Local SEO and Why It’s Important to Your Tourist Attraction, Tour or Tourism-Based Business

Local search is powerful for small businesses, with 97% of people searching online to find a local business. This means if you aren’t fully optimized, you could be missing out on a lot of potential customers visiting your tourist attraction, tours or travel-related business.

Google My Business

The starting point of Local SEO is making sure that you are optimized for Google My Business. This makes sure that you appear on local map listings in the search engine results page, which Google displays for most local search queries. According to Hubspot, 86% of people look up the location of a business on Google Maps, so make sure yours can be seen.

You should include your address, opening times, contact information, relevant images and even links to your website.

Directory Listings

Something you should be aware of is directory listings and NAPs (Name, Address and Phone Number). You should make sure your attraction name, address and phone numbers will go onto directory lists, such as Yelp or TripAdvisor. Directories will rank higher for your search term and will also link back to your website. Industry and local specific directories are worth linking up to.

Optimize URL, Title Tags, keywords, Headers, Meta Description, and Blog content

Each new blog post is a new indexed page on your site and a new opportunity for your site to get found in search engine results.

Each new piece of content needs to be optimized for search engines by using keywords in the URL, title, header, meta description and body of the text.

The title and meta descriptions are essentially a preview of your content, so make sure to put your main keyword at the beginning of the title and sentence to give you the best chance to rank higher in the search engine results pages.

Create Local Content

It is important to create your own content. It is worth creating a blog section and updating your website with relevant and up to date information. Content lets Google know what your website is about, so it is important to make sure you’re very clear in what you’re talking about and that you’re using relevant keywords.

Ideally, you want your website to be functional, look good and be useful. Keep your customer’s attention by getting them to stay on your site and increase your click-through rate.

Get inbound links

Authoritative references linking to your website will help to boost your domain authority. Guest posts and a diverse range of links back to your website will help you to feature higher up the search ranks. Collaborating with local news outlets and local social media influencers and bloggers can help you to do this.

Get more reviews from your customers – Google My Business / Facebook / TripAdvisor

High-quality reviews for Google My Business, TripAdvisor and Facebook can really help to sell your attraction to potential visitors and drive them to your website. The more reviews you can get, the better, but obviously positive reviews will help to build your reputation. You should consider responding to reviews, especially negative ones, as you could turn their bad experience into a positive one. It also shows your customers that you care about their feedback.

If you take the time to develop and maintain a strong SEO strategy, then you will be perfectly placed to help local people find your attraction and turn them into paying customers.