SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a great method to help your tourism business obtain new leads. It’s an opportunity for your business to gain qualified traffic that you can turn into conversions for your tourism business.

On this page, we’ll discuss the basics of SEO and three tips to help you create an effective SEO plan. If you’re ready to start implementing a customized SEO plan into your digital marketing plan, call us today at +26772305316 to speak with a strategist.

Let’s get started!

Why is SEO important?

SEO is the process of boosting your website’s ranking in the search results. When users conduct searches online, they see a list of relevant search results.

You want to appear at the top of these results so leads will find and contact your business. Considering 75% of people don’t look past the first page of results, it is crucial that you improve your website’s rankings with SEO.

SEO helps your business appear in the right search results. It operates on keywords, and these keywords are important for ensuring your tourism business appears in search results when people search for tourism businesses like yours online.

You help your business connect with leads that are more interested in your services. When you use the right keywords, you attract leads that are using those keywords to generate search results. SEO is crucial to helping your tourism business connect with more valuable leads.

3 tips to help your SEO plan drive results

If you want to see results with your SEO plan, there are steps you can take to ensure that you drive the best results. These tips will help you create an SEO plan that is more effective and drives in more leads.

1. Conduct keyword research

If you want your SEO plan to be effective, you need to conduct keyword research. Keyword research is important because you need to rank for the right keywords. You want your website to appear in relevant search results, so choosing the right keywords is crucial.

There are numerous keyword research tools you can use to help you figure out the right keywords. These tools will offer suggestions for different keywords you can use on your site. As you look at different keywords, it is best to focus on long-tail keywords for your campaign.

Long-tail keywords are keywords that contain three or more words. For example, “tourist attractions near Harrisburg, PA” is a long-tail keyword. This is a specific keyword that says exactly what a user is seeking.

These keywords are better than short-tail keywords, which only contain one or two words. In this case, a short tail keyword is “tourism.” This is a very generic term and doesn’t specify what a user wants to see.

With a keyword like “tourism,” someone could be looking for the definition of the word, news articles about tourism, or tourist attractions. If you tried to rank for this keyword, it wouldn’t drive the best results for your tourism business because your traffic is less qualified. By focusing on long-tail keywords, you are driving in more qualified traffic.

When leads use search long-tail keywords related to your business, it’s more likely they are looking for a tourism business like yours. With SEO, you can attract these leads to your site and earn more conversions for your business.

2. Integrate keywords on your pages

Once you have your keywords selected, you need to integrate them into your pages. When Google crawls your pages, search bots look for keywords to understand the context of your content. By integrating keywords, you will help Google rank your pages for the right keywords.

There are numerous places you will integrate keywords to help your page rank. This includes the headings, title tags, meta descriptions, and body text of your page. These are all places that will help your pages rank higher in search results for specific keywords.

As you integrate keywords into your page, it is important that you don’t overuse them. This leads to keyword stuffing.

Google will think you are trying to stuff your page with certain keywords to help your site rank better for that keyword. This may seem like it will help your tourism website rank better, but it will damage your ranking.

To avoid overusing keywords, only use them where they fit and flow naturally.

3. Build links

Link building plays an important role in helping your tourism business improve your SEO ranking. There are two types of links you’ll want to focus on to improve your ranking.

1. Backlinks

Backlinks are links you earn from other reputable sites. When an authority site links to your page on their own page, it forms a backlink.

These links boost the trust and authority of your site. When a reputable site links to your content, it sends a positive signal to Google that your site is trustworthy and has reliable information. It will rank your site higher to help more people find your helpful information.

The best way to earn backlinks is through content creation. You need to create industry-specific content to ensure that you drive in leads that are interested in your tourism business. This content can come in many forms, including blogs, videos, infographics, or ebooks.

Once you have the content created, you can ask authority sites to check it out and share it on their sites. You can continue to build relationships with these authority sites and earn more links for your tourism business.

When you earn backlinks, you help improve your ranking. You want to continually earn quality backlinks, so you can keep improving your SEO ranking.

2. Internal links

Internal links play an important role in improving your website’s ranking. These are links within your text that lead to other pages on your site.

You want to use internal links on your page because they keep your audience engaged on your page longer. When they check out one of your pages, they can click on links that take them to other helpful pages. This keeps them engaged on your page longer, which improves your rankings in search results.

Google wants to rank sites that provide users with a great experience. If users are on your site for a long time checking out your information, it sends a positive signal to Google that your website is helpful and provides a positive user experience. It will rank your site higher to help more leads find your site.

Internal links are a great way to keep leads engaged on your site longer. Not only will they learn more about your tourism business, but they will also help you improve your site’s SEO ranking.

Your museum’s digital presence is critical to its success. It’s an opportunity to connect with more leads that traditional marketing tactics cannot reach. You must invest in your Digital marketing plan if you want to help your museum flourish.

