What is SEO and why is it important in Winter Tourism?

• Is your web site reaching its intended audience?
• Is it ‘findable’ through search engines?
• Is it really promoting your business?

This post is an overall description of what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) actually is and why it is so crucial to businesses within the winter tourism industry.

The definition of SEO

SEO is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via ‘natural’ search results. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it ‘ranks’, the more searchers will visit that site.

Put in layman’s terms, SEO means making your web site ‘findable’ to a larger number of people.

The validity of SEO

Questioning the importance of SEO? Well, think about this…

When looking for information online the first point of call for the vast majority of today’s web users is one of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo! and MSN). This is particularly true for users who are unfamiliar with brand names and products in the market they are exploring. Here’s an example:

John is an English-speaking skier looking for information on where to ski in Japan. He’s never heard of any Japanese ski resorts, only of Nagano – the region that hosted the Olympics not so long ago.

He enters “japan ski resorts” into Google, however no actual ski resorts appear on the first page, only tour operators and online resort guides. To find out more he now has to search through one of the online guides or continue through Google’s listings hoping to find what he’s looking for (something that very few users do).

What if a ski resorts own web site appeared on the first page? John’s life would certainly be a little easier – and the resort would be more likely to welcome John as a customer and holidaymaker.

The search engine concept

A search engine is the middleman between you and your audience. Your web site speaks to the search engine, which then speaks to the potential customers when they ask it about a company or services like yours.

Try to think of search engines as travel agents: a travel agency is the middleman between the destination and the tourist. Much the same as a travel agency promotes destinations search engines promote web sites.

Having said that, for a travel agency to promote a tourist destination properly it requires some information first; brochures, prices, maps… you get the idea. Search engines require information too. Your web site MUST provide this information if it is to succeed.

What’s more, search engines will favour sites that provide information to them in a way that is easy for them to interpret, categorise and accurately describe to search engine users.

Written content that ‘speaks’ to search engines

Search engines look for written content in web sites. A web site without any written content in a format that the search engine can understand becomes very unproductive.

For example, a web site full of images (that may even include written text) does NOT speak to search engines. Web sites with impressive animations and no written content are only useful if the users are already looking at it, not if they are using search engines to find it.

‘Content-rich’ is a term applied to web sites that feature in-depth written content. Generally speaking, the more relative written information your web site contains, the larger your audience will become. There are of course other contributing factors here, but that’s the nuts and bolts of it.

The relevance to winter tourism

With the ever-changing and somewhat unreliable snow seasons (thanks Global Warming!), winter tourists are travelling further a field each year. The closest ski region to one’s home can no longer guarantee a consistent snowfall. Skiers and snowboarders are constantly on the search for fresh destinations and a new adventure. How best to research these new horizons? Using the World Wide Web of course!

Well-established snow sport regions can begin to expect more and more visitors from countries further away. Resorts in Japan can target Brits. Chalets in Europe can focus on the Chinese. Cross-culture marketing is now crucial for all winter tourism businesses with SEO being a primary influence.

Your web site

Take a moment to look at your web site. Re-cap and ask yourself these questions again:

• Is your web site really reaching its intended audience?
• Is it ‘findable’ through search engines?
• Is it promoting your business?

Want to learn more? Over the coming months we will be writing a series of SEO-related posts for you to indulge upon. Topics to cover include keywords, meta-tags, language translation, content mark-up, headers and optimising images for search engines.

Check back regularly or sign up to our RSS feed…

This entry was posted by Posted by Keith on Sunday, December 30th, 2007 at 11:36 am, and is filed under SEO, Web strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.