Jan
03
2017
How Alaskan Businesses Thrive On Tourism
Tourism garners close to 2 billion dollars in yearly revenue for Alaska. That’s huge. Any business owner’s first priority is getting a piece of the pie so to speak.
That leaves two pressing questions for business owners:
- How to reach potential customers who are out of state?
- How to attract out of state customers before competitors?
The answer to both questions is clean and simple: search engine optimization (SEO) marketing.
SEO marketing is your modern age right hand for reaching and grabbing potential clients – it is a sustained campaign to ensure that you appear high on search engine results.
SEO is especially important for attracting tourism customers because a vast majority of tourists will plan their trip before they come to Alaska.
Which means they will be online looking for people like you.
If you don’t stand out, you will have a very hard time attracting business. Period.
How important is SEO?
Let’s put this in perspective – with marketing to potential customers, in terms of SEO vs social media, SEO is significantly more important than social media.
Organic searches account for:
- 50% percent of website traffic, compared to only 5% from Social Media
- Almost 75% of website traffic for service based businesses
- A visitor to lead rate that is 15 times higher than social media
Marketing through social media is a great way to stay in touch with clients you already have - but for garnering new business, there’s no comparison.
A great majority of most Alaskan businesses’ patrons are not repeat customers, which means SEO is their ticket for attracting new business traffic from out of state.
Is SEO marketing worth the money?
Every penny and then some.
Sure, I realize I am biased, but irregardless the statistics for SEO marketing ROI (return on investment) are clear.
Consider the following:
- 75% of all clicks go to the first 3 non-advertised search results
- 70-80% of users ignore the paid ads (Google AdWords)
- 90% of all online experiences begin with a search engine
Sucessful SEO campaigns regularly double, triple, and even quadruple traffic - i.e. exposure.Furthermore, a business owner saves the time, stress, and money of having to manage marketing.
More traffic = equally more business. If your traffic doubles, and assuming your conversion rates are steady, you can reasonably expect a great increase in business. All because of SEO.
Why don't all Alaskan businesses use SEO?
As I noted in a previous post, the Alaskan tech industry tends to lag about 5 years behind the lower 48. Widespread popularity of SEO is a fairly recent development, so it's only natural for Alaska to need time to catch up.
The truth is that many Alaska business have balked at SEO campaigns' price tags. But there's a reason SEO campaigns aren't cheap:
- They are extremely effective sustained campaigns
- The ROI is phenomenal
- They are an essential asset to business growth
And Alaskan businesses are already waking up to the fact that successful SEO campaigns can increase exposure dramatically. The businesses that have woken up to the overwhelming value of SEO already have a significant head start on their competitors.
Let us know how successful your SEO campaigns have been in the comments below.