Make no mistake: unpaid, organic marketing strategies are crucial as well. Your website is important, especially when optimised for relevant search phrases. A social media presence and an email marketing campaign that engages visitors and communicates the nature of the location are also essential.

Digital museum advertising does not replace these efforts, nor does it replace the traditional, in-person marketing that smaller museums and attractions have mastered. Instead, paid advertising are an important contributor to the overall marketing mix, providing a more reliable, structured way to reach your target audience, from capturing their interest to eventually enticing them to come.

Step 1: Understand the Value of Digital Advertising for Museums

Let’s face it: museum marketing budgets tend to be very limited. That’s why the first step has to be a comprehensive understanding of why you should invest in paid ads to begin with. Consider these five reasons to invest in paid digital ads:

1. Expand your reach. Even spending a few hundred dollars on a Facebook campaign can get your message in front of thousands of potential audience members you wouldn’t otherwise reach. You no longer have geographic or demographic limits, or have to rely on your audience finding you.
2. Reach targeted audiences. Reach matters little if you can’t focus on your target audience. Fortunately, you can leverage digital ads to reach audiences with a specific interest in what you offer. Facebook alone offers hundreds of segmentation options, from age and gender all the way to recent travel and purchasing information. Meanwhile, Google allows you to focus on exact keywords and phrases that relate to your museum.
3. Cost-effective outreach. Compared to more traditional means like radio and billboards, digital ads across platforms tend to be extremely cost-effective. As mentioned above, you can stand up an ad or campaign for as little as $100 and still reach a good segment of your audience.
4. Opportunities across the funnel. We’ll dive into this piece more throughout this guide, but it’s important to understand as a general benefit of digital ads. You can create campaigns that accomplish anything from just spreading the word to actually getting visitors through the door on opening night.
5. The value of a Google grant. In its effort to support non-profit organizations, Google (responsible for more than a third of all digital ad revenue) offers significant financial support to entities like museums. The search engine giant offers grants that match up to $10,000 in ad spend every month for 501(c)3 organizations.

These points make digital advertising for museums a no-brainer solution for any museum or attraction looking to gain a consistent audience and revenue stream. Feel free to use them as a business case to your supporters or supervisors to ensure that you have the budget necessary for the below opportunities.

Step 2: Build Your Audience and Targeting Opportunities

The general benefits of digital advertising for museums are clear, but it’s important to understand one caveat: you will only succeed if you know exactly who to target. Defining your audience and understanding how to target them should thus be your first step in building successful digital marketing campaigns for your museum.

It starts with defining your target audience to make sure that you find the people who look most like your potential and ideal visitors. Once that step is complete, take a close look at some of the targeting and segmentation opportunities that digital platforms offer to get your message in front of the right people. These are your options.

Existing Lists of Your Members

Almost every digital platform, from Google to Facebook, now allows for targeting based on email accounts. Upload a list and the network will match its contact info with that of its users, with a typical match rate between 50 and 60%. You can then show ads specifically to the matched users.

Lookalike Audiences

This step involves uploading your audience lists but allowing the platform to make a judgment call. For instance, Facebook Ads Manager will take an uploaded list and look for shared demographic and interest-based characteristics. You can then target ads to other users on the platform who share those same characteristics.

Demographic and Behavioral Targeting

In addition to basic demographic targeting, you can focus on more advanced behavioral options as well. That might include the followers of pages for other museums or interests in topics your museum focuses on.

Geographic and Time-Specific Factors

Ready to get even more advanced? By leveraging networks like Facebook or through advanced keyword targeting, you can reach users based on not just where they are, but where and when they’re traveling. Among other things, that enables you to get your ads in front of tourists while they visit your city.

The Nuances of Intent

Targeting users based on intent has been somewhat of a holy grail for digital marketers. If you know what your audience will do, you no longer have to guess what they might do. Knowing intent is becoming increasingly possible with access to search and content history, allowing you to build more specific audiences and messaging.

Step 3: Generate Awareness Through Eye-Catching, Current Campaigns

Effective museum marketing means embracing smartphone culture and building avenues for user-generated content. Done right, you can use paid ads to support these efforts to generate more awareness among members of your target audience who may have never heard about you.

A few crucial tips can help you get to that point:

• Focus on creativity. Museum visitors tend to embrace creativity, so don’t be afraid to play around with the messaging and visuals to tell your audience more than ‘visit us.’ Good ads get results; great ads create word of mouth and encourage your audience to share them among their own followers.
• Get that attention. Generating awareness is impossible without catching the eye of your audience. Turn images into artwork, play with the coloring, or just switch up the angles. It never hurts to get some inspiration from what other museums are doing, digitally and otherwise.
• Build some videos. Video content tends to be highly effective, paid or unpaid. If you create the right videos, you can push them out through paid ads on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook. Meanwhile, over-the-top (OTT) video allows you to place digital commercials in front of highly targeted audiences on streaming services like Hulu for a fraction of the cost of traditional TV.
• Showcase the experience. What is it like to visit your museum exhibit or attraction? What does your typical visit involve? Use your ads to showcase this experience. That might include a hyperlapse video showcasing the exhibit, a behind-the-scenes tour after dark, or other creative ways to get the attention of your unsuspecting audience.

