An adult who was shopping for somewhere to train wrote this on Reddit about the schools he looked at:
"I've seen so many schools with websites/social media that were so outdated they made me doubt they were still operating."
He wasn't talking about the teaching. He never got as far as the teaching. He was talking about a page with nothing recent on it, and the conclusion a stranger draws from that in about four seconds.
Every martial arts school has that page. It's the Google listing, and it sits in a part of the journey you can't see from inside your own school. You know how many people enquired. You know how many booked. You have no way of knowing how many looked you up first, read the listing, and quietly decided against you. That group never shows up in any number you have.
Does my Google listing matter if I run Facebook ads?
It matters more, not less, because the ad is the reason a parent looks you up in the first place.
The sequence is the same in nearly every town. A mum sees your ad on Tuesday while she's on the sofa. She doesn't book from it. She thinks about it, mentions it to her husband, and on Thursday she types your school's name into Google, because that's what anyone does before taking a child somewhere. What she gets is your listing: how the place looks, what past customers said, and whether the phone goes anywhere useful.
So the listing isn't a search-engine job sitting somewhere below actually teaching. It's the reference check. And the thing about a reference check is that she isn't looking for a reason to say yes. She has already half said yes, which is why she's checking. She's looking for a reason to say no, because saying no is easier and cheaper and means she doesn't have to drive anywhere on Tuesday evening.
She will then tell you, honestly, that she found you on Google, which is true about the last step and blind to every step before it.
What a parent is actually checking when she looks you up
Three things, in this order, and none of them is your curriculum.
Is this place still going? The signal she uses is the date on your newest review. A listing with eleven reviews, the newest from 2023, reads as a school that might have closed, moved, or stopped caring. Eleven reviews is fine. The gap between the newest one and today's date is the problem, and it gets worse every month on its own while you do nothing.
Where is it, exactly? Not the town, the actual place, and whether getting there on a weekday evening is realistic. Make that findable before she has to ask, because distance is one of the quietest reasons people quit later. If she can't work out where you are, that doubt goes on the pile with the rest.
Can I do something about this right now? She's standing in a kitchen at half past nine at night. If the only route forward is a phone call tomorrow during the day, the odds drop hard. Another trainee on the same forum put it bluntly:
"Don't make me schedule a call. Don't say you'll reach out to me. Make it easy or I'm probably going somewhere else."
Which is why there should be a booking link on the listing. You add it in Google Business Profile under Booking: Add link, paste the URL, save. You get up to ten links in that category, so if you teach several styles, point her at the page for the one she searched for rather than a general timetable. Google offers two routes: sign up with a booking provider from its Reserve with Google list, or add your own link instead. Most schools will be adding their own, and the one thing Google says you give up by doing that is the reporting, because performance data isn't available for custom links. It is still a way out of that kitchen at half nine.
How do I get more Google reviews for my martial arts school?
Ask at the moment the result lands, not at the moment you remember to.
Most owners ask badly, and they ask badly for an honest reason: it feels like begging. So the ask gets bolted onto a newsletter, or announced at the end of a class, or made in a group chat where everyone assumes somebody else will do it. Asking a room gets you nothing. Asking one parent on the day something changed at home gets you a review that evening.
That day is identifiable. It's the week a parent tells you her son slept better, or that the teacher mentioned he's concentrating, or that the shy one answered a question in class. Owners hear that constantly and treat it as a nice moment. It's also the only moment where a review writes itself, because she already has the sentence in her head. She just said it out loud to you.
Neil's rule on the mechanics is simple: "Remove the effort they need to expend to review and you'll get far more reviews." That means a short link or a QR code, not an instruction to go and find you on Google.
When a review arrives, reply to it. All of them, including the three-star one. Google's own guidance on local ranking says positive reviews and helpful replies help a business stand out, and the practical effect is simpler than that: a parent reading your listing learns more from how you answered a complaint than from the complaint. Then put the good ones where your other families can see them, on your Facebook page and your Instagram.
Your Google listing is the one that matters most, because it's the one she's looking at, but reviews on your Facebook page and on the business directories you're listed in do work too, and the same link-or-QR rule applies. And reviews are not the same job as asking a new family for a referral, which is a bigger ask made at a different moment.
Can I ask only the parents who are happy for a review?
No, and get this one right, because the version most owners have been taught puts the listing itself at risk.
The practice is to ask first whether somebody is enjoying it, then pass the review link only to the ones who say yes. It feels like good manners. Google's review policies name it directly: a merchant may not "Discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers". The same policies prohibit incentives outright, which covers a free month, a discount, a free uniform or a prize draw, and that applies to incentives for changing or removing a bad review too.
What is allowed is asking genuinely, of everybody, without steering what they write, and that version works better anyway, because a listing with twenty-six reviews and a couple of four-star ones reads like a real school, and twenty-six flawless fives from a school with ninety students reads like something a parent has seen before.
The replying is the part that counts, not winning the argument.
What should a martial arts school's Google profile say?
Fill in everything, and be more explicit than feels natural. Neil's instruction in his book is to be "overly descriptive here to help Google understand what searches it should display your listing for. For example you can include both the area names and ZIP codes of your school's service areas."
In practice, for a school:
- Every area you serve, by name, and the zip codes. The town the building is in, and also the neighbouring areas parents drive in from.
- The classes as separate services, in the words a parent uses: kids karate, little ones, teens, adults, after-school. The style name alone isn't how she searches, and what you call the programme matters here for the same reason it matters in an ad.
- A description that says who the classes are for: a shy six-year-old, a hyperactive eight-year-old, a parent who fancies training alongside their kid. Not your lineage.
- Photos of a class in progress, with children in them and other parents visible on the benches. An empty mat is the least reassuring photo you can put up.
