Featured in the CW’s hit series Breaking Pointe and a member of Ballet West, Allison DeBona is coming to Cleveland on March 2nd to create a ballet experience of a lifetime. Not only will she be teaching two personalized master classes (with classes holding no more than 40 students each), but she will also hold a Q&A session after each class for the students to ask any questions about her career and her life on the stage. I would love to know how many pointe shoes she goes through in a season!

Not only will you get to experience taking class with DeBona, the master class will be held at the Gund Dance Studio right at Playhouse Square in the heart of Cleveland along with legendary ballet class accompanist John Parkinson.

The price of this ballet class also includes an autographed headshot of DeBona, a photo with DeBona, a Ballet in Cleveland dance bag, a Ballet in Cleveland water bottle and even a nutrition bar from Real Food Barre including a meet and greet with the Real Food Barre founders, Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre principal dancer Julia Erickson and Aaron Ingley.

Limited space is available and spots at the barre are going quickly so be sure to register as soon as possible or by calling 330-285-5779.

The post Ballet in Cleveland to Present Master Class with Allison DeBona appeared first on Dance Marketing | To The Pointe.

You need website analytics to find out for certain! Website analytics, most commonly Google Analytics, keeps track of the amount of traffic that your website gets, where people go when they are on your website, how long they spend browsing your website, what search words they used to find your website, and even keep track of any goals you set up for your website. Peter Drucker, management consultant whose writings contributed to the philosophical and practical foundations of the modern business, said, “What gets measured, gets managed.” This couldn’t be more true! If you are not measuring your online marketing efforts, how can you manage or strategize them? A few of the insights analytics provides is where your website traffic is coming from, what pages on your website is performing the best and tracking website goals.

How do people find your site? A Traffic Sources report will allow you to see the amount of traffic you receive, as well as the effectiveness, from referrals, direct traffic, organic or paid campaigns. Referral traffic refers to other websites that link back to your website, for example if you post a link in your Facebook status, you can see how many people clicked through your link and visited your website. Direct traffic refers to those visitors who typed in your domain directly into their browser address bar or have your site bookmarked. Organic refers to traffic received by visitors clicking on your organic listing in a search engine (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc). Paid campaigns refer to any paid search, or pay per click, campaigns you may be running. With this report, you will be able to see how each of these traffic sources performed in regards to how long they stayed on your site, what pages they visited and if they completed any goals. You can also utilize the Traffic Sources report to find out geographically where your users are coming from. If you are an Ohio based business, but are getting a ton of traffic from California, you can begin to dig into why this might be happening and tailor your efforts to market to your location.

Another area of importance when looking at your analytics, is finding out what pages on your website perform the best. While a lot of traffic will tend to hit your homepage, you will want to analyze other pages on your site that receive traffic. With a Pages report, you will be able to identify other pages that may need to be rewritten or redesigned to be more effective and meet the expectation of your visitors. This report will also show you if your entry pages have a high bounce rate. Entry pages are the web pages that visitors enter your site while the bounce rate is the percentage of visitors  that only see one page on your site. The lower the bounce rate the better! You don’t want your visitors to “bounce” off of your site too quickly, this tends to mean that they did not find the information they were looking for. By analyzing the data of the Pages report, you could decide that you need to design some effective landing pages for visitors from different traffic sources to make it the best user experience possible.

The last segment of analytics we’ll touch on today would be Goal tracking. Do you have any forms on your website? Whether it be for an email newsletter sign up or a contact us form, Goals allow you to measure how many times these forms were submitted. Each time a visitor completes a Goal, a conversion is logged in your account. You can even set up values for your Goals. So, if you feel that a contact us form is worth $10.00, you can track that within your analytics account. You can even track simpler goals such as visitors hitting a certain page within your website, visitors staying on your site for a specific amount of time or longer, or even visitors viewing a specific number of pages on your site. If you want to take your Goals one step further, you can create a Goal Funnel. When utilizing a Goal Funnel, you can specify a path you would expect your visitors to take to reach a Goal. By setting up this funnel, you can see where a visitor enters or exits the funnel and will give you insights has to how optimized your Goal path really is.

The above is just scratching the surface of what web analytics has to offer your website, and even your business. Once you have analytics set up, you can begin to analyze your traffic so you can achieve better outcomes. Don’t have time? We can help! Feel free to contact us with your questions!

The post Website Analytics – You’ve Got to Measure to Manage appeared first on Dance Marketing | To The Pointe.

We are pulling together an expansive list of dance studios, dance companies, dance instructors, and even dance retailers in one user-friendly space. This not only will allow your future customers to find information about you online, it can also help boost your online marketing efforts. There are two options for submission:

1. Free Directory Listing: this type of listing does not cost anything, and will run for a full year
2. Premium Directory Listing: this type of listing costs $5.00, but will include 3 images and will last indefinitely

In just a few minutes, you could have a full dance directory listing including your website’s URL, your social profiles, location and even short and long descriptions of your business features and goals.

So, what are you waiting for? Sign up today! Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you need any help!

The post To The Pointe Dance Directory appeared first on Dance Marketing | To The Pointe.

Improve Tags and Keywords

Make your dance studio website work for you locally. Be sure to optimize all of the local elements on your site with location specific keywords including cities, zip codes, regions and even street names. Your title tags, meta tag descriptions and meta tag keywords should reflect your location with keywords containing location modifiers. Here are some rules of thumb when handling these search engine optimization elements.

