It is easy to get caught up in content marketing. Rightfully so, content marketing is popular for good reason and I am a proponent for content marketing. In my last blog post I talked about the differences between SEO and SEM. Now, I am going to be talking about how convention and visitors bureau’s can develop content throughout their website to improve their SEO. One thing that I also notice on CVB websites is when you click on the dinning section or the hotel section of their site, there are a few sentences and then listings of all the the restaurants or accommodations in their destination. In this blog post, I am going to discuss how you can enhance those listing pages into dynamic content pages that helps your SEO and overall marketing.
How Did I Enhance The Listing Pages
When I worked at Visit Lake County, I was looking for a way to increase our organic search results, provide a story of all of our restaurants, attractions and accommodations. I really did not like how our dining page was just a few sentences and then a listing of all of our restaurants in alphabetical order. I kept thinking and saying there is a better way to make these pages user friendly. I started with the dining page and used that as a template throughout the website.
The first thing that I did was break down our restaurants into 8 categories. Granted there could be some overlap but I wanted to create categories that reflected our sites visitors interests. Once I did that, I started to create content for each page. I wanted a minimum of 3 – 4 paragraphs on each page that told the story of the restaurant category, for example family friendly dining. Now, every destination has family friendly dining, but want made ours different? How could we stand out? I wanted the page to highlight restaurants, specifically the restaurants that were clicked on the most and feature some of the area’s popular dishes. On each new listing page, I would link to restaurants on the page so there was internal site linking and include images of food throughout the content. The restaurants in that category on the listing page would then appear after the content. I would then use the dining guide section as a template for the other sections of the website.
What about the accommodations page? The CVBs main goal is to put heads in beds, or in other words their job is to generate overnight stays for the destination. As travel marketers know, overnight stays generated through the CVB website are relatively low. Plus, companies like Orbitz, Hotels.com, Expedia, Marriott, Hyatt, and Hilton dominate the accommodation search terms in Google and Bing. But you can make a difference organically, and there is where content comes into play. Using the dining page as a template, I did the same thing with the accommodations page, broke them out into categories and then created content on each category page. In the content is where I mentioned the accommodation name, link to a stay package, and tell their story. This allowed us to provide additional information about the hotels, besides what was already in their listing description.
How Did This Work
This strategy is not a short-term strategy, it is a long-term strategy. Results won’t happen overnight, it will take time to gain traction, but once it does, your organic search traffic will increase. During the time I worked at the CVB, organic traffic was key, because we did not have advertising outside of SEM running year-round, so we relied on generating and increasing traffic organically. This type of strategy also provided us with a better landing page experience for interested travelers. It also provided us with more content to post to our social channels. Not only did we benefit from increased traffic to our website, interested travelers who visited our website also found the website more user friendly. They could easily find the attraction, restaurant or hotel that they were looking for. Instead of searching through a list of places alphabetically, the consumer was able to learn about our restaurant offerings and then select a category type of food that appealed to them.
By implementing this content strategy throughout the website, we saw our website sessions increase by 30% in 1 year and our average time on site also saw a noticeable increase. Our organic search traffic increased as well, and the organic traffic was our top source of referral traffic to our website. The content on the listing pages was not filled with keywords, it told the story of that categories dining experiences in the area. The key to this is to look at your analytics, see what people are searching for and clicking on and formulate a content plan for your internal pages of your website. Through this process, one thing that I found out was visitors to our site didn’t all view or homepage first. Visitors were entering on a variety of pages. By turning our section pages into dynamic landing pages, allowed visitors to land on more robust content, which provided them with the information that they were looking for. Not only was this strategy beneficial for our SEO, it also benefited and improved our SEM due to the dedicated landing page for each section.
Content marketing is as old as we are, and a strategy marketers have been doing since the beginning of time. As marketers today we are wearing many hats, and always have to find creative and useful ways to convey or message to or customers. The idea that I laid out above was just one step to us building our contenting marketing strategy for the destination to reach, engage, convert new visitors and retain current visitors to our website and destination. This project was a massive undertaking as we implemented it throughout our entire site and wrote fresh content on each page. Overall it was all worth it as we were able to increase website visits to our website, our SEO, SEM and social media, and digital marketing all become stronger because of it. In the end, when you are create your content strategy, be sure to include content throughout your website to help increase the effectiveness of your advertising.
