Optimize Your Website

More than an Online Brochure:
Generate Membership Leads on Your Website

Word-of-mouth isn’t enough for many private clubs these days, especially in the post-pandemic era. Prospective members are doing their research online. They’re comparing options. They’re watching videos, taking virtual tours, engaging with club members, reading reviews, and downloading assets. And the best way they do that is by exploring club websites.

If a club’s website is merely a login page for members or a digital replication of their club brochure, that's an opportunity lost. They’d miss the chance to differentiate themselves from other clubs in their area, and lose a massive opportunity to share their unique culture and attract the right prospective members.

Most club websites are created by technology companies for administrative functions, to support club operations, member experiences, and internal communications. But these sites aren’t designed to attract and convert new members. 

If you really want to attract visitors (and potential members) to your club’s website, you need to do more than simply build it: you need to optimize it. You need to offer unique, targeted experiences that answer your prospective members’ questions before they ask them. And that is vital to getting your club website seen by search engines.

SEO for the Modern Age

Search engine optimization (SEO) is how your website is discovered via search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

SEO typically involves two sets of tactics: on-page SEO and off-page SEO.

• On-page SEO focuses on the strategic placement of visible elements on your site, including keywords, page titles, headers, meta descriptions, image data and more.

• Off-page SEO is the process of improving your website’s overall search engine authority, which is determined by other websites that link to your website. The goal of off-page SEO is to attract “backlinks” from relevant, authoritative websites.

While on-page and off-page SEO are helpful concepts, they are rooted in an older search approach. Search engines are more sophisticated now, driven by artificial intelligence and focused on the intent of the search, rather than just the content. That means your website should be seen as an experienced, authoritative, and trustworthy source for issues relevant to your audience.

Google specifically rewards content that follows its E-E-A-T principles: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Clubs have a better chance of ranking highly in search if they show:

• Authentic member experiences through testimonials and stories

• Insights from pro credentials, teaching philosophies, chef backgrounds and culinary approaches

• Insights into club history and notable membership stories

• Transparent information about membership processes and benefits

• Location-specific content, addressing local events and interests

Modern SEO is about optimizing for the people searching for information, not the search engines. To do that, make sure you have the SEO fundamentals in place.

Optimizing for Mobile

Mobile-first indexing means search engines evaluate websites based on their mobile versions first. This means every page needs to be fully responsive and optimized for mobile users. If a site isn't mobile-friendly, it won't rank well—plain and simple.

Members increasingly use mobile devices to check tee times, make reservations, view event calendars, register for activities, access member directories and communication tools, make dining reservations and view menus, and check court availability and fitness class schedules.

While you could create a separate mobile site or an app, the best option, from an optimization standpoint, is to use what is known as "responsive design."

A responsive website uses the same URL and HTML across all devices: desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. The only thing that changes is the Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS, which is a programming language that describes the style and formatting of a web page. CSS allows the content on your website to adapt to different screen sizes, which means visitors always get a great viewing and browsing experience. Google prefers responsive design to other mobile technologies because it allows for more efficient crawling and indexing.

Making Your Site Accessible

Website accessibility is no longer optional—it's both a legal requirement and a competitive advantage for private clubs. Accessible websites open your club to a wider audience and reduce navigational or structural problems later.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) define how best to make a website accessible to all users, especially those with disabilities. WCAG guidelines cover elements like color contrast on pages, sufficient alt text for visual elements, keyboard accessibility, and screen reader compatibility.

If you’re not sure about your club site’s accessibility, check with a web developer to assess WCAG compliance.

Create Great Content

Content is Key

Think of content, such as blogs, podcasts, videos, and membership guides, as the fuel that drives your digital marketing strategy. By creating valuable, high-quality information that’s targeted at specific, well-defined audiences, you’ll attract the visitors who are the right fit for your club and more likely to convert into leads (and ultimately become members).

Besides attracting the right prospective members, good content will considerably help your website’s SEO. Creating and distributing this information is the best way to earn those valuable inbound links that can boost your search rankings and help improve your website’s discoverability—it’s a powerful way to improve off-page SEO.

Blogs and Beyond

Modern content strategy for private clubs has moved beyond sporadic blogging toward a structured approach that signals deep expertise to both Google and prospective members. Think of your club's content as an ecosystem with interconnected parts: main topics like “membership experience,” and subtopics like “junior golf programs” or “dining experiences.’

Don’t think of this as a constant chase, however. Many clubs fall into the trap of producing high volumes of content without a clear strategic purpose. Instead, focus on quality over quantity. This means publishing more substantial pieces that deliver genuine value to prospective and current members. 

