SEO GUIDE

for tour & activity providers

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 SEO GUIDE

Content
Introduc3on 3

Chapter 1: Your website: establishing the basics 4

• Imagine how a search engine pictures search results 5
• Meta descrip7ons won’t increase your rankings, but they will separate you from the crowd 6
• Step into the mind of a searcher 7
• Make your website intui7ve and easy to browse 8
• Guide people around your website with calls to ac7on and naviga7on 9
• You don’t need to submit your site to Google to get found online 10

Chapter 2: Content is king 11

• Be more valuable and useful than other sites 12
• Find your niche (and own it) 13
• Display informa7on that people are searching for 14
• Engage in the right way 15
• 5 golden 7ps for wri7ng great content 16

Chapter 3: Now that you’re publishing great content, do this 17

• Create remarkable content first, think about technicali7es second 18
• Links are an important part of your SEO, but not all are equal 19
• Make people want to stay on your site, fix what’s making them leave 20
• You’re more likely to suffer from keyword overuse than underuse 21

SEO success checklist 22

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SEO can seem complex,

but it’s something
you’re probably doing
already
SEO–or search engine optimisation– In fact, the face of SEO has changed
can seem complex, but it’s something dramatically in recent years. What was
you’re probably doing already as a once thought to be a game of link-
building and keyword stuffing has
tour operator or activity provider. When become driven by content. Over-
you’re creating content or tweaking the optimisation with keywords, technical
wording on your homepage, you’re tweaks and links can now have an
priming your website to be the best adverse effect on your website.
search result it can be. This is SEO.
This guide will help you to boost your
In simple terms, it’s all about making content creation from an SEO
your website more likely to show up in perspective, while also showing you
people’s organic search results. You how to implement technical SEO
don’t need to hire a professional to adjustments that reinforce your
succeed and a lot of it comes down to success.
putting people, not technicalities, first .
Go about SEO effectively and you can
have more customers heading your way
for your tours or activities!

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 CHAPTER 1
YOUR WEBSITE:
Establishing the basics
To get started with SEO, let’s begin with the basics. This will create a
foundation for all of your other efforts, so it’s worth getting it right the first
time round. Here’s how.

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1.
Start by imagining how
a search engine
searches

Google uses algorithms to figure out what the searcher is looking for and serves up the
most relevant pages from its index. 95% of searchers stick with the listings on the first
page of results, so it’s worth making an effort to get your listing closer to the top.

If your website or one of its pages appears as a search result, three main things show
up: the webpage title, a description, and its URL. Therefore, it’s important that you
make the most of this space: optimise each of the three elements to show off your
website and make clicking on your URL as tempting as possible.

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2.
Meta descriptions won’t
increase your ranking,
but they will separate
you from the crowd
When you search for something online, the short description you see under a search
result is the meta description.

Google announced back in 2009 that meta descriptions and meta keywords have no
bearing on search results or rankings, but when we search on Google we quickly decide
which search result best matches our query. So if your result has a relevant and
compelling description, this can make your page stand out.

Saying that, it’s not terrible if you don’t have a meta description in place for a page:
Google creates its own snippet and it uses the search query to pull in relevant content
from your pages for it.

If you do create your own, make it compelling and use a targeted keyword. If a
keyword matches a person’s search, it will appear in bold (which can draw extra
attention to your search results.
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3.
Next, step into the
mind of a searcher
Whatever you do, don’t direct your SEO efforts purely at pleasing search engines. The
person searching on Google is most important of all!

Think about how people come across your website in searches. Will your ideal
customer be searching for the best paintballing activity in your area, historical walking
d tours in your city, or rainy day activities? If your tour or activity relates to a person’s
tire query, make it your job to come to the rescue with your search result. Bonus points if
you can also let them instantly book online, using software such as our TrekkSoft
o gobooking, payment, and rental software.

ng Search engines and searchers see results in different ways, which means that you have
e to prep your site for them in different ways too. While optimising for search engine
d. crawling is about tweaking words and URLs, optimising for searchers is about crafting
quality content.

Search When the internet was born, little software robots called spiders
were created to build a list of words found on web pages to help
engine people find what they were looking for. This process is called
crawling. For this list to be useful, spiders need to look at a lot of

crawling pages, usually starting with popular pages or sites, indexing the
page and following all the links found on the site. Spiders also

explained look for two things: the words used and where these words are
found on a given page.

