Technology? Solutions? Web Marketing? It Doesn’t Matter to Me. Or Does It?

Martial Arts has certainly come a long way. It wasn’t until 15 years ago that Martial Arts schools were small family-orientated businesses with carpeted floors, a punching bag, and a group of 30-40 beaming hopeful Bruce Lee wannabes. And the closest thing to a computer was the thick chunky calculators masters used to work out their monthly budget. Today, Martial Arts has fully embraced the business aspects of the culture and with the growing popularity of Martial Arts, catered by big budget Hollywood movies starring any one of the “A-List” high-flying, spin-kicking Martial Arts movie stars, the business practices of Martial Arts schools of the past is a nostalgic memory few can remember.

Carpeted floors have been replaced with anti-bacterial space age rubber mats, fully-sized life-like kicking dummies silently stand side by side ready to be barraged by punches and kicks, and calculators have been tossed for high-powered computers outfitted with software solutions specifically tailored to do everything you can imagine and more.

While the involvement with technology will vary greatly from one instructor to the next, there should be a constant awareness as to what tools are there to help you in whatever circumstance your Martial Arts Business is in. Whether you are a growing school pushing towards 100 students, or you are a small school looking to get a really cool website so that you can attract 10 new students each month, or you are a master wanting to get over the dread of having to spend your entire weekend crunching numbers, there are technological tools out there that can help in those painstaking areas.

The issue is that all the tech-lingo is often so confusing that it would make anyone want to pull their hair out from its ends. SEO, SEM, CTR, PPC, “stickiness” are all terms that make you want to throw your copy of “Website For Dummies” out the window. To explain all the terms would definitely be out of scope for this article, but the few that are important to any Martial Arts school can be explained here. 

So what is SEO and SEM?

Well it all begins with a website. A website really helps get your school exposed in a relatively cheap way to an audience so big that you might need a minute to prepare before reading the subsequent facts about to be revealed. According to recent statistics, as of today, there are almost 1,000,000,000 internet users in the world and that number is growing by 630,000 users a day. In Canada alone there are 22,000,000 people who spend some part of their lives sitting in front of their computers looking at a website.
So where does your school fit in the grand scheme of things?

Is your website getting you the millions of viewers you so desire?
It’s most likely that your website is lost within a sea of other Karate, Tae Kwon Do or Judo websites and when you analyze the amount of traffic you are getting your monthly goal of a million views may be falling quite short of that total. But that’s where SEO plays a big role in helping your website get noticed.

SEO, or search engine optimization, is your flotation device and literally does what it says. It is a technique used to make your Web pages more useful for your customers while making them more transparent and understandable to search engines. Search engine optimization helps your website get more page views by creating Web pages that rank highly in search engine results. So what does this mean in layman’s terms? It means that the content and keywords within your website (as well as valid html) will determine where your website will show up when somebody wanting to learn Karate types in “Martial Arts School” and presses search.

SEM, or Search engine marketing, is really a subset of SEO. It is everything that can be done to utilize the technology of search engines with the goal of promoting a website and increasing its traffic, its “stickiness”(anything about a Web site that encourages a visitor to stay longer), and in the case of Martial Arts businesses, increase student registration and profits.

With these two tools you most likely won’t get millions of viewers, but, it will give you a targeted and efficient way to market to the audience you want to expose your business to. For those of you already aware of these concepts, here is something new: it’s expanding to telephone service too! Conduct this experiment today: Call 1-800-GOOG-411 and ask for Martial Arts Schools in your area. This new service is going to grow exponentially and is directly related to your search engine placement.

Now the next question you might ask yourself is “how can I do this?” and “Can I do it myself?”
It is possible do some part of the work yourself like submit your website to search engines, web directories, promote your website using traditional marketing channels to generate more qualified traffic. It will take some time and save you money, however real SEO requires knowledge of web programming and Internet as a technology.  You need to invest into the use of expensive professional software applications for keyword search-analysis, visitor traffic monitoring and reporting.

If that's not enough, you also need to continuously update your knowledge of how the various search engines look at sites and be ready to change in parallel with any changes made in the way search engines work. 

These days, if you make a mistake in optimization and submission, it can take months to find the mistake, fix it, re-submit the site and obtain the search engine ranking you desired.  You can even get "black listed" by search engines for bad practice - take a look at what happened to BMW for breaching Google guidelines.

Like any do-it-yourself job, a full-time certified and accredited professional will often get you the results you want. Wouldn't you rather stick to teaching classes and running a great school? 

Whether or not your school is using all the state of the art technology that is being offered today remember that technology cannot be ignored, and shouldn’t be ignored because they are tools to help your school become a better experience not only for you but for your students as well.