When creating content, take off your "hat" as a Membership Director or GM and try to think like a magazine publisher. For example, the goal of your club’s blog should be to publish valuable, non-promotional posts, much like an article in a magazine. Think about how your members describe your club and apply those phrases to your blogging language. To keep a steady stream of content flowing, engage your department heads to help.

What Do I Talk About?

For your content to be effective, you need to start with a member-focused purpose. Ask yourself these questions:

• What questions or challenges are your prospective members looking to answer? What’s getting in their way?

• How can the approach your club offers help them address those issues? What makes this approach different from other clubs?

• What actions can the prospective member take to resolve their questions? (schedule a tour, download a guide, contact for information)

• What immediate value would a prospective member get from joining your club?

• What are the long-term benefits that they could experience, compared to their current situation?

This type of education is not simply about the features and services you offer. Instead, it’s about points of interest for prospective members—considerations when choosing how to spend recreational time and money, solutions your club may offer, and topics that convey your club's culture.

You can also share memorable "stories" that occur at your club. Stories are memorable and shareable online, enabling someone to feel "connected" to your club. Your members most likely aren't sharing your newsletters, but they will share interesting stories. For example, consider writing a member profile article featuring a new family and showcasing why they decided to join.

A simple way to start creating content is to answer the ten most common questions new prospective members ask. Do this once a week for ten weeks, and you will have the foundation of a successful content plan! Consistency is important.

Once those first ten weeks are over, check out your analytics to see which content resonates the most with your audience. If two or three posts receive a significantly higher number of views and inbound links, try to expand on those topics. Remember to let your expertise and passion shine through in your content.

Key Components of a Blog Post:

Generating Leads With Content

Strong content can help attract organic traffic to your website and engage with your audience. However, the primary goal of your content should be to drive conversions.

A conversion occurs when a website visitor takes a desired action, like completing a form to download a piece of advanced content (like a membership guide). Once they complete the form, they become a known lead, and you can begin to establish a relationship with them, deliver useful and engaging content, and ultimately convert them into members.

To achieve this goal, add calls-to-action to your content and link them to landing pages that provide downloadable access to more in-depth materials, such as member testimonial videos, online golf tips, etc. Make sure to include CTAs both in the sidebar of your blog and on every individual post you publish. In addition to image/button CTAs, you can also include text CTAs within the body of your content

Video: The Emotional Gateway to Club Life

Video content is essential for effective club marketing. Unlike text, video can capture the emotional aspects of club membership—the camaraderie, the facilities, the overall experience—in ways that resonate deeply with potential members.

Effective club videos include virtual tours allowing prospects to explore facilities at their own pace, authentic member testimonials sharing genuine experiences, golf pro tips demonstrating expertise, and event highlights showcasing the club's culture and community.

For maximum impact, ensure each video is thoughtfully optimized with descriptive titles, complete transcripts for accessibility and SEO benefits, and clear calls-to-action guiding viewers toward specific next steps in the membership journey. Video content should be integrated across your digital properties, from website pages to social media channels, maximizing its reach and impact.

Whether text, video, or some other form of content, a resource that takes some time and effort to put together will provide the value prospective members seek. The right content offers help to educate and enrich one's knowledge of your club, shortening the sales cycle.

Supercharge Your Social Media

Social media provides a platform for direct communication between your members, prospects, employees, and admirers. Often, clubs use likes and followers to measure social media success, but this is an outdated focus. The business opportunity of social media lies in content distribution and brand visibility online.

When you use social media for marketing, review the analytics the platforms provide and other tools like HubSpot’s social inbox to measure the success of your social media efforts.

There are several social networks you can use, which may feel overwhelming. But you don’t necessarily need to use all of them. It’s important to have a social media strategy and understand which platforms attract most of your prospects. We’ll focus on the six most relevant for clubs: Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, TikTok, and YouTube.

The Art of Social Listening

An important part of leveraging social media for your club is to understand what conversations are happening online and recognizing when you should respond. Here are some helpful tools you can use to monitor your club and industry mentions in social media:

• Google Alerts - Set up multiple Google Alerts for your club, brand, services, leaders, industry terms, etc. The alerts will get delivered directly to your email inbox at the frequency you indicate (e.g., daily or as they happen). It's an easy way to track mentions of your club and relevant keywords on the web.

• Social media management tools - Tools like HubSpot’s Social Monitoring, Hootsuite, and Sprout Social allow you to set up and monitor a live stream so you won’t miss out on what’s being said about your club, your industry, and your services.