Generating awareness means capturing attention. If you can do that, you’ve taken the first step in making sure that your audience enters your funnel and that you’ve established future contact down the road.

Step 4: Increase Consideration Among Interested Audiences

Generating awareness, of course, is only part of the battle. If that awareness never turns into tangible interest, you won’t see the ROI you need to help your museum succeed.

In this step, you go beyond that initial awareness. Here you specifically target the audience that already knows about you, through seeing your ads or following you on your social media accounts. That means refining your targeting, messaging, and ad types accordingly.

Leverage Retargeting Opportunities

Let’s start with the basics of retargeting, which describes a targeting mechanism available on all digital platforms that allows you to focus on potential visitors who have already shown an interest in your museum. By placing a so-called retargeting pixel, you can show your ads specifically to recent web visitors or app downloaders.

The implications for the consideration stage are significant. While your awareness-driven ads might prompt your audience to visit your website, retargeting draws them in deeper.

You know they’re interested now. It’s time to get specific.

Focus Your Messaging on Event Detail

Retargeting gets your message in front of the right audience. But of course, the message has to be right too. If you’re reaching interested audiences, it’s on you to satisfy their interest.

You can accomplish that by focusing on a variety of message types:

• Details about upcoming exhibit openings and other special events.
• Highlights from the individual exhibits that leave your audience wanting to learn more.
• Specific opening times and dates that allow would-be visitors to make their plans.
• Facebook event ads that push your audience to take action directly on the platform.

With this captive audience, specificity is almost always better. Give them information up front so they can see how it fits into their plans.

Step 5: Close the Deal With Decision-Based Ads

We’ve reached the bottom of the funnel, the crucial point at which your audience makes a go-or-no-go decision: should they visit your museum or enjoy your attraction, or not?

Awareness and consideration-based ads fill your funnel to get to this point. But that doesn’t mean your digital campaigns have to be complete. In fact, you can still influence this final step with the right types of ads and messaging.

The Convincing Power of Special Offers

The ads in this funnel stage have one goal: to give that final nudge. Special offers can play a major role in getting to that specific point.

It might be an early-bird special for the first few days of a new exhibit or opportunity. Another option is a membership offer that allows for extra perks such as return visits. We’re psychologically predisposed to respond positively to special offers, and decision-stage ads allow for an effective way to get these offers in front of your audience.

Leveraging the FOMO Element

One specific type of offer that’s worth highlighting in closing the deal and driving the decision: FOMO. Short for ‘fear of missing out,’ it’s a proven marketing principle that becomes invaluable at the decision stage.

Time-based special offers, like the early opening special mentioned above, are one way to leverage FOMO. You don’t have to stop there, though. User-generated content, especially from users your audience considers influencers, can have the same general psychological effect: if others are going, should I really stay home?

In digital museum advertising, FOMO should be used judiciously. It only remains credible if you don’t constantly change discount deadlines or push every new exhibit as the latest and greatest. But used selectively in ads, it can become a powerful tool to drive that visit decision.

Step 6: Measure Your ROI to Maximize Digital Ad Potential

Building ads throughout the funnel allows you to create a more strategic marketing effort that should, in theory, drive more visits. That doesn’t mean you have to hope for it. Instead, the final step in building your comprehensive digital ad campaign is to measure the ROI of your efforts.

Whenever possible, connect your ads to that next funnel step you want and need your audience to take as the core KPI:

• Awareness-based ads are successful when they drive consideration, measured through web visits and ad engagement.
• Consideration-based ads succeed when they show a clear path to the decision, like visits to a pricing page or calls for booking.
• Decision-based ads should lead directly to actual revenue through ticket purchases and advanced booking.

A comprehensive campaign designed for the entire funnel should have revenue as its ultimate goal to drive true ROI. That requires analytics tools such as geo-conversion lift, measuring not just online conversions (an undoubtedly crucial part of the equation) but also actual foot traffic to your location.

Building this type of campaign is not easy. It requires careful thought and planning, as well as the right tools. At the same time, the effort will be well worth the investment when your attraction sees a significant increase in revenue and foot traffic as a direct result of your full-funnel digital ad campaign.

You don’t have to do it alone. With our help, you can build comprehensive campaigns designed to help your museum or attraction gain awareness and revenue to sustain and make a regional name for itself. Drop us a line to start the conversation.