How to Get Found Online & Drive Traffic to Your Website
If you build it, they will come, is not true at all when it comes to your website. Just having a website on the internet doesn’t mean people are going to find your business. Most businesses will do the obvious things when they build a website like add their website address to their business card and update their social media account info, but more should be done.
Below I cover some of the key things you should be doing to help bring more people to your website.
Claim & Update your Google Business Listing
Claiming or creating your Google Business listing is a must. Whenever a search is done in Google that contains the name of a city, Google almost always shows a list of Map locations of businesses that it thinks you’re looking for. This is called their ‘local pack’. To get found here, you need to claim and complete your business listing.
If you’ve never claimed your listing, or even know if you have one, follow this Google help guide:
Google will want to verify your business by sending you a postcard or calling you to give you a verification pin. It is important to finish this verification process.
Once your listing is setup it is important to fill out as many of the business details as you can, especially your website address. You’ll even have the ability to add photos like your logo as well as interior and exterior pictures of your business. Now you’ll have one more place to be found online.
Create an Email List
If you aren’t already collecting customer emails at your clubhouse or having a form to have users sign up on your website, start now. Everyone has an email and email marketing it is one of the most cost effective ways to market to your audience.
You can use email to communicate with people who have already either been to your facility or are interested in it. Sending out emails with links to your events, sales on your rates page, or a quick link to book a tee-time is a great way to get in front of people and drive them back to your website to take action.
Pro tip: Sending out a monthly newsletter that includes educational content for your audience can help your club stand out in your area. You don’t always want to be selling to your audience.
Social Media
If you haven’t watched the movie The Intern, look it up on Netflix. In this movie Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson are interns at Google, and in a particularly funny scene Vince Vaughn is explaining his great idea for an app where you “take a picture, and put it on the line”. Ha ha, on-the-line. So funny.
Anyway, social media is as simple as that, especially for a golf course. If you’re sitting at your club on a pristine morning, go outside, snap a quick shot of the course on your phone and post it on your social channels with a caption such as “It’s a beautiful day for a round of golf, book your tee-time now.” Link this to your site and people are going to get the itch and click, and maybe even book.
SEO – Search Engine Optimization
Now, SEO is a monster of a topic, but let me try to explain what it is and a few key things you can do as quickly as I can.
First, SEO is the art of optimizing your website so that it ranks on the first page of Google, so when people search for “Golf course” in your city, your website appears near the top of Google’s list.
Before I tell you what you need to do to improve your ranking, you need to understand what I mean by keywords. Keywords are the words people type into Google to find your business. This could be something like “Golf Course Saskatoon”, or “available tee times in Ottawa”.
Here’s a few of the top things you can do to improve where you rank in search engines:
- Add your main keywords in your Page Titles, Headings and Content. The Page Title is what appears on the tab of the browser when people come to your site, the headings are the large text heading on your page, and content is the paragraphs or lists of info on your page. These keywords should only appear naturally within your page though, and never stuff your page with too many or you can get penalized by Google.
- Create shareable content. If you have a blog, write articles that people want to share. Provide value and make sure to include social media share buttons so people can easily post this news to their social feeds. The more your website is shared on social media, the more popular Google thinks your site is, and thus will rank it higher.
- Make sure your website is listed online wherever possible. What this means is make sure that wherever your golf course is listed online, such as any provincial or national associations, that the listing includes your website address. The more times your website is linked to, the better. But don’t go looking for links on websites that aren’t credible.
Conclusion
I’m sure this is a lot of info to absorb in one sitting, but I want to encourage you to just start trying to do these things. When it comes to marketing, I have a goal of doing at least one thing each day. If you can complete one marketing task a day, that’s 5 – 7 in a week. Before you know it you’re going to be everywhere.
I also know though, that during the golf season, time can be limited. At YasGolf, we have support plans in place where we can help you offload these responsibilities on us. View our complete YasGolf services here … YasGolf Services
Post by Michael Yasieniuk / YasGolf
