce CTR (MapLift 2025).
• Expanded schema markup tip to use the most specific subtype (e.g., HealthAndBeautyBusiness) instead of generic LocalBusiness (Schema.org LocalBusiness, Google Search Central).
• Added priority Australian directories for citation building: White Pages Australia, Yellow Pages Australia, True Local, Start Local (HiAgency).
• Added partnership backlink strategy (local physio clinic, café, community sponsorship) and value of editorial links from local news (Searchlab 2026).
• Added key local SEO statistics: 46% of searches are local, 400% growth in "near me" searches, 65% zero-click searches, NAP consistency worth 27% more local rankings (Searchlab 2026).
• Added client psychology insights: primary reason to hire a PT is frustration, #1 selection factor is trainer's physique/track record (Rushcutters Health).