Open Google's Keyword Planner, type in a handful of gym searches, set the location to your city and hit enter. Thousands of ideas come back, sorted by volume, and near the top sit some of the biggest searches in the category. "Planet fitness near me." "Crunchfitness." "24 hour fitness." They look like gold: huge volume, cheap clicks, people ready to work out.
They are gold. They're just someone else's. A person who types a chain's name has already picked a gym, and it isn't yours. This chapter is about building a keyword list from the searches that could become your members, and putting the rest where it belongs.
A Quarter of Keyword Planner's Gym Ideas Are Somebody Else's Brand Name
We ran Keyword Planner the way most gym owners would, with 20 ordinary gym searches ("gym near me," "gym membership," "24 hour gym," "gym day pass" and so on) and the location set to our example market, Austin. It returned 10,733 keyword ideas. Of those, 2,796, or 26%, contained the name of a chain or franchise. Eight of the 25 highest-volume ideas were chain names. Run the same seeds for the whole US and the single biggest idea on the list is "planet fitness near me," at about 2,240,000 searches a month.
What comes back depends on what you feed in. When we seeded Keyword Planner with chain websites instead, the share went up: 50% of the ideas from a Planet Fitness location page were chain terms, and 91% from the YMCA's site. Seeded from independent studios, the Pilates, yoga, CrossFit, boxing and training sites we checked, chain names were 0% to 3% of the ideas, and those lists had different weeds, which we'll get to.
So a general gym starting from generic gym searches should expect roughly one idea in four to be another gym's name. A boutique studio will see far fewer. Either way, sorting is the job, and it starts with knowing where the ideas came from.
The Gyms Already Bidding Near You Are the Best Keyword Research You Can Get
The method starts with the gyms actually buying ads in your area, because their websites describe what they sell in the words their customers search.
First, find them. Inside your Google Ads account sits a tool called Ad Preview and Diagnosis. Type a search, pick a town, and it shows you the live results page that a person there would see, without registering as a real view of anyone's ad. Search your programs and your town: "reformer pilates [your city]," "boxing gym near me," "24 hour gym." Write down who shows up in the ads. Don't click their ads to look at their sites. Every click costs them money and muddies their data, and it's not the way to win.
Then feed those websites to Keyword Planner. Keyword Planner can start from a web address instead of a word. Hand it a rival gym's site, point the location at your own town so the numbers mean something locally, and it reads the pages for you. It returns the searches Google associates with that site's content. Do it for three or four of the gyms you found, favoring the ones whose programs match yours. A boxing gym learns more from another boxing gym's site than from a chain's.
Last, point the same tool at your own gym's site. The ideas it hands back are Google's reading of what you sell. If you sell reformer Pilates and nothing comes back about Pilates, your site isn't saying it clearly enough, and that affects the landing pages from Chapter 4 as well as your keywords.
Planet Fitness Shows Up in 648 Different Searches. Every One Is Another Gym's Customer.
Competitor names go on the negative list, the list of searches your ads should never show for. The reason isn't manners. It's money. Someone searching "planet fitness hours" or "crunch fitness near me" is looking for that gym's front door. Your ad is a stranger tapping them on the shoulder in someone else's lobby.
Could a gym ever target a competitor's name on purpose? Only in a campaign built for that and nothing else, with its own budget and its own ads, and only if the numbers justify it. That's a big if, and it's never where a new account starts.
The catch is that chain names don't arrive once. In the same generic seed list, we counted 648 different searches built around Planet Fitness: "planet fitness near me," "pf fitness near me," "near me planet fitness," "planet gym near me," "planet fitness summer pass" and hundreds more. Crunch showed up in 209, including "crunchfitness" as a single word, which gets about 33,100 searches a month in Austin on its own. (Six other searches on the list used the word "planet" for unrelated gyms, like Planet Granite, which is why we don't count them.)
That matters because negative keywords behave differently from regular ones. Google's help pages are clear that negatives don't stretch to cover close variants the way a regular keyword can: misspellings, short forms and plurals slip past. Block "planet fitness" and you have not blocked "pf fitness near me." So build the list from what the searches actually look like:
- Add each chain's name as it's written ("planet fitness," "crunch fitness") and as people type it ("crunchfitness," "pf fitness").
