More than ever before, consumers are evaluating vendors online before making any kind of inquiry or purchase. Where dance studios are concerned, prospective clients are combing through program or class descriptions, looking for recent pictures or videos on social media and, above all else, reading user reviews.
With all this in mind, your dance business should be catering to community members using a refined online marketing strategy. Through webpage text, your site’s overall design, blog content or even YouTube clips, your online presence must be top-notch. The sum of those parts should make your audience care about not only your services but the lifestyle benefits they’ll receive in the process.
Here are four things to keep in mind to ensure a stellar online presence.
Make Sure You’re Ranking Well for Search Engine Results Pages
How does anyone find out about local businesses these days? Through Google or your search engine of choice, of course.
If you want your dance studio to stand out among all the other recreation options in your community, potential participants need to be able to find you at or near the top of search engine results pages (SERPs). If your dance business is getting buried in those rankings, here are some quick fixes you can make to change that trajectory:
- Do. Keyword. Research. Free tools, such as Google’s Keyword Planner and Moz’s Keyword Explorer, will help you know exactly what terms are searched the most and which ones have the least amount of competition.
- Make sure at least some of those keywords (hopefully the ones with the biggest search volume) are in your webpages’ titles, meta descriptions, and body text.
Optimize Your Website
One of the first and most effective ways to improve engagement is to have an optimized website. According to Sweor (2017), 57% of all mobile users will not recommend a business if their mobile website is poorly designed or unresponsive. Optimized websites not only look better, but they adapt to the device a person uses, be it desktop, tablet or mobile.
A more responsive website also means it loads faster, that people spend more time browsing your content, and eventually, it ranks higher in search results. According to Google (2017), mobile websites that load in 5 seconds or less will end in a viewing session that’s 70% longer than their slower counterparts. In addition to ranking higher, you will generate more traffic and ultimately acquire more customers.
Create New Content Regularly
Having an optimized website is the first step to improving your online visibility. The next step is to create new content to deliver information to your community promptly. When done regularly, this can help your dance studio gain top-of-mind awareness in the minds of potential customers.
You can also audit your current website content to ensure everything is easy to find and share. This exercise provides an opportunity to review and update outdated things such that they remain relevant.
Leverage Social Media (sponsored by our partner Amilia)
Providing great and engaging content to your social media followers is one thing but having the right business tools that enable you to increase your online presence is crucial to your longevity in this industry. Our Canadian partner Amilia offers a complete solution to studio owners looking to grow and promote their studio online. With their FREE Facebook integration module, Studios can easily promote classes and activities right to Facebook thus helping you reach a new level of success and visibility with minimal capital and admin work.
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Written by: Amilia + Tracey of Beyond Dance Consulting