The title tag is so important because it is the first thing the user sees about your site and will absolutely effect your site’s search engine rankings. Most studios fall into the trap of simply using their studio name as their website title, but with the characters available for your title tag (up to 70 characters) you should use this space to display the ‘what’ and the ‘where’ of your business.

Original Title Tag: “Dolly Dinkle Studio“

Updated Title Tag: “Dolly Dinkle Dance Studio | Cleveland, Ohio Dance Classes“

To optimize this title tag, I took the above original tag and defined both what type of “studio” this business was, as well as, where this studio was located and what the studio offers.

Your meta tag description is not something that appears on your website, but along with the title tag is the first thing a user sees in regards to your website. While the meta tag description is not used by search engines to effect your rankings, it is where information is provided to users searching for services in under 150 characters. I look at a meta tag description as an informative advertisement for your website.

Original Meta Tag Description: “Dolly Dinkle Studio… Specializing in ballet, tap and jazz lessons with professional, certified instructors can teach you how to dance these styles in no…“

Updated Meta Tag Description: “Dolly Dinkle Dance Studio offers dance classes in Cleveland, Ohio. Learn the art of ballet, modern, tap and jazz with our professional dance instructors.“

The most common meta tag description mistakes tend to be not having a meta tag description (which then allows the search engines to pull content directly from the site which usually gets cut off and may read awkwardly), having too many keywords in the meta tag description, or not having enough keywords. Per the updated meta tag description, you’ll see I’ve included the ‘what’, the ‘where’ and the services that are offered.

Lastly, your meta tag keywords should also be strategic in how they are crafted. While the meta tag keywords are considered to be the least important of all of the meta data from search engines, we still recommend optimizing for your most important keywords.

Original Meta Tag Keywords: “dolly dinkle, dolly dinkle studio, dance studio“

Updated Meta Tag Keywords: “dolly dinkle dance studio, dance studio cleveland, dance class cleveland, dance lessons 44115“

Meta tag keywords should contain between 4 and 10 keywords. Be sure to separate them with commas and make sure these keywords appear somewhere in the content of your site.

All of these meta tags should be different per each page of your website!

Clearly Display Business Info 

Display your business information clearly on your homepage, as well as, within the interior pages of your site. As a local business, you want people to be able to find your location so listing your studio’s address is pertinent along with clearly displaying your phone number  and even hours of operation.

Utilize Images and Videos

Showing a photo of your studio and videos of your classes can represent who you are as a business as well as take your local optimization to the next level. Here are some tips for boosting your local search optimizations with the images and videos on your site:

• Utilize high quality photos on your site. While this may not effect your search engine rankings, you do want to make sure the images your use are professional and clean.
• Optimize the file name of any photo or video on your site. Most times images saved on your computer are a photo number, date or some other mishmash of letters. Carefully craft your file name by including keywords and locations such as, “Dolly-Dinkle-Cleveland-Dance-Studio.jpg”.
• Add descriptive ALT text to each of your photos and videos. ALT is basically the description of your photo as if a user could not see the image. Don’t forget to add a location in your description.
• Include your optimized images across all of your local directories and your social profiles.

Submit Your Site to Local Directories

So many of your users are searching within the search engines to find locations for dance classes and more than likely they are going to stumble upon local business directory sites that list all of the studios in their area. If you haven’t submitted to the following sites you are missing out!

Google Places
YP (YellowPages)
Yelp
Local.com
Manta
SuperPages
Yahoo! Local
DexOne
Find a Dance Studio

There are a ton more, but this is a great place to start!

Build Out Social Profiles

Along with the local directories, build out all of your social profiles including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google+, Flickr, Pinterest and Instagram. Again, these are places that your students and parents live, when they aren’t in your classroom! Make sure you fill in every bit of information you can about your studio within these profiles including your address, phone number, hours of operation, services offered and even awards achieved.

With the above strategy you could gain so much more visibility online and increase the traffic reaching your site. Get help with your local search optimization with a professional today!

The post Optimizing Your Dance Studio for Local Search appeared first on Dance Marketing | To The Pointe.

Diablo Ballet of Walnut Creek, California is doing just that by pushing the boundary with a new piece called The Web Ballet. They are actually asking their followers to suggest ideas for this new ballet by Tweeting to Diablo Ballet’s Twitter Page (@DiabloBallet) about how they want the dancers to feel, the entire mood of the work and even specific dance moves or steps they would like to see with the hashtag #DiabloWebBallet.

They can also help decide the musical selection. Followers can visit Diablo Ballet’s YouTube page and “Like” their favorite out of 3 pieces composed by Sibelius, Vivaldi or Bach.

These are the types of risks and challenges more dance companies should take on. Being able to merge the classical nature of dance with a technology focused generation will not only grow their following, but will help maintain audience through online interaction. For example, I followed Diablo Ballet on Twitter via my personal Twitter handle @akrejny and within minutes I was followed back. A personal touch like that can go a long way with building rapport.

If  you are interested in participating, you have until the February 14th deadline so start getting your creative ideas flowing! After the 14th, seven of the best suggestions will be chosen by Diablo Ballet’s dancer Robert Dekkers and Diablo Ballet’s Artistic Director Lauren Jonas. In just two weeks, The Web Ballet will be performed on March 1st and 2nd at Shadelands Arts Center Auditorium in Walnut Creek, California. The users who tweeted the winning suggestions will receive free tickets to the performance.

The post Diablo Ballet – Creating the World’s First Web Ballet appeared first on Dance Marketing | To The Pointe.