Leg day

I joined a new gym recently out in LA.

It costs me $150/month, which is on the higher end of gym memberships, but it’s 100% worth it.

They only allow 6 people in the gym at any one time, and you have to make a reservation ahead of time to book your 60-90 minute slot.

With only 6 people in the gym, each person is guaranteed their own power rack to squat, power clean, snatch, deadlift, etc.

This is great — it beats the hell out of commercial gyms, especially my last one — LA Fitness.

LA Fitness is an amazing business franchise business model, but as someone who’s serious about their fitness, it’s simply not for me.

I do quite a bit of Olympic lifting, plyometrics, sled pushes & pulls, and other unconventional exercises.

I’m simply not allowed to those at a gym like LA Fitness, hence the change.

My other gripe with commercial gyms is the amount of beginners.

I love that people are getting to the gym — it’s great — I was a beginner at one point too.

I just think they’re going about it wrong.

Let me explain:

Everyone skips the basic steps: no warmup, no bodyweight exercises, and almost always, no leg exercises.

Because these things are “hard” and it “makes them sore.”

Fitness isn’t meant to be easy — the most athletic individuals in the world have devoted their entire lives to it, not just thrown a few dumbbells around and called it a day.

Outside of the gym, the other thing I spend a lot of time doing is SEO.

And unsurprisingly, I see the same thing — people just jump right in and start randomly writing content and building links without evaluating their current state.

And the reality is that most websites are the new, scrawny guy at the gym.

If you jump right in — you will get hurt.

And what does getting hurt feel like in SEO?

It feels like someone threw a 20 pound dumbbell at your—

Kidding.

This approach simply stunts your site’s long-term growth.

I approach SEO like I approach weightlifting — which I’ve been doing since I was 14.

Instead of just throwing things at my site and hope one of them makes my site magically grow muscles, I individually audit the three major buckets of every site (technical, on-page, and off-page) before I change anything or even build a strategy.

I’m specifically looking for errors, potential issues, and opportunities in each of these buckets.

Errors are currently holding the site back.

Issues may hold the site back in the future.

And opportunities will unlock early stage growth — quick wins if you will.  

This allows me to squeeze as much value out of the site as it exists right now and ultimately unlock that seemingly elusive organic growth. 

My audits are more intense than most other SEO agencies — that’s very much intentional.

I’ll spend 48 hours combing through every aspect of the site until I’ve got a complete lay of the land.

Then I spend the next 24 hours plotting out what growth looks like for the brand.

Specifically, which keywords we’ll target & when.

Which technical fixes & why.

And which links to build & how.

On day 3, I have a crystal clear vision of how the next 6-12 months of organic growth will look for the brand.

And then, I execute.

Catch y’all on Friday.

Kai