While the best way to get traffic to one’s website is to incorporate SEO elements, there are other factors that can affect a site’s visibility in browser platforms. A sports website for one can have better search page ranking by considering other factors or features that make sports fans or site users visit a sports website regularly; or better yet, frequently.
Actually, the full set of SEO elements needed by a sports website depends on the type of sports audience to attract and on the reason why that target audience will want to visit regularly. 
It’s about getting the right people to visit the site for the right reason:and the right technology e.,g. sports organization membership recruitment, sports-specific events promotion and ticket sales, or sports news and betting statistics.
Some Tips on How to Make a Sports Website Attractive to the Right Audience
Getting ranked high in the search engine pages is not the end goal but it’s the best start when looking to attract the right set of audience.
Always Start with Keyword Research and Continue with Keyword Monitoring
Keyword research is never out of the picture and should in fact include text in support of local SEO strategy. Reference to local SEO simply denotes being placed in front of searchers coming from the same geographic location in which the sports website operates as an organization or as a business entity. Keywords for local SEO includes adding the name of the state, city or municipality to the focus keywords appearing as relevant texts of a sport site’s content.
It will also help to use long-tail keywords by adding the type of sports (football, baseball, basketball, etc.) or the specific purpose (sports news, betting odds, statistics). The text to add basically boils down to knowing what the target audience wants and needs as info when launching a search query.
However, it’s also important to test the effectiveness of the focus keywords by using an online tool to rank check its search engine visibility status.
Make a Sports Website Mobile Responsive and Mobile Friendly
Owners of sports website should have awareness that mobile traffic has become an integral Internet aspect. Google has actually noticed the continuously growing population of Internet visitors using their mobile phones or tablets. If a website is not mobile friendly, a Google mobile search will automatically exclude non-mobile friendly websites from the search page results.
What makes a site mobile-friendly? A site is mobile friendly if it is responsive. This means the theme used as layout and web design, allow the pages to adjust or calibrate the elements and their placements, to best fit the width of the mobile device screen.
Moreover, a mobile-friendly website is lightweight, which means, it will not take long for the server to build the web page requested by the mobile device user, or included as search page results of a mobile browser. This is important for sports websites especially when adding images. Bear in mind that the fewer the codes that a server works on when sending a page, the faster it can be accessed by mobile visitors.