Four Key Points To Creating an Effective Swimfari Listing

Although this post is aimed at event organisers it also applies to anyone wanting to list their favourite swim on Swimfari.

Getting your open water swim event noticed can be hard, especially when there are so many others vying for attention. We do make it easier for swimmers to find a suitable swim by allowing filtering by location, month and distance, but with many swims happening around the same time of year competition is fierce.

If you’re an event organiser and have found your swim listed on Swimfari chances are that it was added by us or one of our site’s users. Although we take great care when listing any swims, most information collected is usually copied and pasted from already existing, freely available details found on either your website or other online channels.

By following these four key points to creating an effective Swimfari listing and providing detailed and accurate information your listing will gain more attention and result in increased registrations for your event.

1. Claim Your Event

If you’re in charge of promoting and event and have found your swim on Swimfari but didn’t submit it, you can ‘claim’ the listing as yours by simply clicking on the ‘Claim Listing’ button at the top of the page. But before you do you will need to sign up for a free account so that we can attribute the listing to your username.

Please provide as much detail about who you are and include an email address so we can contact you to verify your details. Once we are satisfied you are the rightful owner of the listing we’ll assign it to you so that you can keep it up-to-date with the correct information.

If you don’t keep your listing up-to-date there is a great chance that participants will over look it and if there is inactivity for a long period of time it will be removed completely.

Also, by having your listing verified it automatically favours your event over others and will appear ahead of those that haven’t been claimed.

2. Create a Lasting Swim Title

When we talk about the Swim Title we’re referring to how it appears in search results and over the top of your feature image. The Article Title however is the main heading at the top of your description.

There are three key factors to creating a swim title that will stand the test of time, they are:

Don’t include years and dates

This is probably the most obvious one, but avoid using a year in your title. If you do use the year as part of your listing a new listing would need to be created for the following year and the old one removed, resulting in broken links to the previous year’s page and therefore poor search results.

The same goes for including the day and date unless your event falls on a public holiday (like Australia Day, Independence Day, etc.).

Avoid using distances

Unless you have a single event with a single distance you should avoid using the distance as a part of your swim title. Distance in open water swimming is all relevant anyway with many factors like conditions, course and swimmer accuracy playing a part.

Most swims now offer multiple distances and so by having only one distance listed in your title would exclude or discourage those looking for other distances.

Get rid of sponsor and series names

Now we know that many swims rely on sponsorship to be able to run their event, and so many would be reluctant to exclude their major naming sponsor… but hear me out.

We’ve already covered why years and dates shouldn’t be included, and although we’d like to think that many sponsors will stay on forever, it’s not always the case. For that reason we recommend not using your sponsor as part of the main Swim Title.

You can however credit the sponsor within in the Article Title above the Swim Description.

For example, your Swim Title may be called ‘Pier to Pier Swim‘ but your Article Title ‘The 20th Anniversary, Sponsor Name Pier to Pier Swim‘.

Ensuring the Swim Title also appears as a whole in the Article Title will improve search engine optimisation (SEO).

3. Write a Unique 300 Word Description

Copying and pasting the contents from your website is the easiest way to submit your listing but can cause conflicts with your website’s SEO. That’s why we recommend you write a unique description for your event listing on Swimfari and make it at least 300 words long. This ensures there’s enough content for search engine to index plus provides meaningful information for users that differs to your event site.

You will also get improved SEO to both your listing and your site as search engines will compare the content from both sites. Penalties are applied to results if they are too similar.

Make sure you also make the text generic enough so that there is less need to update it every year. So avoid using fixed dates in the text and if including a shout out to your sponsor make it a separate parapgraph so it’s easier to spot and update.

4. Customise Your Feature Image

When a swim gets listed we add our own generic image for the Feature Image (the large image at the top of your listing and thumbnails on search results). Use this feature to customise your listing and really stand out from all those generic ones. Listings that use a different images to all the others will also be viewed favourably by search engines.

There are some great ways you can utilise this key piece of screen real estate and could include:

• Showcasing a celebrity swimmer
• Endorsing your major sponsor
• Highlighting the beautiful location of your swim
• Push your event branding
• Show your swims popularity

Include additional images

You also have the ability to include additional images and your fans and followers can also upload their own images to your event page.

Other Great Ways To Improve Your Listing

These four key points to creating an effective Swimfari listing form part of the mandatory requirements and are really just the start. To make your listing stand out even further you can:

• Add a link to a promotional video
• Show who organises the event
• Include your social media channels and a link to your website
• Upload additional images and event photos
• Get people to submit a review

We hope you get the most out of your Swimfari listing.

If you have any questions or comments, leave them in the comments section below.

We hope you’ll soon #SwimNewHorizons