Website review · armorypickleball.net

What I found on your website

An independent review of all four club pages, prepared for Armory Pickleball. Yours to keep and act on however you like — including not at all.

Prepared for
Ryan WatkinOperations Manager, Marysville
Date
10 September 2026
Reviewed
11 pagesPlus sitemap and technical setup
By
Sean KnoxYour Week Back

Ryan — I ran a full audit on the Armory site and wanted to hand you the results, free.

No catch and nothing to sign. I do this kind of work, I was curious about the site, and what I found was interesting enough that it seemed worth writing up properly rather than sitting on it.

Two things up front. First, the site is in better shape than most club sites I look at — there's real work in it, and I've listed what's working before anything else, because it matters. Second, there are a handful of things quietly costing you bookings, and one of them is on your club's page specifically.

I also went ahead and built out a version of the site with the fixes applied, so you can see what the difference actually looks like rather than taking my word for it. There's a link further down.

You're welcome to take this document, hand it to whoever manages the site, and never speak to me again — the findings work just as well that way. If you only do one thing, do the first one below. It takes two minutes and it's costing you money today.

Sean Knox Your Week Back · yourweekback.com
If you do one thing

Google is telling people the Marysville club hasn't opened

This is the single highest-value fix on the site, it's on your club, and it takes about two minutes in Squarespace.

The problem

Your Marysville search result says "coming to Marysville"

The Marysville page itself is fine — full open-play schedule, three leagues, coaches, all current. But the description attached to that page, which is the grey text Google shows under the blue link, was written before the club opened and never updated.

What Google shows people today
Armory Pickleball is coming to Marysville, WA. Sign up for our newsletter to learn more about the new location!

Somebody in Marysville searching "pickleball near me" sees that, concludes you aren't open yet, and books somewhere else. It has been doing that for as long as the club has been open.

Paste this in instead — 134 characters, fits Google's limit
Armory Pickleball Marysville: 4 indoor courts at 9315 State Ave. Open daily 5am–11pm for memberships, open play, leagues, and coaching.

Where to change it: in Squarespace, open the Marysville page → Page Settings → SEO tab → the "Search Engine Description" field. Replace what's there, save. Google usually picks it up within a week or two.

Do this one whatever else you decide. It costs nothing and it's the clearest lost revenue on the site.

Credit where it's due

What's already working

Worth saying plainly, because a lot of what follows is criticism and this part is genuinely good. Whoever has been looking after this site knows what they're doing.

  • Your page titles name the city and the service. "Bellingham's Premier Pickleball Club," "Pickleball Coaches in Bellingham, Ferndale, Ellensburg, and Marysville." That's exactly right, and most clubs get it wrong.
  • Every page has a written description. Not auto-generated — actually written. That's unusual and it's why the Marysville one being out of date stands out rather than being the norm.
  • The coaching page is substantial. Nearly 2,500 words and every coach pictured. That page is doing real work for you and should be protected in any future change.
  • Short URLs redirect properly. Someone typing armorypickleball.net/marysville lands on the right page, and Google is told which version is canonical. That's a detail a lot of sites get wrong.
  • Each club has its own page, with hours, address, phone extension and schedule. The bones of a good multi-location site are there.
Findings

What's costing you, in order

Five things beyond the Marysville description. Two are worth fixing soon; the rest are worth knowing about.

Google doesn't have an address for any of your four clubs

Fix soon

Behind every website there's a hidden block of information that tells Google what kind of business it is and where. Yours exists, but the address field is blank — literally an empty space where "525 N. State St." should be. Same on all four club pages.

"address": "" ← this is what Google receives "@type": "LocalBusiness"

Nothing on the site tells a search engine, in the format it actually reads, that there is a pickleball club at 9315 State Ave in Marysville. The address is visible to a human reading the page; it isn't in the part Google uses to build map results.

What it costs: this is the main input for "pickleball near me" and Google Maps placement. For a business with four physical venues, it's the biggest technical gap on the site. Partial free fix: Squarespace has a Business Information panel under Settings — filling in the address and phone there populates some of this automatically. Worth doing today.

