Jan
17
2017
Cutting straight to tourist customers
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. Which leaves only two problems. Getting exposure to tourists while they are planning, and attracting them before the competition does.
Search engine optimization is your modern age samurai sword for for cutting straight to potential clients – it is a sustained campaign to build quality content, with the benefit that you appear high on search engine results. SEO essentially operates based on relevancy and authority. Things like blogs, number of web pages, how many times other web addresses link to you, and how many people visit your site all play into the "authority" equation.
Which is why it makes sense that you and I and most people tend to trust higher search results. Don't believe me? 94% of people never go beyond the second page of Google.
SEO is especially important for attracting tourist customers because a vast majority of tourists will plan their trip before they come to Alaska. In fact, in the weeks leading up to a tourist booking plans, he/she will visit relevant websites 38 times before making a decision. Which means he/she will be online looking for businesses like yours. If you don’t stand out, you will have a very hard time attracting business. If they can't find you at all, you will not attract business. Period.
How important is SEO...really?
You're probably thinking I'm not the right guy to ask. Well I am biased, but I'm also honest. SEO is extremely important for many business - but not all. More on this in the next section. Let's assume that you are the right business and put this in perspective - with marketing to out of state 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 and people you are already connected with, but for garnering new business, there’s no comparison. A great majority of most Alaskan tourists - about 2/3 - are new to Alaska, which means SEO is your ticket for attracting new business traffic from out of state.
SEO marketing: price tag right for you?
SEO marketing doesn't make sense for all businesses. High ticket (and very common) keyword phrases, general audience (vs. niche), new businesses, low budgets. These are just some of reasons why a business would and probably should take a look at price tags and run.
But beyond this, the statistics for SEO marketing for return on investment (ROI) are clear that the return can be phenomenal. SEO is good for niche businesses and higher ticket services/items, such as the Alaskan tourism market where many customers are dropping at least $2000 on cruises and outdoor adventures. With those kind of returns, SEO marketing only needs to convert a limited number of people to be profitable.
Moreover, SEO campaigns are long term strategies, and essentially work with a snowball effect. Just consider the following statistics, and how they apply to the millions of tourists who searching for you every year.
- 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. More traffic = more business. And cash flow feels nice.