SEO Optimization for Edmonton Rowing Club

PROJECT

Industry: rowing sports club, Canada

Client goal: increase visibility for local queries (“rowing edmonton”, “rowing lessons”, “rowing club near me”), improve on-page semantics and page structure so Google can better understand the site.

PROBLEM

The initial audit showed the site looked tidy for users but didn’t convey a clear topical structure to search engines:

Title and Meta Description were present, but not optimized for actual search intent

Heading hierarchy was mixed up (H1/H2/H3 out of order), with occasional duplicate H1

Weak internal linking — key pages were isolated from each other

Images lacked ALT tags and several files were too heavy (1–3 MB)

sitemap.xml and robots.txt didn’t reflect the full content structure

SOLUTION

We executed targeted on-page SEO optimization without changing the design:

Rewrote Title + Meta Description with a local keyword focus (club, lessons, Edmonton)

Normalized the H1–H3 hierarchy (single H1 per page, consistent H2/H3 order)

Added contextual internal links between club, training, membership and events pages

Optimized images (compression, WebP, manual ALT tags)

Updated sitemap.xml and robots.txt to match the actual site architecture

Delivered a keyword table for upcoming programs and events

Google re-crawled the site with no indexing errors

Visibility for “rowing edmonton” and “rowing club near me” improved from #19 → #11

Traffic to Membership and Learn to Row increased by +22%

The site is now structurally sound for search engines and ready to scale