How do you get your golf club or business website to the top of Google in six months?
Where do you appear on Google and what are you doing to improve your rankings?
Google uses over 400 data points on which to make a judgement on where it ranks your website, in comparison to your competition, and it doesn’t happen by luck.
Like any algorithm, the results are only driven by the data it is given!
The importance of ranking highly on Google in search results
Your Golf Marketing’s website was launched just six months ago. However, within that period, my SEO team and I have managed to get our website to the top of Google. Now, inevitably, it didn’t just happen. On the contrary, it was planned!
Obviously, when we launched the website, we were nowhere to be seen in Google’s search rankings and we were launching into a very established sector of the golf business.
But why did we care?
- We know there were some very well-known golf marketing agencies out there. So as a new business and in the marketing sector, we felt it important when discussing our services with prospects and clients that we can demonstrate it to them. We walk the walk.
- We also saw being seen in this arena, it would boost our credibility and drive potential new business.
So what did we do that was so effective?
- We specifically wrote our website content focused on the user experience, rather than the usual “Let’s talk about us!” headlines.
- We set a goal of ranking on page 1 of Google for the following phrase ‘golf marketing agency’.
Why? Well, because let’s face it, people barely look past the first page on Google for their answer.
Secondly, if you were a golf club or business looking for marketing support, what would you type in?
Finally, who would you trust, the marketing agency that was at the top of their own search terms, right?
What did we do to improve our Google search ranking?
Despite what some people may tell you, no one knows how the Google algorithm works and if they tell you they do, they’re lying!
There is no single set format or process for improving your Google ranking for when somebody is searching for something.
Although. there are many different things you must consider and implement – one of them is patience.
5 things we did to improve our Google Rankings:
- Chose a good template
- Researched our keyword pool
- Clearly structured the headlines on our website, ensuring all pages had relevant page titles and meta descriptions. Key point – plan each page of your site to focus on a separate part of your services offering.
- We avoided using Ai tools to write our content. But, we do use them for writing prompts (Google knows you’ve used ChatGPT or another Ai tool to write your content)
- Followed Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines. (Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness)
5 more tasks we implemented
- Shared all of our blogs and pages on our Social Media feeds (this drives Indexing)
- Ensured all images are correctly tagged with the page title in mind.
- Established citation with local business Directories, e.g., Yell.com, Google Business Profile – BrightLocal is a good tool for this.
- Had a link strategy (onsite & offsite). Improving our backlinking from other high ranking domain websites to create better authority.
- Monitored, measured and reviewed our SERPS (Search Engine Ranking Positions) on a weekly basis, especially via our Google Business Profile page.
How to start implementing changes to your website?
Firstly, before you even implement any change, it’s important you understand where you currently are. You need to know what changes are required for your website and when you make them, that they have a positive impact.
Secondly, assuming you have a WordPress website, (our preferred platform), if you don’t already have them installed, we would recommend looking into a SEO tool. E.g. Yoast SEO or Rank Math.
These Plugins will not do the work for you, but they can be a valuable ‘check’ on your own work, but you will need to know what you are doing, as you can do more damage than good.
They provide a handy traffic light system which helps when knowing what pages need improvements. E.g. red means more work required and green means it’s good to go.
How do you stay at the top of Google?
For any football lover out there, you’ll know it’s one thing being top of the league, but it’s another to stay there. (The less Man Utd talk here the better though…)
Once there, you must periodically update your pages. Yes, once every 3 months, go back into your pages and blogs and see if they are still relevant.
If you don’t, you can be sure your competitor will see they have dropped in the ranking and will respond accordingly. So yes, it’s like painting the forth bridge, it never ends.
However, what I can tell you is done properly, being top of golf with your golf business website, will drive you a passive income and traffic, while you are sleeping!
Finally, treat carefully, seek specialist advice. Optimising your website is a skill and therefore does require expert knowledge.
Here at Your Golf Marketing, while we can assist with social media, blogging, website builds and email marketing, we can also create a content plan for you. E.g. We tell you what to do and when, but you do it!
How can Your Golf Marketing support your golf club?
When you’re travelling to a new area and you want to find golf courses in and around there, presumably you would type in something like:
- Golf club in Surrey
- Golf courses in Hampshire
- Best golf courses in Manchester
Try this as a basic exercise and see where your page ranks in Google. (Remember to do this ‘incognito’ too.) as your personal search history will skew the results!
Once you’ve done this, get in contact and let us know where you feature and we can give you a basic website audit completely free.
Only then can we set about developing a plan for you to follow!