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4.
Make your website
intuitive and easy to
browse

To make sure your website is crawled and indexed accurately, you need to make sure
it’s structured logically and easy to navigate. To organise your content, headers come
in handy.

A big header (or H1 in SEO lingo) would be written in the largest text, subheaders (or
H2) would be slightly smaller, sub-sub-headers (or H3) would be even smaller, and so
on. It makes sense that your biggest headings are at the top of the page, and that
they contain your most important content. You can also divide your content into
logical chunks to make it super easy for people to find what they’re searching for.
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5.
Guide the user around
your website with calls
to action and navigation
Treat each visitor on your site like a guest: guide them around your website, make it
clear where everything is, and put in effort to improve the experience for them.

You should have an easy-to-use navigation bar at the top of your website, a footer for
further links, and a sidebar on your blog. As a tour operator or activity provider, it’s
also crucial to get those “book now” buttons in clear sight. Don’t lose a new customer
by making them pick up the phone or wait for opening hours.

CTA
In marketing, a call to action (CTA) is an
instruction to the audience to provoke an
immediate response, usually using an
imperative verb such as "call now", "find
out more" or "visit a store today".[1]

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6.
You don’t need to
submit your site to
Google to get found
Some people submit their website URL to Google directly, but this doesn’t make much
sense. Google can find your site without you submitting it, and it’s more worthwhile to
think about what you don’t want Google to see.

You can block pages from Google’s crawlers via your robots.text file (it’s not too tricky
to do this on Google Webmaster Tools). Certain directories and pages, such as internal
search results, should usually be kept out of Google's search index so that your real
content takes the lead.

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 CHAPTER 2
CONTENT IS KING!

The key to a well-ranking website isn’t nifty SEO (search engine optimisation)
adjustments as perhaps once thought, but creating “the best possible experience for
your audience with original and high quality content”. This is according to Google’s
SEO team itself, who have confirmed that strong, engaging and useful content will
probably affect your search status more than anything else.

People love to share great content with friends through social media, blogs and
emails. This cultivates a powerful type of organic word-of-mouth for your company,
and hints to Google that your site has quality content to push up in searches.

Not everyone is born a copywriter, but there are certain things you can do to craft
better content.

Keep your content focused on the topic at hand, and divide it into logical, short
chunks to help people find what they’re looking for faster. Make an effort to regularly
add new content and you will keep fans coming back and attract new visitors.

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1.
Be more valuable and
useful than other sites
In 2011, the Google Panda algorithm was introduced: a change that aimed to lower
the rank of "low-quality sites" or "thin sites", and return higher-quality sites near the
top of the search results.

To set your tour or activity company apart, your website has to be useful,
informative, and more valuable than similar sites. Above all, create content to
provide good user experience, not just to rank well in searches.

Distinguish your company by writing blog posts that are more valuable to your
reader than similar articles on the web. Provide a fresh perspective on content that’s
been covered numerous times before, and don’t be afraid to write longer content: it
tends to rank better than short-form content.

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2.
Find your niche
(and own it)
If you search for “outdoor activity companies” on Google, you’re faced with a daunting
47,200,000 results. “Canyoning companies” has 213,000, while “canyoning in
Interlaken” has just 85,700.

If your target audience is very specific, your content is likely to be highly relevant to
those searching for your offering. This probably isn’t an audience of millions, but it’s
still an advantage. You can become the expert in your area, write well for a specialised
audience, and define your niche in a way that the big players can’t.

Remember: online searches are likely to include keywords related to your city, area, or
state rather than your brand name. Use language that relates to where your company
is based, especially on important pages such as your homepage or about us page.

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3.
Display information that
people are searching for
Google’s RankBrain algorithm (introduced in 2015) uses advanced machine learning
to best answer search queries. This makes it more important than ever to answer
users’ questions with your content.

You should aim to answer frequently asked questions on your website. If you’re in
Ohio, you might get asked about the best restaurants in town. Write a blog post
about this and you will not only have something to direct customers to, you will also
attract new visitors to your website.

