England Squash is the national governing body of squash, helping to support 200,000 people who play squash in England. 

The organisation develops grassroots programmes and provides support and resources to over 500 affiliated local squash clubs. England Squash facilitate squash for people of all ages, and help to grow awareness of the sport nationwide. 

England Squash approached us for content support with the goal of building sustained interest and participation in squash.

The organisation had invested heavily in their Squash Finder tool - an industry-specific search engine to surface squash clubs, classes and coaches across the country. England Squash wanted to improve the rest of its online content to meet this new standard. 

The team at England Squash were also eager to encourage affiliated squash clubs to embrace digital opportunities. By supporting local squash clubs to improve their own websites, England Squash could improve users’ journeys beyond their core site. In doing so, England Squash sought to raise the profile of squash at a national and local level. 

Complicating matters, England Squash needed to complete this project in time for the Commonwealth Games to capitalise on renewed interest in their sport. They also wanted their modest budget to support hundreds of independent sites. As such, we had to devise a concise solution to maximise resources and support non-digital volunteers in keeping their web content fresh.

Squash is a sport that has been around for more than a century, but there are still plenty of people who don’t know much - or anything at all - about it. We wanted to help the team at England Squash expand its audience and engage with audiences from complete beginners to professional players.

Our content team met with England Squash to identify areas for improvement across the national site. We quickly spotted many optimisation opportunities, so we opted for a consultative approach to provide the client-side marketing team with expert guidance.

We shared data insights alongside how-to guides and detailed training resources to empower the in-house team at the England Squash national office. We provided best practice guidance documentation and produced an in-depth training video for the England Squash team to refer to.

Multiple duplicate pages and confused content were leading to poor site performance. To revive the on-site content, we began with in-depth keyword research to understand what England Squash’s target users were searching for. In doing so, we were also able to identify gaps in the national site’s content library.

We then allocated a set of primary and secondary keywords to each page on the site. This approach to Keyword Mapping informs the on-page copy and prevents content from competing with other pages on the England Squash site. We gave each page a unique purpose, represented in its set of target phrases. In doing so, we ensured that every page offered new valuable information for a potential user and no two pages were the same.

With a short timeline ahead of the Commonwealth Games, we prioritised and tackled the site section by section. Meanwhile, the client-side team could get underway with optimising their content.

England Squash hosts a national scheme to encourage children to join their sporting community: Squash Stars. We recognised that this scheme represented some of the most important pages on the site for the client-side marketing team. 

Conducting a review of each page in this section, we offered explicit examples of how and where England Squash could put our training and guidance into practice. 

Rather than rewriting the content ourselves, we maximised time and budget to offer as much expert guidance to the England Squash team as possible. Our recommendations for Squash Stars should produce exemplar pages from which the England Squash team (and their affiliated clubs) can draw inspiration. 

To transform over 500 affiliated England Squash club websites, we needed to empower clubs to get involved. Although they are the governing body, England Squash does not have direct access to edit local squash websites. Instead, each club is run by volunteers, many of whom don’t have a lot of digital marketing experience.

The England Squash team is keen to empower individual clubs and wants to create valuable resources as a gift to all the clubs they support.

Our solution was to create training videos that the team could share with the local clubs. Knowing that club volunteers already have a lot on their plates, we provided advice in the most digestible way possible.

Our consultancy project culminated in a 6-part series of 2-minute videos, each offering a single quick win tip that would immediately help local clubs’ SEO:

Introduction: 5 simple steps to SEO

• Step 1: Answer FAQs directly

• Step 2: Optimise your metadata

• Step 3: Shrink large image files

• Step 4: Seek backlinks to your site

• Step 5: Update your Google Business profile.

These videos are the correct length for England Squash to share across social channels to encourage widespread engagement. While we focused on simple improvements, we also signed posted towards longer-term opportunities for improvement so local clubs can advance their websites on their terms.

By putting content first, we have helped England Squash to reach its target audience at an important time in the world of sport. We provided all the tools and data insights that the England Squash team (and the wider network of independent squash clubs) need to improve their sites. 

We continue to work with the team at England Squash on a consultative basis, and we look forward to further collaborations.