How To Shoot Marketing Eagles?
A Golf Course Manager Guide To Search Engine Optimisation.
Once you create a website for your golf course, you very quickly figure out that people are not flocking it. When you assess the different ways of driving traffic, your options include:
- Advertising your website address in golf magazines
- Promoting your website address through Public Relations and gaining media coverage
- Encouraging other sites to link to you
- Getting placed in online golf directories
However, these marketing activities will deliver small and sporadic volumes of traffic. The single biggest thing you can do to drive traffic is search engine marketing. Here is why:
- 80% of traffic to most websites comes from search engines.
- There are roughly 500 million searches performed every day.
- 88% of that traffic comes from the top 4-5 search engines (Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN, and of these, Google is by far the largest.)
- Approximately 90% of people searching don't go past the third page of results and few go beyond the first page.
Therefore, if you want to drive large volumes of golfers to your site, it is imperative that you get onto the first three pages of Google and the other top search engines. Surprisingly, the majority of golf courses haven't figured this out yet and for those who have, the majority are asking the question, "How can I get my site to appear on the first page of Google search results?"
Different Options
There are two main methods of appearing on the first page of search results.
- Paid for results or Pay Per click (PPC)
- You pay to appear in the "sponsored links" section of the results page.
- You decide which search keywords e.g. "Golfing in Scotland" you would like to appear in search results for. You appear in the search results and you pay for every user who clicks through to your site. The cost will vary by keyword and can range from 10p to £1 per click, depending on how many other golf clubs and Golfing guides sites are bidding for that keyword.
- Natural results - achieved through SEO
- Natural results are when you appear in the main list of results.
- You do not have to pay to appear in the list, or when a user clicks on your link.
- However, to appear on the first three pages of results, you need to implement a number of design and content changes to your website, which are termed "Search Engine Optimisation" or SEO.
Which is best?
- Both have their merits, but natural results are by far the most preferable because once you have invested in SEO, you do not have to pay for the traffic that is generated.
- PPC is a great solution if you
- Have just launched your website and you need immediate presence on the first page of search results
- If you haven't yet successfully optimised your site to appear on the first page. Remember, there are thousands of websites all looking to appear on the first page of search results for certain keywords.
Spiders and Links: The Basics of How Search Engines Work
Without getting bogged down in the technical details of how search engines work, here are a few basics that you should to be aware of.
- Search engines want to ensure that the most relevant sites are displayed to customers who are searching for "key words" e.g. Wales golfing holiday.
- Each page is "ranked" by the search engine on different criteria.
- Each search engine uses different criteria when calculating the ranking of the site, but there are some commonalities such as:
- Automated "spiders" are sent by the search engine to index each page on your site. These spiders log the content of your site.
- This allows the search engine to know whether the key words that a user is searching for appear within your site and on specific web pages.
- However, in addition, the search engines have decided that it isn't sufficient to simply have the keywords appear in the site. They believe that the most "useful" and "relevant" sites for the person who is searching are those, which have a lot of other relevant sites linking to them.
The important points you should take out of that are:
- You want to make it as easy as possible for the spiders to visit and index your site.
- You need to have relevant keywords on your site that are easily found by the spiders.
- You need to have lots of other sites linking to your site.
Four Components of SEO
In order to optimise your website to appear in natural search results, there are four components that you will need to address.
1. Design: What to do when designing your golf website
Many golf websites make the mistake of designing their website and then start thinking about driving traffic to it. The problem is that the way you design your site can result in your site being ignored by the search engine spiders. Meaning you will receive very little traffic. When designing your site, ensure you avoid the following pitfalls and ask your marketing agency to confirm that they have been avoided:
Avoid flash sites
>> Sites can be created
with HTML or flash codes. The
spiders that are sent to your
site by the search engines cannot
read flash.
No frames
>> Some agencies design sites within
frames. For example, the menu on the left
might be within a frame and the main body
of the page within another frame. It makes
designing the site easier as the only thing
that changes from page to page is the content
within the frame. However, spiders cannot
read what is inside a frame so you won't get
indexed and noticed by search engines.
