Who
Wellington Tennis Club, a small community tennis club
What
- Website with high Google ranking
- Club logo refreshed
- Quarterly newsletter
How
We built an attractive website that:
- highlights all the services the club offers
- has an online court booking system
- has online membership enrolment
- ranks well in Google
Our work
Logo and newsletter
Our designers created a new logo incorporating historic club imagery.
We came up with a catchy name for their quarterly newsletter — First Serve. It’s easily written in MS Word and they send it out to the email addresses on their membership database.
Google — getting to the top
There are a number of other tennis clubs nearby all competing for members. My client wanted to rank above the other clubs in Google.
About 95% of the new members come to the club after finding it through Google.
How did the club get its Google results?
Type in anything at all about tennis in Wellington and chances are the club has a top result. It’s a strong position to be in.
Pretty much we simply followed what Google says works and we kept at it.
The keeping at it part is crucial. Google search results are, in my experience, not a static situation. Getting to the top is one thing, staying there for any length of time is another thing.
- Having your main search terms in your website (domain) name is said to be a good thing. Wellington Tennis Club is very fortunate that even though it is a southern and central suburbs club, the club’s name takes in the whole city.
- Sites get Google’s approval for regular new information. We post items regularly and we keep on doing it. Our newsfeed, on the homepage of the site, is a very useful way to keep members informed about club activities. We understand that Google also loves this because with the site being updated regularly, this makes it new and fresh, and Google’s search bots come back regularly to lap up all the new info.
- Each page and post on the site generally deals with one topic. We understand that Google like pages to be focused on just a few key topics.
- We have put important keywords in all the areas on the site that Google suggests. Information on doing this is freely available on the internet (try here), and it is important to do this.
Converting Google results to increased membership
One result of our online activities is that the club’s website visitor numbers are on a continuous upwards climb.
A small neighbourhood tennis club website has been attracting increasing numbers of eyeballs. And the web stats show these are eyeballs largely in Wellington, too. So we have very targeted and focused visitors to the site.
The challenge for the club now is to convert those eyeballs into paying members.
Increased online visibility won’t necessarily increase membership on its own but it does give the club a big head-start in its marketing efforts. We see proof of that in the increasing levels of phone and email enquiries about services and offers available on the website.
If a small tennis club can ace Google, you can too!