Marysville is missing from Apple Maps

Fix soon

Searching Apple Maps for "Armory Pickleball" returns two clubs:

Armory Pickleball · 525 N State St, Bellingham listed Armory Pickleball · 1500 W Dolarway Rd Ste 801, Ellensburg listed Armory Pickleball · 9315 State Ave, Marysville not found

Apple Maps is a separate system from Google with its own listings, claimed through Apple Business Connect. Bellingham and Ellensburg are in there. Marysville isn't.

Apple holds roughly 60% of the US smartphone market, and on every one of those phones Apple Maps is the default — it's what Siri answers, what Spotlight searches, and what opens when someone taps an address in a text. A player in Marysville asking their iPhone "pickleball near me" is being shown everyone except you.

Test it in fifteen seconds: open Maps on an iPhone, search "Armory Pickleball," and count the clubs. Then ask Siri for pickleball near Marysville. The fix is free — Apple Business Connect costs nothing, the listing just has to be created and verified. One more thing to look at: the two listings that do exist are filed under two different categories. Which one is right is your call — but they should probably match, since category is part of what decides which "near me" searches surface you.

You have five good blog posts and nothing on the site links to them

Free win

There's a blog at armorypickleball.net/blog with five posts — why indoor play is better for skill development, why players plateau, the Washington league, and two more. They're well written and they target exactly the kind of searches that bring in new players.

I checked every link on your homepage. There are 59 of them, and none goes to the blog. It's not in the top menu, not in the footer, not anywhere. The only reason I found it is that it appears in your sitemap file.

What it costs: nothing about those posts is wrong — they just can't be reached. Adding one link in the footer or the main menu makes them work. This is the cheapest improvement on the list. One thing to check: two of the posts are dated 2019, which looks like a Squarespace default rather than a real date. Worth correcting while you're in there.

There's no way in for someone who's never played

Worth doing

The only routes into the club from the website are: walk in, call, or click Join Us — which hands you straight to CourtReserve or PlayByPoint to buy something. There's nothing in between.

Someone who's curious but has never held a paddle has no low-commitment option. No "book a tour," no free intro session, no way to raise a hand without committing to a purchase in a booking system they've never seen.

What it costs: beginners are the hardest players to convert and the ones who stay longest once they do — people learn at a club and then stay at that club. Every enquiry that isn't a phone call is currently going uncaptured.

The membership page doesn't explain membership

Worth doing

It's 127 words. It doesn't say what a membership includes, how it differs from a punch card, what drop-in costs, or which of the three applies to which club. To find any of that out you have to leave the site and work it out inside CourtReserve or PlayByPoint.

What it costs: membership is the product. This is also, I'd guess, a decent share of the questions your front desk answers on the phone — and every one of those is a question the website could have answered at 9pm on a Sunday.

Two smaller things

Good to know

Your homepage title is just "Armory Pickleball." Every other page names the city and the service; the homepage — which carries more weight with Google than any other page — says only the brand name. It's a one-line change.

The site is heavier than it needs to be. The homepage pulls 60 separate files and about 558 KB to display roughly 150 words, taking about 1.6 seconds on a good desktop connection. Most of your traffic is someone on a phone in a car park deciding where to play tonight, and it's noticeably slower there.

Also worth a tidy: your sitemap includes a duplicate copy of the homepage at /home, plus four account login pages that shouldn't be submitted to Google.
Built, not described

I went ahead and made some of these

Rather than send you a list of recommendations, I built a working version so you can click around it. It's a private preview — not public, not indexed by Google, and not connected to your domain in any way.

Each club, properly described

Address, coordinates, phone extension, opening hours and court count for Bellingham, Ellensburg, Marysville and Ferndale — in the format Google reads for map results.

Membership explained first

Membership, punch card and drop-in side by side, with the right booking system named per city, before anyone gets handed to CourtReserve or PlayByPoint.

A door for beginners

Book a tour on every page. Alongside it I've mocked up a free 30-minute Monday beginner class — that's a suggestion, not something you run today. It's the cheapest way I know to convert people who've never held a paddle.

Marysville says it's open

Because it is. Every page description written to match what the club actually offers today, not what it offered before opening.

Built to stay fast

A fraction of the files, and every photo sized for the space it actually sits in rather than served at full resolution. Most of that difference shows up on phones.

Everything you already have

Your coach roster, your open-play schedules, your booking systems, your blog posts. Nothing that's working today gets thrown away.

Open the preview

Have a look on your phone as well as a desktop — that's where the difference is most obvious.

