This weeks’ blog comes courtesy of Geoff Ellis from GolfWorking and is designed to provide some key tips for a golf course to improve their web presence. GolfWorking is one of the leading UK web design companies for golf courses.
Identify your Goals and Target Audience:
An important step, that is often overlooked by golf clubs, is to first set out your website’s goals and target audience. When you do this properly, you may come to realise that some of the goals you are trying to achieve may have completely differing target audiences to others.
Lets say for example you have some of the following goals:
Generating more visitor tee bookings
Attracting new members and societies
Improve communication with members
Showcasing your club as a venue for hire
Therefore – someone looking for venue hire (who might not even be interested in golf) is going to have completely different wants and needs to someone looking to play a quick round. Likewise a potential new member is different to a current member – an example being, a member will know exactly what the course is like – and someone researching where next to join will want to see exactly what it is they will be playing.
With this in mind a ‘catchall’ approach is not going to work. It is a common story we regularly come across, which is – a group of enthusiastic committee members are tasked with over seeing their club’s new online presence. They sit down and think the website is all about them, they are the only target audience and its all about their wants and needs.
This always results in a confused site with muddled thinking and ultimately, poor results.
Once you’ve identified your goals and target audience, you can then clearly set out to achieve them – starting with an improved site map.
The Golf Course
When looking to market your golf club to new potential members, visitors or societies, you need to hit them instantly with the WOW factor.
Spectacular, awe-inspiring imagery is a great way to do this.
We have access to analytics and stats across dozens of golf club websites and we can see that the course section is nearly always the most popular in hits.
This makes complete sense. If you were researching online your next big purchase, such as a nice coffee machine or your next holiday location – you look at the pictures first and then go on to price, details etc.
Increase Website Traffic
Its often been said, you can have the greatest website in the world but if no one can find it, then it’s a failure.
Good search engine optimisation (SEO) is something that is also often overlooked by golf clubs. But because of this, it is an area where your website can excel by having an edge over the competition.
Good SEO is not rocket science, it is lots of little tasks, all done well, that add up to big improvements. Research what ‘key phrases’ would get the most appropriate traffic to your site. Too competitive (such as ‘Golf’) and it will be impossible to make a dent – against all the big club manufacturers, tour and news sites.To obscure – and no one will be searching for it.
Tip: location based Search Phrases are best, such as ‘Play Golf in Bristol’
You should learn where to best add those phrases to your content – Alt tags and meta tags are misleading buzzwords. However title tags and headings are very important.
Next Steps
There is lots more to discuss in order to create a successful golf club website, such as a clear call to action, easy to use navigation, pictures telling a story, data capture, importance of mobile, GDPR and the list goes on.
To learn more and to find out how GolfWorking can help your golf club gain success online, please get in touch with them on 0117 3255 755 or email [email protected].
If you don’t think you have the time to implement or change your website then The Revenue Club is here to help, we can advise on the digital customer experience and project manage any changes. We have worked closely with GolfWorking on a number of projects, and they certainly get a thumbs up from us.
