Search engine optimization, or SEO for short, is the process that is used to ensure that your campground website ranks as high as possible in search results. It really is that simple, but it couldn’t be more complicated and it changes every week. Let me back up for a moment and try to explain a little better.
There are two ways of looking at search results today. The first are your traditional rankings that are primarily focused on content. These are impacted by the text that appears on your website, the blog posts you write, how your navigation works and dozens of other items. The second is optimizing for Local SEO which is when your RV Park shows up in searches for keywords like “campground near me” etc. Both can have a big impact on where you rank.
So let’s keep this simple and if you want to know more advanced strategies, just reach out to us. Content is and always will be king, but the difference between mediocre content that was written in five minutes for SEO and content written in a few hours for human consumption is what sets you apart. Always remember that real people are the audience you want to attract long-term, not Google’s robots. Why? Because robots don’t spend money on campsites.
A content strategy takes time, planning, and patience. Now that Google has started featured local businesses in a different way, though, there are quicker and easier methods to outrank your competition. The two single most important things to focus on are reviews and citations. Focus on getting more reviews for your campground, responding to your reviews, and building out local citations. Those are the two paths to ranking higher in many local searches.
That doesn’t mean you should ignore your website content or skip writing blog posts. It means you should start with the above and then once you have that mastered, move on to the things that require more planning and more patience to achieve results. If you are a writer and words flow easily, create the content and ask your website designer to put it online. If you aren’t then hire someone who can create the content for you.
Hopefully that gave you a basic understanding of Local SEO and the different things you can work on at a basic level to outrank the RV Park’s you compete with. There are literally hundreds of more complicated things that great marketing teams do to improve your search engine rankings, and the person you already work with may already be doing some or all of the above for you. Don’t take their word, though, demand results.