- Add the short forms people use ("pf," "planet gym").
- Add each chain that operates near you, not just the national names. Our Austin check found local clubs, franchise studios and a climbing gym chain all buying ads.
The list matters most later. At launch, your first campaign runs on exact match, so a stray chain search can only get through if it's one of your exact keywords. Once the account earns its broad match campaign (what we call Exploration, the campaign that finds searches you didn't predict), broad match will wander toward those chain names constantly. This is where the chain list pays for itself. In the new campaign's first month, check which searches triggered your ads every single day. Any gym name that sneaks in gets added as a negative on the spot, spelling and all. It's never finished.
Yoga Studios Get Teacher-Training Searches. Budget Gyms Want the Word "Cheap."
Chain names are the biggest weed for a general gym. Other gyms grow different ones, and what counts as a weed depends on what you sell.
Of the 1,711 ideas the yoga studio's site returned, 775, or 45%, were about teacher training, certification or teaching careers: "yoga teacher training," "200 hour yoga teacher training," "yoga instructor certification." The Pilates studio's list held 109 of the same kind, about 10%, from "pilates instructor training" to "pilates certification courses." Those searchers want a career, not a class. Unless your studio runs a teacher training program, they're negatives. If it does, give teacher training its own campaign, budget and page. A multi-week certification and a single drop-in class are different purchases made by different people.
The generic gym seed returned 395 ideas with the word "free" in them, from "free gym pass" and "free gym trial near me" to "planet fitness free day pass." Some of those fit a gym that offers a free first visit. Most are people looking for exercise that costs nothing, and they're negatives. Chain studio pages brought back their own crop of answer-seekers: 184 how-to, exercise and at-home ideas from one franchise studio page alone, the questions Chapter 2 set aside for later.
Then there's "cheap." Our method treats words like "cheap" as weeds by default, and for a boutique studio charging $150 a month, they are. For a budget gym with a $15 membership, "cheap gym near me" is the customer walking in the door. That's not a rule; it's a deliberate choice about who you serve. Decide it once, on purpose, and write it down.
Five or Six Keywords Is a Full Ad Group When Each Program Has Its Own
With the weeds pulled, what's left is a list of searches people use to find programs like yours. Sort them into the program groups from Chapter 4, and keep each group small:
- Reformer Pilates: "reformer pilates near me," "pilates studio near me," "reformer classes," and two or three close relatives.
- Boxing: "boxing gym near me," "boxing classes," "kickboxing classes near me."
- Open gym: "gym near me," "gym membership near me," "24 hour gym."
Five or six keywords per group is enough. A group that grows past that usually hides two programs, and splitting it keeps each ad talking about one thing.
At launch, these go live in exact match inside Isolation, our name for the opening campaign: hand-set bids, and only searches we've chosen on purpose. Exact match keeps the budget on the searches you chose while the account learns what a new member looks like. Searches for your own gym's name stay out of these groups entirely. They run in their own small brand campaign (Chapter 2), where their easy wins can't make "gym near me" look better than it is.
Keyword Planner's Bid Range Is a Starting Guess, Not a Quote
Next to each idea, Keyword Planner prints a pair of dollar figures labeled top of page bid. Picture every past bid that won a top spot on that search, lined up from cheapest to priciest. Per Google, the low figure sits about a fifth of the way up that line and the high figure about four-fifths of the way up, for the location you picked. In Austin, "gym near me" came back at about $1.56 to $6.00.
Treat those numbers as a weather forecast, not a price tag. They reflect how the whole market has bid, largely on broad match, not what your exact match keyword with your ad and your page will cost. Our rule of thumb is to expect your real costs to land within about 30% either side of the planner's range, and to let your own first weeks of data replace the estimate as soon as it exists. Chapter 7 turns those first weeks into bids.
Next: Known Gym Searches First, Surprises Later
Your list now holds the searches that could become members, sorted by program, with chain names and freebie hunters kept out. Chapter 6 explains why the first campaign sticks to exact match on those known searches, and how the broader campaign later finds the long tail of searches nobody would have guessed. Chapter 4 set up the ad group and page for each program, and the Google Ads for Gyms guide home lists everything after this.
Hand us a gym's Google Ads management and the first thing you'll get back isn't a keyword list. It's the list of gym names we're keeping your ads away from.
