The adventure travel industry is an interesting one– it’s an extremely competitive environment dominated by a few huge players (National Geographic Expeditions, for example) and hundreds of smaller fish. With dozens of unique niche markets and hundreds of boutique adventure destinations, it’s absolutely critical that your website stands out from the crowd and that your trips can be found in the search engines.
When I first got involved in the adventure travel industry, I was a software marketing guy from the Seattle boom times. I had worked with some of the biggest and the best in web development and software marketing, and I was used to getting a solid product at a fair (though relatively high) price.
My first foray into the adventure travel marketing industry floored me. The smaller “mom and pop” travel providers are in many cases getting completely taken advantage of by unscrupulous “experts” in SEO/SEM and website marketing. I’ve seen these struggling, low margin companies paying top dollar for absolutely shoddy sites and services, and just accepting it since they don’t have the technical knowledge to argue the point.
One of our clients was paying hundreds of dollars a month for a static HTML website with an amateur design and minimal SEO services. They were used to waiting weeks, if not months for their provider to update the site for them, critical factors when you’re adding or removing trips and destinations or gearing up for a new season. And though they expressed great confidence in the SEO expertise of their provider, I found that they had probably been taken for a ride– they had identical meta descriptions and in many cases, meta keyword tags on every page of the site, and their “consultant” had taken little, if any thought to the content of the page.
So– after that long-winded tirade, you might be asking yourself “Well, what should I expect as a small-to-midsized adventure travel company who just needs a respectable and functional web presence?”
I’m glad you asked!
1) Make sure you get a CMS (Content Management System).
There is no earthly reason why you need to be struggling with a painfully useless tool like Frontpage, or even worse, waiting for your provider to update your website and then charging you for the privilege.
Modern CMS frameworks allow you to go to a “backend” section of your site and simply fill out a form with the information you want, in an interface that looks and feels like Microsoft Word. The data is all maintained in a database, so there’s not hundreds of pages of static content that all need to be modified when you change your phone number or update your logo. And it’s extremely easy to publish or unpublish content based on calendar dates or a user’s access level.
2) Take advantage of Google.
Google has tons of great tools that can help your website and marketing efforts succeed. Google Webmaster Tools allow you to keep tabs on how often your site is getting crawled by Google, how many URLs are indexed, what keywords people are finding your site by, and they’ll even point out issues with your site that may be hurting your SEO performance.
Google Analytics is the best thing going for webmasters to see exactly how their site is performing. There’s way too much to go into here, but if you’re not using Google Analytics, you should be!
Google Sitemaps– make sure you’re generating an XML sitemap with all your site content easily accessible. Google loves these things, and it makes your site that much easier for the Google spiders to traverse. Simple to do, and if done right, will dynamically update itself so it’s always current.
3) Be organized.
One of the worst things we see on the small-to-midsized adventure travel company websites is badly organized page content. Part of this is due to point number one, above: since there’s no CMS, and no good way to edit content (or because the provider editing the content is incompetent!), content just gets tossed all into one long page, or gets broken up with no real rhyme or reason.
Think before you type! Try this– make a grid, with geographic locations on one axis and adventure types (eg. fishing, camping, hiking, boating, etc.) on the other. Then, populate the grid with your individual trips, and subcategorize them by any demographics you might use (eg. family trips, children’s trips, women only, etc.).
Once you’ve got this plan worked out, you’ll see that it’s much easier to find a “slot” for each individual trip– and your users (and the search engines!) will thank you for it.
4) Remember: Content is KING!
I’ll go ahead and say it– I think that a lot of the SEO practitioners out there are snake oil salesmen. They send confusing reports with ambiguous information, then claim that it was their fiddling with a few meta tags that resulted in a great jump in rankings or in better traffic, and then they charge you $ 100/month.
While a good SEO guy can really make an impact, the fact is that this type of dramatic change from simple meta tag management is increasingly unlikely. The best thing you can do to help your search engine ranking is to have well written, topical content! If you are the world’s best fly fishing outfitter, prove it– with detailed, interesting and professional articles about all the cool stuff you do.
Augment this with blogs, press releases, articles about you from publications and newspapers, etc. Get it in writing and get it on your site!
Good luck.
Tim Kramer is owner/principal of The Thinkery, LLC, and developer of the Trip Agent adventure travel website software.