Any local businesses you mention on your website might also link to your article in
their own marketing. These are the types of links to your website you should be
aiming for, not low-quality mass-purchased links (always a bad idea!)

Remember 1. Location
2. Contact information
3. Hours of operation
to clearly 4. Prices for your tours and activities

display
Ideally, you can also provide customers with the option to
book online to increase chances of a quick conversion. By
using TrekkSoft’s booking software, it’s easy to get those

your: “book now” buttons on your website and start accepting

payments.

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4.
Engage in the right way

Ultimately, you want to nurture memorable experiences on your website that result
in bookings and recommendations.

Engage people in the right way with images of your outdoor activities, your
surroundings, or your team. Other ways to be engaging include regular business
updates, a comment box on your blog posts, and social media widgets.

Avoid engaging people negatively with spelling mistakes, bad web design, or
excessive ads on your website.

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5.
Follow these tips and
write naturally SEO-
friendly content
1. Write about what you care about
2. Write about what your readers care about
3. Imagine you’re writing to one person
4. Keep it as simple as you can (cut out all the crap, seriously)
5. The most important point goes at the start of the sentence

For more advice on crafting great content, you can download our
Writing Guide for Tour and Activity Providers.

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 CHAPTER 3
Now that you’re publishing
great content, do this.

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 SEO GUIDE

1.
Create remarkable
content first, think about
technicalities second
Make content your number one priority, then think about the other technicalities that
play a part in SEO. These technical tasks are important, so don’t ignore them, but it’s
usually a case of getting them in place before turning your attention back to publishing
fresh content that’s relevant to your tours or activities.

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2.
Links are an important
part of your SEO,
but not all are equal

Even with an increasing emphasis on quality content, links are still an important part of
your website’s authority. It makes sense really: if you have top and trustworthy sites
linking to your site, your website probably has quality content on it.

However, linking isn’t about numbers, and for this reason it’s not particularly
recommended to hire a link-building professional. Instead, it’s worth focusing on
creating thoughtful strategies to have relevant and diverse sources linking to relevant
pages. With today’s SEO framework, you can’t game the system with a cheat sheet.
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3.
Make people want to
stay on your site, fix
what’s making them
leave
When people spend time on your website and make repeated visits, Google gets the
hint that your website has useful and quality content that’s worth pushing up in
searches.

Improve your chances of this by creating high-quality unique content and having a
well-designed website.

You should also avoid–or repair–anything that’s making visitors not trust your website
or leave. Double check for broken links or incorrect information, grammar and spelling
mistakes, and any spam in your blog comments: these are the leading culprits of
disappearing website visitors.

An unresponsive site can also deter people from exploring your site and discovering
your fantastic tours and activities. Avoid losing out on valuable attention by using a
platform like TrekkSoft that allows your site to be viewed on different screens.

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4.
You’re more likely to
suffer from keyword
overuse than underuse
One SEO misconception is that you need to stuff your pages with relevant keywords in
order to improve your search rankings. Perhaps this was once more the case, but
nowadays keyword overuse is more likely to work against you.

Write as if you’re talking to your website visitor. If it makes sense to use a keyword like
“walking tour in London” or “paragliding in Chamonix”, then use it. And instead of
trying to shoehorn a keyword into a title, clearly write what the article is about.

This will contribute to a useful, readable, and naturally-optimised chunk of text that
people - and search engines - will love.

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SEO success checklist

1. Step into the mind of both a search engine and the person searching
2. Make content your top priority
3. Find your niche, then publish content that’s personalised and relevant
4. Write with a clear focus and keywords will come naturally
5. Make your website more useful than other websites
6. Answer questions and display the information that people are searching for
7. Make your website intuitive and easy to browse
8. Guide people around your website with calls to action and navigation
9. Present your most important concepts clearly and closer to the top of the page
10. Don’t pay for links, cultivate them naturally by getting people talking about
you
11. Make people want to stay on your site with good design and great content
12. Fix what’s making people leave, such as low-quality content or bad design

Above all, focus on creating the most useful, relevant, and engaging content within
your niche. By combining a technically-sound website with quality content that goes
beyond expectations, you’ll reap SEO benefits and drive organic traffic to your
website.

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CREATE
YOUR OWN
BOOKING WEBSITE
with just a few clicks!

SEO GUIDE
for tour & activity providers