BONUS ONLINE-ONLY COVERAGE //
Is your club technically ready for the Olympic bump?
By Lon Peper, Cedar Rapids Curling Club
site? A Facebook page? Twitter? A Wikipedia page? YouTube? If you’re asking “Do we really need these? If so, how many? And why?”
I
Te answers are “Yes,” “As many as you can manage” and “Because, as a say- ing goes, ‘I would rather have 10 ways to find one lead, than one way to find 10 leads.’” In this day and age, every business should have some kind of web presence, at a minimum a Facebook page. Tey are free and generally rank high in a web search, thanks to Facebook’s overall ranking. While the majority of clubs have a website, you may want to ask yourself
if you are using this platform most effectively. For example, does your do- main name include your club name? I am in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and our club website is
www.cedarrapidscurling.com. We chose to leave “club” out of the website, because it was getting too long. Keep this in mind if your club name is a long one. Whenever possible, avoid abbreviating, such as “www.
crcc.com” because that does not help in your page ranking. If the website name matches what people trying to find curling clubs type in their search engine, your site should be at the top of the websites listed. If you don’t already have a website, you can create websites for free, if you don’t mind having “
wordpress.com” or “
blogspot.com” at the end of your site name. Since there is very little direct competition for the majority of clubs in the
United States, obtaining the top spot for your website in a web search does not require a marketing team or a search engine optimization (SEO) expert. Te three main things you need to concentrate on are your key words, rel- evancy of the content and frequency of your posts/updates. Key words – Tese are the terms that people will use when searching for
websites. For curling clubs, we want to use our club name, the main city our club is connected with, the facility where we curl (if we’re an arena club), other cities nearby, and our state. Focus on just the word “curling” is not enough for clubs. Frequency – We need to add/update our content on a regular basis.
Search engines like websites that are “loved,” in other words, are updated regularly. If the content is static and unchanging, that hurts your sites’ over- all ranking. For curling clubs, I recommend updating once a week during the off-season and two to three times a week when the ice is in and we’re curling. As we approach the Olympics, we may even want to increase the frequency. Relevancy – It is important that content is relevant to curling. It does
us no good to post updates on baseball if our website is about curling. If search engines can’t determine the relevancy, it will affect our ranking in a search result. Now let’s tie all of this together. Our updates should contain as many
key words as are relevant to what we are posting about, and you want to use each key word two to three times in the post. If you are posting an update on Olympic curling results, it is likely you won’t include your club name, the facility where you curl, etc. in that update, and that’s okay. Even though
s your curling club technically ready for the Olympic bump? By that I mean, is it ready technologically? Can people find your club by searching the web? Does your club have an online presence? A web-
we are not concentrating on the term “curling,” the fact that you would be talking about curling and your site is about curling, that makes it relevant. So, let’s say you want to post something about your upcoming Learn to Curl event. What you don’t want to post is: “We’d like to announce our next Learn to Curl on Oct. 1, 6 p.m. at the ice arena.” Outside of the word “curl,” there is no relevancy to our club, the city we represent or the state that we are located in. Instead you should post something like, “Te Palmetto Curl- ing Club would like to invite everyone in the Greenville, S.C., area to our next Learn to Curl on Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2013, at Te Pavilion ice arena in Taylors, S.C. Start time is 6 p.m.” For a club like Palmetto, that does not use the city they represent for their club name – Greenville – this is a good example of how they would make their posts. Not every post will use your key words two to three times, and not all will use all of your key words. Tat will depend on the post and size of the post. Add photos and videos to your website, as these are also well-liked by
search engines. Anytime you mention another curling club, a city, the facil- ity where you play, anything that has a website you can link to, consider pro- viding a link to that site; they may reciprocate. Have an area on your front page where people can sign up for your email list. Tis should be toward the top of your page and visitors should not have to scroll down to sign up. Add Google Analytics to your site. Tis will help you track how traffic is coming to your website. It will tell you by search terms used, which search engine, if they came from another website, what country they are located in, and much more. Make use of SEO sites that will analyze your website for free. It will give you basic tips on changes that could be made to better optimize your site for search engines. Have your website postings automatically update your club’s Facebook
page and Twitter accounts. Not everyone likes Facebook or Twitter, so use as many ways to get your message to them as you can. I like to have the website update Facebook, and Facebook update Twitter, that way if I put something on Facebook (but not the website), Facebook will still automati- cally update Twitter. I don’t use Facebook or Twitter to update the website, however. With Facebook being the number one social media website, having a
Facebook page is important. Tis will allow your members, fans and mem- bers of other clubs to share photos, events, comments, and more, and it can be set up in a matter of minutes. Here in Iowa, we have a Facebook page called “Curling In Iowa” that is used to promote the sport anywhere in Iowa, to assist and encourage new clubs in getting started, and to promote any existing clubs. In the “About” section we list any clubs that exist or are in the stages of forming in the state. Tis page is very useful to find those who search for “Curling in Iowa,” but have no idea if or where any clubs ex- ist. I would encourage all states to create a similar Facebook page. If this article has you thinking you need to create an enhanced web pres-
ence for your club, don’t wait until February to get started – start as soon as possible. If you get started now, the search engines will have you at the top of the list when people start searching for curling clubs in your area while watching Olympic curling. n
USA Curling (( 33
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