So you decided to disaffiliate with CrossFit
Tags: seo, business, marketing
Published: 2020-06-29 10:51:32

If you are one of a number of gyms that have taken the decision to disaffiliate from CrossFit, this article might help you to consider how this affects your online presence and how to improve this moving forward.

A big part of your online presence is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). This is essentially your ranking on Google and other search engines. If you are changing your name, you have built up a rank based on that name and content linking to that website. A sudden change to this can have quite a big impact.

Redirecting correctly can mitigate some of this damage. If your gym was called “CrossFit North” and now it is called “Northern Fitness”, and your domain name crossfitnorth.com is now northernfitness.com, this is like starting again. You may also end up with errors as the pages from the original domain don’t exist anymore, but these links contribute a lot to your rank; the more content that links to your website the better. It would be good to keep the original domain alive during the transition, but when a user hits that domain it should redirect to the new content. For example if you have a blog post with a url like crossfitnorth.com/blog/some-post-title, you will want to redirect this to northernfitness.com/blog/some-post-title, which will help when people visit old links by ensuring that they aren’t hit with an error, and it will also help contribute to boosting the rank of the new domain. 

You will need to take into consideration how a potential customer will find your gym. Having worked with a CrossFit gym previously, I have seen this first hand: Most people searched “CrossFit” or “CrossFit near me”. Obviously dropping that from your brand will mean customers will have to search something different, but people who don’t drop that name will see better results and therefore rank higher than you, this will be a difficult one to find a solution for as you are now competing with other gyms that offer similar services, but don’t have a novel name that helps identify their specific service. I believe if you include CrossFit in your keywords or in the copy of your website you could get into trouble with HQ. Like I said this one is really tricky and will take time and research to figure out what works specifically for your gym. 

I imagine most gyms will make use of social media. This is great as it helps get your message out there, and will help inform people of the transition. However, social media applications aren’t always predictable. They may display posts out of order, and they’re likely to rank popular posts higher than less popular ones; the danger this has for you is that your customers might suddenly be presented with a post from an account that they don’t recognise, which in turn could lead to a loss of followers for you. I would recommend putting a marketing strategy together to inform your followers of the change in an engaging way, and maybe try and be consistent with this over the period of time it takes you to transition over to the new name. 

I have left this to last, as it is the most straightforward but can be the most effective: make sure your business is registered with Google Business. This allows your gym to be listed on Google Maps, which in my experience is how people will decide on which gym they will get in touch with. It means your business will appear in two places: if specific enough it will appear on the top right of the search feed, otherwise it will appear in a list just below ads and top two results. 
These are ranked in two ways: 
- Location: as it shows a mini map and where your business is located in the region a user is searching
- Reviews: which are important to customers, as most people prefer to go to a gym that has been reviewed by real people 


So to finish up here is a list to consider: 

- Ensure old content redirects to new content
- Inform your users and potential customers through a marketing strategy 
- Have content people can read about this change on your website, maybe through a blog post. 
- Research search terms of how people find you, this can be done with google analytics or google webmaster tools 
- Ensure your business is registered with Google Business or if you are already registered that all your information is updated. 
- Speak to your members, word of mouth is still the most powerful asset a gym has, getting feedback and being open about the changes will go a huge way to retain people and keep their confidence in you. 

If you have any questions feel free to get in touch; My DMs are open over on instagram @madebyjonny, and I would be happy to help.