Three ways forward

What you do next is genuinely up to you

Do nothing

Entirely reasonable. Fix the Marysville description anyway — it takes two minutes and it's the one thing I'd push on regardless of what you decide about anything else.

Do it yourselves

Most of what's in this document can be done inside Squarespace by whoever looks after the site now. Take the findings and hand them over. No credit needed and nothing owed.

Hire me

If you'd rather it was done and stayed done, the offer's below. The preview is already built — most of the work you'd be paying for exists already.

The offer

If you want me to do it

Priced per club, so it scales with you rather than needing renegotiating when Ferndale opens.

Move the site over, then keep it current
One setup fee, then a monthly rate per open club.
ItemWhat it coversPrice
Migration Move everything across, port the full coach roster and the five blog posts, redirect every existing link so nothing breaks, switch the domain over. Your Squarespace account stays live and paid through the changeover. $2,950
one-off
Site Care Schedule changes, league and event updates, offer changes, new coach profiles, hosting, monitoring, and a short monthly report on what the site is actually doing — enquiries, tour requests, which club is converting, and your ad spend and return if you're running any. $175
per club / month
Today, three clubs open Bellingham, Ellensburg, Marysville $525/mo
When Ferndale opens Adds automatically, no renegotiation $700/mo
Terms, plainly
  • Twelve months on Site Care, then month to month. The domain switches over on the day Site Care starts, so the site is never live without someone maintaining it.
  • You own everything. No exit fee at the end of the term, and ownership transfer is included. If you leave, you take the site with you and I'll help you move it. No hostage-taking.
  • Changes are included, not billed hourly. Send an email, it's done — usually same day. That's what the monthly is for.
Optional — map listings, managed

At $50 per club per month I'll claim, verify and maintain your Google Business Profile and your Apple Business Connect listing for each location — hours, photos, holiday closures, addresses, phone extensions. Both kept matching each other and matching the website, which is the part that actually moves you up in "near me" results.

Not included: replying to reviews. Those should come from someone who was actually there and knows what happened. I'll flag new ones in the monthly report so nothing sits unanswered, but the words should be yours.

Three clubs is $150/month, four when Ferndale opens is $200. Worth saying plainly: claiming the listings is free and you can absolutely do it yourselves — the finding above stands whether or not you hire anyone. What you'd be paying for is that they stay right twelve months from now, when hours change and nobody remembers which of the two systems still says 8pm.

Included — independent reporting on your ads

If you're running Google or Meta ads, I'll pull that spend into the same monthly report at no extra cost: what you spent per club, what it returned, cost per enquiry, and which campaigns are quietly burning money.

I don't run ads and I don't want to. That's the point — whoever manages your ad spend shouldn't also be the one grading it. You keep running them however you run them now, and you get a second set of eyes with no stake in the answer telling you whether the numbers hold up.

Optional — a self-editing portal

At $250 per club per month I'll build your team a simple editing portal: open-play schedules, events, offers and coach details, updated by your own staff in plain English, without touching code or waiting on me. Includes the build, training for whoever's doing it, and me as the backstop if something breaks.

Why it costs more than having me do it: making a change myself takes a few minutes. Building a place where your team can safely make changes across four clubs, keeping it working, and sorting out anything that goes sideways is the bigger job. Some clubs want that control; others would rather never think about the website again. Both are fine — this is the version for the first kind.

For context on the monthly: at a typical membership rate, $525 is under five memberships a month spread across three clubs. If the site brings in five players who stay, it has paid for itself and the migration inside the first year.

How this was done

This review was carried out over several passes rather than a single sitting, with the final verification completed on 10 September 2026. Eleven pages were examined — the homepage, all four club pages, membership, coaching, punch cards, contact, events and the blog — plus the sitemap, the robots file and the technical setup behind each page. Every figure quoted is measured, not estimated: word counts, page weights, load times, link counts and the contents of the hidden business-information block were all read directly from the live site, and re-checked before this document was sent.

The Apple Maps finding was verified separately by searching Apple Maps directly rather than through the website.

Not covered: how the site currently ranks for specific searches, which sites link to you, and how the pages render on specific phone models. Those need access to your Google Search Console and a device test, and I'd want both before making promises about traffic. Nothing in this document depends on them.

The preview site is a private demo. It isn't public, isn't indexed, and isn't connected to your domain.