The golfing season is upon us, and with more and more golfers booking their tee times online SEO should be part of your summer marketing strategy. With this in mind we have gathered some top tips to help you out:
1. Use Plain Language
Keywords are a major topic in SEO, make sure your website explains things in the clearest possible format. For example you can use various terms for booking golf, visitor bookings, tee time bookings etc… make your website copy features these subtle differences and other meaningful key words.
2. Write descriptive title tags
Title tags are descriptive text that should tell people what to expect on a page. They are an important part of SEO and help with ranking. Whether visitors see it in their search engine results page (SERP), or while hovering over a tab before navigating to it, this copy should inform them about what’s on the page.\
3. Put the right stuff on your homepage
Although the aesthetics of your homepage is crucial, make sure that it works for your website visitors. The home page should contain some basic information about the club, and provide the user with the options to explore the website further.
The text should help to signpost the user where to go, so make sure you think carefully about why a golfer would visit your webpage. For golf clubs it can be fairly straight forward, memberships, visitor tee times, society/group bookings and functions/weddings. Although simple it is important to keep your CTA seasonal, for example in the summer, green fees should be a priority, where as in the off season it might be societies and in Spring the focal CTA could be membership.
4. SEO is an ongoing project which is about the end user
Although optimising your website for search is the aim of SEO, it is also important to make your website usable for real people i.e. golfers. Make sure to check your Google Analytics/Google Search Console to see which pages are visited most, figure out why that is and improve them first. SEO is an ongoing project and will change with the seasons and technology. We know how busy golf managers can be, but remember a website works around the clock to help get more members, visitors, societies and functions for the golf club! Keep looking at your data. And, when you can find the time, do a little analysis on your competitor’s content. There’s never any harm!
5. Mobile is your friend!
We harp on about it all the time, but it’s so important that your site is optimised for mobile in every sense, and a site that’s well optimised for search engines only has a few more considerations to think about for mobile. Things like page speed, site design and optimising for local search all need to be taken into account!
6. Keyword research
A quick keyword research can often net thousands of of keywords, some relevant to you, some not. The first thing to do is take a look at your websites data on Google Search Console and analyse what you’re ranking for. Then you can start to box a little smarter with your use of keywords!
7. Conversion Optimisation
Whether it is more green fees or membership enquiries you are looking for, optimising the conversion of a website visitor into an enquiry or booking is key. There is no point doing all the work on SEO if a website visitor is not going to convert into a customer. When ever The Revenue Club works with a golf club, converting web traffic into a tee time booking or enquiry is at the forefront of our minds!