Avoid dynamic pages
>> Some sites are developed with a database,
which generates dynamic pages. You can identify
dynamic pages on your site if there is a question
mark within the page URL. Most, but not all
of the search engines can't read dynamic pages
so it is best to avoid dynamic pages.
Text within graphics
>> To ensure different browsers read
text uniformly, design agencies often put
text within a graphic. It looks great. However,
a spider cannot read the text that is in a
graphic and simply moves on.
Keywords
>> At design stage, think about the keywords you want to be listed for search results on search engines and incorporate that into your design. For example, if you were to design your site so that a page was allocated to the most popular keywords, it would be easier to include more keywords on those pages that would be searched by the spiders.
2. Content: What to do when developing your content
Keywords
Choosing the keywords that you want to appear in search results for is one of the most important things you can do. Think of it as being similar to planning the location for your physical golf course. Choosing keywords that people search for a lot (i.e. generates a lot of potential traffic) and then ensuring that these keywords are peppered around your site (i.e. more chance that the spiders will index them giving you a good chance of appearing high in search results) could result in your site receiving thousand of visitors.
- Invest time in choosing the keywords. Think about how you would search for your golf course. You should immediately think beyond the generic search keyword of golf course and consider descriptive keywords such as "links course" or "golf society outings." You also need to target the keywords around where your course is located so if you are based in Surrey, consider "Surrey golf" or "Surrey green fees."
- Use online tools to help you generate keywords and research the amount of traffic each keyword generates. You can use this free tool to generate ideas http://www.goodkeywords.com and these tools to generate ideas, plus look at volume of traffic the keywords generate http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/.
Once you have decided on your keywords, you now need to place them throughout your site. The main areas are:
Web page title
- This is what you see written in the title bar of the browser. It is also what you see when you bookmark a page. This should explain what is the purpose of your site and try to include many keywords, but always in such a way that it makes sense to the user who reads it.
Meta tags
- The tags are not visible to users, but they explain what the content of the page is. Keywords should be placed here, as they are easily searchable by spiders.
Homepage content
- The spiders search your homepage and you should ensure that your keywords appear near the top header. They should also be sprinkled throughout the homepage. See keyword density for guidance on this.
Keyword density
- A question often asked is how many times your keywords should appear on a page. The guidance for SEO is that:
- Each page should have a minimum of 250 words.
- Your keywords should account for 2 - 8% of the words on the page. That means they should appear between 4 - 16 times.
- Two important points to bear in mind are:
- You need to balance the need to write your copy for your users, in order to sell your product, and the need to write your copy for search engines, in order to be found.
- To help you achieve both objectives, you should focus on a couple of keywords for each page rather than a large number.
3. Links
To combat a lot of sites achieving high page ranking by simply stuffing their sites with keywords, the search engines have placed a higher weighting on the value of the number of sites which link into a site. The rationale is that if a site is linked to by lots of other sites, then it must be offering popular and relevant content.
Therefore, your site might be designed in way that is easily searchable by spiders and your content might be sprinkled with keywords, but you need to have other sites linking to you in order to achieve success.
Ensure you know how many other website are linking into your site and set a goal for increasing that figure. You should have at least 100 quality links.
There are many creative ways to generate links to your site:
- Ask friends, customers or suppliers to link to your site
- Post comments on golf forums or discussion groups with a link back to your site
- Register your site with sites such as www.stumbleupon.com and if users like your site, they will bookmark it, creating a link to your site
- Issue an online press release about the course which should result in online media coverage and links back to your site
- Register your site with multiple golfing directories
- Ensure your site has content that would motivate other golfing sites or forums to link to you. For example, you could develop an unusual feature such as an iPod download for your course. This would motivate other sites to draw their user's attention to your site.
Marketing agencies such as www.MarketingGolf.co.uk can also help you with link building programmes.
4 Maintenance: Once you achieve a high
ranking in the search engines, it is important
to realise that you need to maintain your
ranking. The criteria the search engines use
in the algorithms constantly change and what
works today may not work next week. Your site
would need to be tweaked to bring you back
up the rankings. |
