What the Custom Canine team needed was an event booking plugin for WordPress they could count on, one that would give their events a better shot in search results and fit their existing site without much rework. Their SEO agency suggested WP Event Manager, and the company went with the Event Manager Pro bundle. Since the move, they’ve seen their search standings improve and their event pages become easier for visitors to use. Registration, attendee details, tags and alerts now run through one WordPress event registration plugin on their own website.
About Custom Canine Unlimited
Company: Custom Canine Unlimited, Gainesville, Georgia, USA
Industry: Professional dog training, working dogs, and K9 services
Contact: AJ Vargas
Website: customcanineunlimited.com
Custom Canine Unlimited has been around since 2003, and it’s run by former law enforcement and military K9 handlers and trainers. Their clients range from police departments and military kennels to private contractors, veterans, and everyday dog owners. Some come to them for a trained detection or patrol dog. Others want to learn how to handle one.
But training is only part of the job. The company also offers hands-on courses, including decoy training and a military working dog tracking course, online K9 courses, certification programs, and business support to those wishing to pursue a career in the industry. All of that means a steady calendar of K9 training events that people need to seek out, read, and sign up for.
What Custom Canine Unlimited Needed From Its Event Site
AJ Vargas and the team had a clear goal. They wanted their clients to get the best event booking experience the K9 industry has to offer, from the first search to the confirmation email.
The second goal was visibility. Their courses are for a very specific audience, and those people who search for them are searching for very specific terms. The team wanted a place where these people could look for their events and book a seat without leaving.
The Challenge: Finding a Stable, SEO-Friendly Booking Setup
The company already had a WordPress site which worked well for the company, so it was never an option to start from scratch. It didn’t have a booking system that could handle the events side of the business without issues.
The team needed a plugin that would:
- Stay stable as more courses and dates were added
- Give them SEO-friendly event pages that search engines could read and rank
- Fit into the setup they already had
- Handle registration, attendee details, and event discovery in one place, with no need for separate tools
Getting all four from one plugin, without stitching several tools together, was the main thing the team was after.
Why Custom Canine Unlimited Chose WP Event Manager
The recommendation came from the company’s SEO agency, which already knew the plugin. When AJ’s team went through the feature list, they found everything their courses and training days called for, so they went ahead with it.
WP Event Manager is an event management plugin for WordPress. You can start using it for free at WordPress.org. From that point on, you decide how much to add. Some sites buy a single add-on for the one feature they’re missing, and others pick up a bundle at the start, the way Custom Canine Unlimited did. The event pages also sit on the company’s own domain, which means any search value they earn, and every visitor who lands on them, belongs to Custom Canine Unlimited.
Custom Canine Unlimited picked the Event Manager Pro bundle for one site, which brings together 27 of our premium add-ons. It gave the team the registration and attendee tools they wanted from day one, plus room to add more features later without buying anything new.
How WP Event Manager Powers Custom Canine Unlimited’s Events
The site is built on the WP Event Manager core plugin, with most of the event work being done by four add-ons from the bundle. Two of them come from our Ticket Selling range and two from the Feature range.
Registrations Handles Every Sign-Up
Registrations is where the sign-ups happen.
- AJ’s team builds the form for each event, picking only the fields that the course needs
- After someone signs up, the team can find their registration on the front end of the site or in the WordPress dashboard, then change its status to confirmed, pending, or cancelled whenever plans shift
- Whoever registers gets an email right away saying they’re in, and the team hears about every new booking as well
- For courses with limited room, there’s a cap on seats, plus an option that stops anyone from signing up twice with the same email address, which is useful when a hands-on course only has room for a small group of handlers
Attendee Information Collects the Details Each Course Needs
A K9 course usually needs more than a name and an email address. That’s what Attendee Information is for.
- For a course built around working dogs, it might mean asking for the handler’s agency or a few details about the dog
- The team can add those questions to any event’s form, even after it’s been published
- They can ask only the person paying, or every attendee on the booking
- Before the course starts, the whole list can be exported as a CSV file
Event Tags Help People Find the Right Course
This add-on ties straight back to the search goal.
- Event Tags lets each event carry several tags, such as the type of training or the level it’s aimed at
- Visitors can filter the event list by tag or click through a tag cloud
- Site owners can switch on tag archive pages too
- Good use of WordPress event tags makes events more searchable, both on the site and in search results
Alerts Bring Visitors Back for the Next Date
Alerts lets visitors handle some of the follow-up themselves.
- Someone might only care about tracking courses, or only about events in Georgia, so they set an alert for just that
- They choose how often the emails come: every day, once a week, or biweekly
- They can go back to their account and change it or delete it whenever they like
For Custom Canine Unlimited, this works well. New courses and training dates go up through the year, and the people who asked to hear about them get an email on their own, without anyone on the team having to write one.
What Changed After Custom Canine Unlimited Switched to WP Event Manager
The team named two improvements, and both match the goals they started with.
The first is search. Custom Canine Unlimited has seen its SEO standings improve since moving its events to WP Event Manager. The events now sit on the company’s own site, each with its own page and tags, which is the kind of setup the team and its SEO agency were looking for.
The second is the event page itself. Visitors can browse the courses, filter them, read the details, and register in one place, and the team says that the experience is now noticeably better. Behind the scenes, registrations, attendee lists and alerts all run through one event booking plugin for WordPress, so there’s a single dashboard to check before each course.
What Other Training Businesses Can Learn From Custom Canine Unlimited
- Ask the people who already handle your SEO what they’d recommend, since they know which plugins hold up in search
- Keep your events on your own website so the rankings and the traffic stay with you
- Write the features you need before you buy, the way AJ’s team did, then check each one against the add-on pages
- Start with the add-ons that fix today’s problem and add more as your calendar grows
Run Your Training Events on WP Event Manager
If you run K9 courses, workshops or certification days of your own, WP Event Manager can be the WordPress event registration plugin behind them, right there on your own site. The core plugin costs nothing to download. You can pay for extra features later, when you actually need them, either one by one or in a bundle.
The post How Custom Canine Unlimited Runs Its K9 Training Events on WP Event Manager appeared first on WP Event Manager.
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