Getting found on Google
How your JoinCPR booking site ranks on Google: what happens automatically, what to fill in, the Search and SEO settings, Search Console and your sitemap.
Updated · JoinCPR help center
Your student portal is built so that Google can list your course pages for searches like "BLS classes in Denver" or "CPR certification near me". Most of that work is automatic. This article explains what happens on its own, the few things worth filling in, and how to connect Google Search Console so you can watch it work.
What the portal does automatically
- Course pages are your landing pages. Every active course has a permanent page at
your-portal/courses/{course-name}with a title like "BLS Provider Classes in Denver, CO | Your Company", the description, duration, certification validity, price, the list of upcoming dates with Register buttons, and links to your other courses. These pages stay online between class runs, which is what lets them build up a ranking over time. - Class pages are listed while they are upcoming. Each public, published class is described to Google as an event (date, time, venue, price, availability), so it can appear in Google's event results. Online classes are marked as online events with "Online" in place of the city, and the meeting link is never published. Google's event results only list classes held in person, so online classes are found through their course pages. Once the class has ended or is cancelled, its address sends visitors and search engines to the course page instead of a dead link.
- The group training page is a landing page too.
your-portal/request-trainingcarries a title like "Group and Corporate CPR Training in Denver, CO | Your Company" and sits in your sitemap, so it can rank for corporate training searches. See Group training requests. - Your home page introduces the business to Google as a local business: name, logo, phone, email, address and the area you serve, taken from your settings and your first location.
- A sitemap at
your-portal/sitemap.xmllists the home page, the course list, every active course and every upcoming public class, and updates itself whenever you save a course or class. - Only the right pages are offered for indexing. The schedule, course list, course pages and public class pages are. Checkout, student accounts, the client portal, certificate verification, embeds and private class pages are marked so search engines leave them out.
- Page titles, descriptions and social previews are written for you from your company name, city, course names and descriptions. Sharing a course or class link on Facebook, LinkedIn or in a text message shows the course image (or your logo) and a proper title.
What to fill in
The automatic text is only as good as the data behind it. In order of impact:
- A location with a city and state under Locations. The first active location's city becomes the "in Denver, CO" part of every title and the address Google shows for your business. Without one, titles simply omit the city.
- Company phone, email and website under General settings. They appear in the business listing and on course pages that have no upcoming dates.
- Course descriptions on each course. The first sentence or two becomes the snippet under your page in search results, so lead with what the course is and who it is for ("AHA BLS Provider certification for nurses, EMTs and dental staff…"). Add a course image; it is used as the preview picture.
- Your logo under Branding, used wherever a course has no image.
- A custom domain under Domains. Once it is active, search engines are told that
classes.yourdomain.comis the real address of every page, so the ranking builds up on your own domain rather than on the JoinCPR subdomain.
Tip
Name courses the way people search: "BLS Provider" or "CPR and First Aid" rather than internal codes like "Course 3". The course name is the page title, its heading and its web address.
Search & SEO settings
Settings → Student Portal → Search & SEO has three optional fields. See Student Portal settings for the details.
- City or service area replaces the detected city in titles, for example "the Denver metro area" or "Boulder and Longmont".
- Business description (up to 160 characters) replaces the automatic sentence shown under your home page in search results.
- Google Search Console verification proves to Google that the portal is yours (below).
Each course also has an optional Search result description on its edit form, for when you want a hand-written snippet instead of the start of the course description.
Google Search Console
Search Console is Google's free tool for seeing which searches bring people to your portal and whether every page has been indexed.
- Go to search.google.com/search-console, add a property of type URL prefix and enter your portal address (
https://classes.yourdomain.com/orhttps://your-business.joincpr.com/). - Choose the HTML tag verification method and copy the tag Google shows.
- Paste it into Google Search Console verification under Settings → Student Portal and click Save. Pasting the whole tag or just the code both work.
- Back in Search Console click Verify.
- Open Sitemaps in Search Console and submit
sitemap.xml. The full address is shown under the verification field.
After a few days the Performance report shows the searches, clicks and average position for each page, and Pages shows what has been indexed. You can also use URL inspection to ask Google to crawl a new course page straight away.
Google Business Profile
Local searches ("CPR classes near me") are dominated by the map results, which come from Google Business Profile, not from your website. Set one up at business.google.com if you have not already, use the same business name, phone and address as in JoinCPR, and put your portal's address (or your custom domain) as the website. Add your courses as services or products and post upcoming class dates as updates.
What to expect
- Search engines usually pick up a new portal within a few days of the sitemap being submitted, and rankings settle over weeks to months. Pages with more detail, and businesses with a Google Business Profile and a custom domain, tend to do better.
- Renaming a course changes its web address, but the old address keeps working and forwards to the new one, so nothing you have shared breaks and the ranking carries over.
- If your subscription lapses, every portal page shows "registration is closed" and is marked not to be indexed until the plan is active again. The sitemap is empty during that time.
- The website embed is meant for your own site and is never indexed on its own; the ranking benefit goes to your portal pages and to the page on your site that hosts the embed.