As a small tour operator or activity provider you have your work cut out for you. Like many small business owners you probably wear many hats and have to handle a lot of the marketing yourself. Here are five simple things that you can do to improve SEO for tour operators and activity providers like you. Don’t think of these tips so much as search engine optimization techniques but more like good practices for maintaining your site and making it more relevant for your customers. Remember, Google and the other search engines are often refining their search algorithms to prevent spammers, who use over optimization, from showing up in search results. The best way to maintain a high search rank and remain in the search engines’ good books is to provide relevant content to people searching for your tours or activities.
Kitsap Tours offers unique and interesting tours of Seattle, Bainbridge Island, and the Olympic peninsula. Kitsap Tours has a popular blog which Jean Boyle, the owner uses to educate and connect with potential customers.
1. Be more niche
Let’s face it, you’ll never be able to compete against Expedia or the other large tour resellers. What you can do, however, is out niche them. You have the opportunity to clearly define your offerings in a way that the big players can’t. Use your uniqueness to your advantage. If there are ways to make your tour or activity even more specialized, then you might want to consider them. Providing a specialized offering means that the content you create for your tour descriptions and website content in general, will be more relevant to customers searching for your particular tour or activity.
As a specialized operator, you also have the ability to become the expert.
2. Use high quality unique descriptions for your tours and activities
Your tours or activities are what people are looking to book. Provide a long and well written description of what the customer will experience. Neil Patel explains in this article that longer content tends to rank better in search engines than short descriptions. Since you are taking the time to create a site for your customers, why not take the extra time to fully describe the tour or experience they will have.
3. Make a video of your tour or activity
There is a lot of data to back up that videos can increase conversions on online sales. With Rezgo you have the ability to add videos as well as photos in your media gallery. This is a huge plus for your customers because they can watch a video during the booking process and really get a sense for what they will experience on your tour or activity. If you are using a professional tour video service, you will want to consider hosting a copy of your video on YouTube as well for search purposes.
4. Write Interesting Blog Posts
This may sound like a really daunting task, but it doesn’t have to be. Just imagine the kinds of things that you talk about with your customers when they are on a tour with you and write about those experiences. You may even know of local vendors or partners that you want to promote as part of your own business. This type of writing emphasizes that you know what you are talking about and that you know your destination.
Don’t just blog for the sake of blogging though. Write with your customers in mind. This is a great step in differentiating yourself from your competition and especially the big tour and activity resellers. Google also ranks content attributed to frequent authors higher in search results.
5. Connect your tour pages to your blog posts
When you write those great posts about your destination or experience, don’t forget to link to your tour pages. You may even want to integrate your tour directly into the blog post somehow, perhaps describing a restaurant, attraction, or important site that might be visited during the tour. Consider doing a short video interview with a guide or yourself talking about something the customer might see or experience.
If the video you create is relevant to a specific tour or activity, you can even re-use the video on your tour page as well. This is a great way to re-purpose your content and drive maximum value for your efforts.
Written By | Rezgo
