Baseline
You can’t know where you’re going until you understand your current baseline. Our SEO and Website Audits take a hard, all-encompassing look at your website and SEO strategy to give you the full picture of the strengths and opportunities of your digital channels. We take the guesswork out and leave you with actionable steps to take your digital marketing to the next level. The off-season or shoulder season for our tour operator clients is often the best time to do a reset on “the way things have always been done” and refresh your tactics as you begin thinking about the next season. From a digital marketing perspective, it is the perfect opportunity to do some spring cleaning – no matter the time of year!
Our SEO and website audits take a deep dive into the following categories:
- Analytics – Filters, Goals, & KPIs
- Technical SEO
- On-Page SEO
- Off-Page SEO
- Website User Experience
Analytics: Understanding What’s Driving Traffic & Conversions
Filters
Whether you are aware of it or not, there are bots that are affecting your website traffic analytics. To have the best understanding possible of your real customers, we start our audit by applying all of our standard spam filters, as well as filters for IP traffic from within our office and yours.
Applying these filters means we have a much more accurate understanding of your website traffic. While there is typically a slight decrease in traffic metrics when comparing to the period prior to implementing the filters, the end result is a positive change as the data is cleaner – there is no irrelevant traffic from bots.
(We also create an Unfiltered view should you ever wish to view the raw data with no spam or IP filters applied.)
Lead Goals
Setting up and tracking goals for your main website objectives allows us to identify website visitor engagement and the likelihood of bookings taking place through other channels. A common mistake is setting up an analytics goal for page views or ‘Book Now’ button clicks; utilize the Analytics goals to inform your quality leads and events that are being taken on your website. Your SEO & Website Audit includes us reconfiguring these lead goals according to industry best practice.
Key Performance Indicators
Our Audits compare YoY data for important KPIs in Google Analytics, breaking down your acquisition channels to identify opportunities and strengths.
TOMIS Marketing App
The marketing and sales reporting dashboards within the TOMIS marketing app aggregate data from your reservation system, Google Analytics, Google Ads, Facebook, MailChimp, and WebCEO (a third-party SEO keyword rank tracking tool). With all the data you need in one place, creating a plan of action to reach the best customers for your business has never been easier.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row full_width=”stretch_row” css=”.vc_custom_1600273769082{background-color: #f3fafb !important;}”][vc_column][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner][vc_single_image image=”2973″ img_size=”large” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center” onclick=”img_link_large”][vc_column_text]
Direct Bookings Through SEO are the Name of the Game
Boosting your position in organic search results through Technical, On-Page, and Off-Page SEO is the best way to ensure that more direct bookings will come your way.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]
Technical SEO
Crawlability
Our Audit includes a crawl of your website – just like the Google bots do – to find issues and opportunities with your technical SEO. This crawl will find 3xx, 4xx, and 5xx errors, which can affect your position in search rankings and the user experience.
Indexation
Our indexation section looks at how Google categorizes the pages and content on your site to ensure that the best and highest quality pages are ranking – and being seen by your customers! We will identify the structured data schema markup that can give you the rich review “star pack” that is known to increase CTR. Structured data helps Google crawl your website in an organized manner and index high-value content in search results. Common structured data markup for our Tour Operator clients includes Brand/Organization, Local Business, Website, Product, and FAQ.
On-Page SEO
We will give recommendations for optimizing your page titles, image file names, image alt text, H1 tags, and more to jump over your competitors in search results for your target keywords. When conducting our exhaustive keyword research, we consider customers in all parts of the sales funnel. Through integrating higher volume keywords onto the main pages on your site, and long-tail keywords into our featured snippet-focused content marketing plan, we can drive significant and meaningful organic traffic increases.
Site Speed
We utilize GT Metrix as well as Google PageSpeed Insights to to evaluate priority areas for improvement on both your desktop and mobile site renderings. Site speed is a contributing factor to your ranking in Google search results – and its importance for user experience should not be overlooked. Research by Google indicates that 53% of mobile users leave a site that takes longer than three seconds to load.
Off-Page SEO
We focus on two main aspects of your off-page SEO strategy:
Backlinks
Backlinks from websites with high domain authority are crucial to your off-page SEO because they signal that your content is noteworthy. We’ll take a look at your competition to see the backlinks they have that you don’t.
NAP (Name, Address, Phone) Optimization
Long story short, standardizing your NAP listings across all platforms is a good thing – it affects your ability to show up in local rankings (!). We’ll show you where some of the inconsistencies in your listings may be. Responding to reviews, posting on social media, tagging local places, and CVB listings will also help your local SEO.
Conversion Rate Optimization
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a system for increasing the percentage of visitors to a website that convert into customers, or more generally, take any desired action on a webpage.
When you think about ways to increase your business’s revenue, many of the options take a lot of money or resources and still have unpredictable results. You don’t know if these strategies will work or how long it will take. The beautiful part of the conversion rate is that you just optimize what’s already there and thus create more profit from your existing customers and traffic.
Our tour operator industry-standard first benchmark is a 2% e-commerce conversion rate. Operators should – at the very least – shoot for this, but we often get our clients higher!
Our Audit includes heatmaps and recordings of users interacting with your site from Hotjar. These heatmaps and recordings can show us where the “hangups” are that prevent website users from becoming customers. We look for opportunities in your booking flow, tour page layout, menu design, and overall site organization. Considering your audience and typical customer persona is important; a younger generation of customers is expecting a different design and experience than an older generation.
User Experience
You probably already know and understand that your website is likely the only interaction potential customers will have with your business before they decide to go on a tour or join you for an experience. We would be willing to bet that you think it looks good. You’ve carefully chosen the images and written copy that you think sells the experience as you know it. Taking an unbiased and critical look at your site can be difficult as an owner or operator. Our experience and extensive knowledge base of the tour industry allows us to take a hard look at your site through both an intuitive and a data-driven lens.
Because mobile responsiveness and mobile page speed are arguably more important than they have ever been, we look at aspects of your mobile site that may have fallen through the cracks. Thumb-sized buttons, clean mobile menu navigation, and mobile page speed are great starting places.
Information needs to catch the eye of the users above the fold, all relevant details need to be easy to find on tour pages, and users should have the ability to book a trip no matter where they are on the page. By following the customer journey from site entry to exploring the most popular tours to conversions on both desktop and mobile, we find opportunities to enhance the overall website user experience and booking experience.
Summary
Feeling overwhelmed? Here are questions you should consider now:
- Is your website analytic data clean and tracking significant events and goals that can inform your strategy?
- Is your site being properly indexed and crawled by search engines?
- Can you walk through your website’s booking flow easily with no hiccups? Are there any opportunities to take clicks out of the process?
Our exhaustive SEO and Website Audits have proved to offer invaluable insights and a concrete path forward for our tour operator clients. We pride ourselves in showing operators how to make their digital marketing platforms work for them.
Reach out to let us lift the hood with an audit for your business!