- Your hours, your phone number and your booking link, all correct.
Google's own help page is plain about why this is worth an hour: businesses with complete and accurate info are more likely to show up in local search results, and more reviews and positive ratings can help your local ranking. As your school grows, that listing tends to become a real source of search traffic on its own, because map results sit high on the page.
The last piece is posting. Posts on a Business Profile are still live and still worth doing, and they come in three types: Updates, Offers and Events. A grading, a new beginners' course, a holiday camp, a photo from last Saturday. One thing to know: posts older than six months get archived unless you set a date range, so a profile that was filled in once in 2024 has quietly emptied itself since.
Is SEO worth it for a martial arts school?
Some of it, in a particular order, and none of it is where the students come from.
Rank for your own school's name first. That's the search a parent runs after she's seen your ad, and losing it to a directory page or a competitor's ad is the only genuinely expensive SEO problem a school has. Get the basics right after that: a site that loads, works on a phone, says clearly what you offer and where you are. Then, if there's real search volume for buyer terms in your area, style plus town, or "near me", it can be worth putting money into. List yourself in business directories while you're at it, because it spreads your name and you borrow traffic they already have.
What it won't do is fill a timetable on its own, or do it this term. It's manual, it's slow, and the number of people in one town typing those searches in a month is small and fixed. Worth having, but it will never be the engine.
How do I stop missing calls while I'm teaching?
This is the one to fix this week, because it's a setting rather than a project.
Neil's line on it, from the book: "if someone calls your school on Google Maps for example and you miss the call, there's a list of other schools (your competitors) ready and waiting for them to call." The call that comes off your listing arrives in the hour you're on the mat, because that hour is also the hour parents are free. It rings out. She goes back to the results page.
The mechanics here have changed since most of this advice was written. Google used to keep call history on a Business Profile and let businesses message customers through it. Google turned chat and call history off on 31 July 2024. Calls still reach your phone; Google no longer logs them, and it will not text anybody for you. So the missed-call text has to come from your own phone system or your CRM, set up so an unanswered call triggers a text within a minute from the number she just rang. "Sorry we missed you, we're on the mat until eight. Here are this week's trial times: [link]".
That is the same wound as the enquiry that sits unanswered while you're teaching, treated from the other side. That article has the follow-up side of it; this is the setting.
Where we sit in this
Half of that list is not our job, so here's the split.
We find the families, get them booked and remind them to come. You welcome them, run a great first class, and enrol them. Across the schools we work with, the pattern we see is that the campaign does its work and then a stale listing or a ringing phone takes some of it back, in a part of the journey nobody is watching. We're paid when a student walks into your school, so that gap costs us too. It is the one bit of homework we ask owners to do themselves, and it costs nothing but an hour and a habit.
What we can't fix from our side is a listing that looks abandoned, or a call nobody answers, or a booking screen with no way to book. Those are yours, and they're all cheap.
Do this Monday
The stranger's check: ten minutes, on your own phone
- Search your school's name on your phone, logged out or in a private window, the way a parent who saw your ad would. Look at what she sees, in that order: photos, rating, newest review date, hours.
- Write down the date of your newest review. If it's more than three months old, you have your first job. Send two asks this week, from the list above, to two families who've told you something changed at home.
- Try to book a trial from that screen, start to finish. If the only route is a phone call during school hours, add the booking link today.
- Ring your own school from another phone during a class, then don't answer it. Whatever happens next, or doesn't, is what happens to every enquiry that arrives while you're teaching. Fix it as a setting on your phone system this week.
- Check the profile is still full: areas and zip codes, classes as services, a class photo with children in it, hours, and whether there's a post newer than six months.
Pen and paper, and you don't need the ad account or anybody's help for any of it. The most useful line is the review date, and you'll know that one in about forty seconds.
The short version
A parent who likes your ad still goes and checks you out, and your listing is where she either goes through with it or lets it go. She looks at three things: whether the place seems alive, where it is, and whether she can act tonight. The newest review date answers the first one, and it is the thing an owner never thinks to look at.
So ask for reviews at the moment something changes at home, ask everyone, never offer anything in exchange, reply to all of them, keep the profile full, and turn the missed call into a text. None of it costs money and all of it sits in the part of the journey nobody is watching.
If your timetable has genuine spaces this month and you'd like us filling them, bring your class times and the number of students you can honestly take. If we don't think we can fill those spaces, we'll say so on the call.
Questions owners ask
How do I get more Google reviews for my martial arts school?
Ask at the moment the result lands, which is the week a parent tells you something has changed at home, and ask with a link or a QR code rather than an instruction. Set it as a habit on a fixed day instead of a campaign. Ask every family in that group, including the quiet ones, and reply to every review that arrives.
Can I ask only the parents who are happy for a review?
No. Google's review policies say a merchant may not discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers. Asking whether someone is enjoying it and only passing the link to the ones who say yes is the practice that rule names. Offering anything in exchange, including a free class or a discount, is prohibited separately.
Does my Google listing matter if I run Facebook ads?
It matters more, because the ad is what sends a parent to look you up. She sees the ad, checks you out that evening or two days later, and your listing is where she decides whether to go through with it. A good campaign puts more people in front of a stale listing, not fewer.
Is 4.5 a good Google rating?
Google publishes no threshold. Its own local ranking guidance says more reviews and positive ratings can help your ranking, and names no number. A parent reads a listing differently from an algorithm: what she notices first is the date on the newest review, how you answered the critical one, and whether there is a way to book from that screen.
How do I stop missing calls while I'm teaching?
It is a setting on your phone system or CRM, not on your Google listing. Google turned Business Profile chat and call history off on 31 July 2024, so the profile no longer logs calls or messages anyone for you. Set up a missed-call text from your own number so an unanswered call becomes a text within a minute.