• Social Inbox - In addition to providing the social monitoring functionality of a traditional social media management tool, HubSpot’s Social Inbox also connects to your contacts database, color-codes your members, clients and leads, and helps you prioritize your engagement so you can focus your time on the conversations that are most important to your club.

Convert Website Visitors into Leads

By this point, you have optimized your website, launched your blog, and started participating in and your promoting content on social media. After a few months of consistent effort, you should start seeing an increase in website traffic. (But remember, like all marketing strategies, it will take time to see significant results, hang in there consistency will pay off!)

An increase in website visitors is nice but you want to turn that traffic into new leads, and, ultimately, into new members! First, remember everything you’ve done to this point is intended to drive people to your website. The next step is to focus on conversion.

Focus on converting more of your website visitors into interested prospects. To do this, create a compelling content offer for your prospects, create a call-to-action to promote that offer, and launch a landing page with a form for visitors to provide their information in exchange for that offer. Finally, you’ll need to measure and iterate the whole process. In short, the conversion process is:

• Create an offer

• Build a call-to-action

• Build a landing page

• Measure, test, iterate

In this section, we will explore the conversion process in more detail. But first, take a look at how converting visitors into leads fits into what we call the “Inbound Methodology”—the best way to turn strangers into members and promoters of your club:

Nurture Leads into Members

Lead nurturing is the process of developing relationships with your potential members by sending targeted, relevant, and valuable messages to them in a timely manner. The end goal is to get your leads to “raise their hand” and self-select into further engaging with your club.

As a Membership Director, you know that getting leads is fantastic—but not all leads are at the point where they can be considered membership-ready.

Take a look at your existing prospective member pipeline. How long does it typically take for a lead to become a member after his or her first inquiry? We know some prospects are eager to become members as soon as possible, but other prospects don’t follow a quick, linear life-cycle.

Unfortunately for most clubs, interested prospects that don’t follow the linear model—initial contact to information gathering to tour to trial to application—are moved out of the sales funnel and lost. When your prospects "go dark" for one reason or another, this is the time to make sure you stay top of mind in a meaningful way. 

Knowing that there are prospects with different decision-making life-cycles equips you to build some very effective lead nurturing campaigns and leverage this channel to qualify prospective members.

Lead nurturing allows you to engage those prospects that are nearly ready to join, as well as engage those who will take more time to make a decision. Through a lead nurturing system you can send an automated series of email messages to provide information they’re looking for. Furthermore, you can stay in contact with them in meaningful ways as they move from consideration to decision.

Measuring Email Performance

• Click-through rate (CTR) - Click-through rate measures response. Of the people you emailed, this shows how many clicked on your link(s)? The CTR can give you a sense of how compelling your email messages are. Experiment with different subject lines, calls-to-action, and timing to improve your email CTR.

• What about open rate? Open rate is an unreliable metric, as major email services do not load the images necessary for tracking who opened an email. Instead of worrying about open rate, focus on the number of clicks your emails receive.

• Unsubscribe Rate - Unsubscribe rate measures the percentage of recipients who opted out of your email communications. As with open rates, the unsubscribe rate isn’t a reliable picture of your prospect member list’s health. Some leads won’t bother to go through the formal unsubscribe process but will just stop opening, reading, and clicking on your messages.

• Conversion rate measures actions. Measure how many of those clicks turned into reconversions on your landing page. This is the ultimate measure of an email campaign’s effectiveness. The higher your conversion rate, the more relevant and compelling the offer was for your audience. Remember that conversion rates are dependent on factors beyond the original email message, such as the quality of your landing page. Test different landing pages to improve the conversion on your website.

Beyond Email

In today’s highly connected world, nurturing your contacts doesn’t have to be limited to email. Remember that you can and should communicate with your leads via social media or other platforms they use. Given this landscape, you should start thinking about behavior-driven communications that are triggered based on the full history of your lead's interactions, both on and off your site. This is something to tackle once all your other digital building blocks are in place.

Analyze and Refine

Your goal in this step is to identify your most and least effective online efforts to amplify what works and eliminate what doesn’t. You will need an analytics program, like Google Analytics or HubSpot Analytics features, to measure the data. Follow these steps to analyze and refine your strategies:

Conclusion

Doing more with your digital marketing might seem difficult and daunting. But by tackling each marketing tactic step-by-step can make it more manageable and start producing real results. 

And unlike traditional marketing tactics, every digital strategy you deploy can be measured and every lead can be analyzed when you have the right toolbox. Data is what enables the conversation in the boardroom to no longer view marketing as an "investment" but rather a "return on investment". 

We hope that by reading this guide, you’ve gained a practical understanding of how strategic digital marketing can improve your current online efforts to attract and add new members.