Club Listing SEO – Optimising Club Listings For Search Engines

Creating an optimised listing for SEO success starts with understanding the foundational components like metadata, keywords, and content structure. By effectively utilising elements such as meta titles and descriptions, crafting engaging activity descriptions, and embedding search intent into your content, you can enhance visibility and attract the right audience. This guide provides insights into how to structure your listings, ensuring they are tailored not only for search engines but also to inspire users to engage with your clubs and activities. Let’s dive into the details to make your listings stand out!

Meta Data

Before we even begin writing content for your listing, you want to first set up to foundations, and this is where metadata comes into play.

What Is Meta Data?

Metadata, simply put, is data about data. In terms of websites, meta data normally consists of descriptions, keywords or tags to help search engines understand and rank the page or listing in this case. Your metadata is telling Google what your listing is all about in order to help it rank high.

What is a Meta Title?

A Meta title is a piece of text normally around 50 – 60 characters long and includes your main keyword. This is the piece of text that appears on the search engine results page (SERP) and acts as the title, it also appears in the tab.

In this example the “find kids clubs and kids activities near you | Club Hub UK” is the meta title, with the text below it being the Meta Description.

What is a Meta Description?

The meta description is normally around 120 – 160 characters long and includes the main keyword of the page that it’s describing, as well as a little information about what the page offers. In the example above the keyword would be “kids clubs”, “activities near you,” with the information being the rest that follows.

How important are these?

These two parts are surprisingly important, but for two different reasons. The meta title is great for showing Google or other search engines the main keyword (the topic of your page) while the description is more used to try and convince people to click on it. 

The meta description used to play a huge role in search rankings, but now adays it’s more of a tool for convincing users to click on your search listing.

Keywords

The next most crucial thing that you need to know before you start writing the content for your listing is all about keywords. Even more specifically is the search intent behind a keyword.

What is a keyword?

A keyword is a word or phrase that people will search for to get results on search engines. A good example of a keyword would be “kids activities near me”. While there is more to keywords than just the words like search volume, difficulty score, we won’t be breaking them down in this blog.

What is Search Intent?

Search intent is the actual reason (intent) behind why the user is searching for this. For example, if someone searches for “coding classes”, the search intent behind this signifies that this person is looking for coding classes to attend.

The Different Types of Search Intent:

There are four main types of search intent and each one has it’s own content format that is preferred, these are: Commercial intent, transactional intent, informational intent, and navigational intent.

What is Informational Intent?

When a keyword has informational intent, it is highly likely that the user is looking for useful information surrounding a topic like “what is SEO?”.

What is Navigational Intent?

When a keyword has navigational intent, the user is looking for a specific web location, like “club hub UK”.

What is Commercial Intent?

When a keyword has commercial intent, the user is weighing up their options and scanning the market like “Dance Classes”

What is Transactional Intent?

Transactional intent occurs when a user knows exactly what they want and is ready to make a purchase, “Dance class sign up”

Now that we know about the technical things behind the listing SEO, it’s time to start writing some content!

The Title

The title of your listing acts as the same as your meta title, it further reinforces the main topic behind this listing. Something you should keep in mind is that your primary keyword should always be included inside of this as the title of your listing will be presented on the site as an H1 (heading 1), which is seen by search engines as the most important heading on a page.

When you write your title make sure that your keyword is as close to the start as possible, as Google is only a program and takes the first thing to be the most important part of the title. So, for example, if you’re running an Easter egg hunt in London, the term “Easter Egg Hunt” should be one of, if not the first thing, that appears in the title.

Your Activity Description

This is another crucial part of your club listing, and there are many crucial parts that people tend to overlook. 

What it Should Include:

• Your main Keyword – at least 2-3 times
• Around 100 – 200 words at least
• A description of what is going to happen/take place
• Some benefits of the club/activity
• And a strong Call-to-action (CTA)

Why include my main keyword?

Although you have already included your main keyword in many parts of the listing, including it inside the main content is a must. This part of the listing is all about delivering relevant information to the users, and if Google sees your listing’s content as not relevant, it will penalise your search listings.

Why At Least 100 – 200 words?

Sadly to say, but long-form content ranks higher on search engines than most Short-form content, however, short-form content is best at converting users. If you have more to say about your club then do so. An example of short form content would be short-from blogs, these typically range form 500 – 600 words. My point is that if your content hasn’t got much to say Google will think of it as a low-quality work and penalise it’s search rankings.

Why Include A Description of what is going to happen?

This part isn’t necessarily for the search engines, but you shoudln’t just be writing for algorithms you should be writing for the people who you want to attend and by giving them a description of what may be in stock for their children or grandchildren it give them a better idea as to what your exactly offering. This is also a great chance to include your unique selling point (USP) think “what makes you different from the rest”.

Why Include Some Benefits?

The same rule applies here as it does to the description of your activity. Your writing is to get people to attend your club/activity, so why not tell them some of the benefits of engaging with your activity or club? People buy from people, not businesses.

Why Include a CTA or Call-To-Action?

Including a CTA in your copy is common practice and has been done ever since marketing became a thing. At the end of the day, you want them to do your activity or join your club. There was an A/B testing study that highlighted the impact of having a CTA, one that did not have a CTA and the other that did. The copy with the CTA saw a 3x higher response rate than the one that didn’t. A CTA is all about providing your audience with a next step for their journey, it’s not mean or spammy, it’s a gentle reminder.

The SEO Data

The next part of writing your listing is to ensure that your metadata is optimised and that you have all the correct information, which also includes your club details, the price, location, etc.

If optimised correctly, these have a chance to appear in what SEO specialists call “position 0”, also known as a featured snippet.

What is a featured snippet?

A featured snippet is a highlighted excerpt of information that appears at the top of search engine results (position 0), aiming to answer a user’s query quickly and concisely.

The one piece of advice for this part is to make sure all your data is up to date and relevant to the activity/club the listing is all about!

The Categories, Tags and Area Data

In this part, I’m referring to the taxonomies that Club Hub listings get access too. The main part of this is to build a “web” of relevant content (listings) that helps build relevance. The advice would be to make sure that you include all of the related information, from your club type all the way to the area that your listing covers. This will also help you get seen not just on search listings but also Club Hub searches and listings.

The Final Part – Featured Image

The final point on this blog is the featured image. The featured image is the final part of this listing. When choosing your image to be featured, you should choose an image that showcases what is to be expected inside your activity/club. You should also make sure that you add an alt text to your image. 

What is Alt Text?

Alt text stands for alternative text, and is a description added to an image. Its purpose is to provide context or explain what the image is about when the image cannot be displayed. One key thing you should do when writing your alt text is to try and fit your focus keyword inside the alt text; this not only helps the image rank in image searches, but it also helps build more relevance on your site.

That’s everything for optimising your listing for SEO success. make sure to include your keyword inside your listings and include a nice description about what the user can expect from your club/activity.