Marketing Your Extreme Adventures

What does Jackson Hole Whitewater have that makes it come up first when you search “white water rafting Wyoming?” It can be summed up in three words: Search Engine Optimization. Their website has been optimized to pull the attention of a search engine directly to it. Properly optimized sites bring outdoor adventure companies upwards of 80% of their business. With that much potential income at stake, one can understand how important a strong web presence is. Here, we’ll explore the benefits, reasoning, and steps to proper search engine optimization:

• What exactly is Search Engine Optimization, and how is it going to help me?

• How does the internet affect adventure marketing?

• How do I determine my competition?

• How can I reach more customers online?

Let’s start off with a brief explanation of Search Engine Marketing. At any one time, there are upwards of 500 to a cool million websites competing for a keyword phrase. For instance, “adventure tours” gets searched an estimated 310 times a day. Each time someone searches for that particular term, there are 4610000 different sites competing for dominance. Not the best odds. On top of that, statistics show that nearly 70% of people searching only look at the first page of their search results. So even if you’re placing, let’s say, 15th in line for a search term, there’s a large percentage of potential customers you’re missing out on by appearing on the second page.

The links that come up first don’t get there by accident. To decide which links to bring up on the first page, the search engine views ‘page rank,’ which is assigned based on relevant content, appropriate links, meta tags, etc. Sites that come up on the first few pages have been optimized to do so. Optimization is a complex operation, but well worth the time and money you put into it.

• The internet’s effect on adventure marketing.

Before the advent and saturation of the internet, travelers relied on advertisements and postings in local newspapers and phonebooks to point them in the right direction. Today’s traveler is of a different mind set. Statistics show that 90% of all vacationers research and plan their travel activities online. Many hotels offer internet access, which aids this process. With this simple and familiar form of research readily available, today’s adventure company needs to have a strong online presence to pull in prospective customers.

• Competition

Adventure marketing is a competitive world. Generalized search terms pull back so many results that it’s next to impossible to get a website to rank on the first page for major terms. Here are some examples:

Key word searched Searches per day Competing websites
Kayaking 649 12100000
Scuba Diving 1453 22600000
Rock Climbing 1215 12400000
Skydiving 1043 5320000
Whitewater Rafting 337 3570000

That’s a lot of competition! As you have probably guessed, the first few pages of search results are very well optimized pages. However, these people are not necessarily your competitors. Just because Crystal Seas Kayaking comes up in the first five results for a search on kayaking, that doesn’t mean that you have to battle it out with them for dominance. This particular company offers kayaking tours in Puerto Rico and the Florida Keys. If your business is located in Marina Del Ray, CA, you’re going after a completely different market. Now, if you search for “Kayaking California,” you’ll start to get an idea of who your competition actually is. Part of the Xylemark service is thoroughly researching specific keywords and identifying your competition.

• Reaching your target audience

Reaching out to prospective clients can be a tricky business – especially with Adventure Marketing. It takes someone familiar with search engine’s complicated rules and regulations. There are several key factors that Xylemark focuses on; relevant content, links, and PPC (pay per click). While we build your site up to organically pull search engine’s attention, we recommend a supervised PPC campaign to get immediate site traffic. Contact us today for a free site evaluation. If you are in the process of developing a website, we can help you to create a site that conforms to the search engine’s standards so you can start ranking right away. We can even refer you to some talented web developers to help you get started.

Reaching your prospective adventurers is a complex task, but well worth the effort. For more information regarding our plans and services, visit http://www.xylemark.com.