SEO for Tour Operators: 7 Tips for Bookings

0:01 — Hello boat trip operators BT OS as I call you how's it going my name is Vitaly levitt and today I'm gonna be telling you how to grow your direct bookings with SEO and it is gonna be super fun volume 2 because our first one didn't work out thank you guys all so much for joining me today we're gonna have a few more people join us here in a minute let me tell you that I packed a ton of content into this webinar so if you

0:37 — Follow this process you guys can significantly increase your direct bookings through organic search and wean yourself off of the dependence of OTAs and social media and advertising because SEO is by far the best and let's get into some of this and what we're gonna be covering today so who is this for this is for boat trip operators who are taking their business seriously I mean

1:13 — It's like yes you have a passion for running this the the the charters or boat trips or scuba or whatever else but fundamentally this is you need to look at this as a holistic in your business right like how do you increase the business how do you grow the business how do you operationalize systematize right and so this is for people who are taking their business seriously you want to grow and you want to build a sustainable business you have some capital to invest in growth because

1:46 — Ultimately you'll need some tools you'll need some services in order to do this and you're tired of paying crazy high commissions to OTAs and advertising costs and so what we'll be covering today I'm gonna give you a brief introduction of myself and my a my my experience my past I'm gonna tell you about why SEO is the best channel for direct bookings how to help customers find you that are already looking for you which I think is like the key to SEO right

2:19 — You essentially insert yourself into the existing flow of demand people are already looking for you how do you help them find you and then we're gonna talk about targeting people who are ready to buy not just those are browsing so this is a very important distinction as well right you want people who are ready to buy from you and then we're gonna talk about how to structure your website how to organize it we're going to talk about how to create content quickly and easy

2:52 — Easily because fundamentally content is the king for SEO how to increase the authority of your website and then we're talking about QA and some ongoing help that I can offer you guys okay so grab a piece of piece of piece of paper and a pen there's gonna be a ton of information in this and if you have any comments questions feel free to post them in the in a comments thread keep in mind that there's a 20-second delay

3:26 — Between what I'm presenting and what you're seeing in Facebook live so my suggestion I'll try to kind of you know space that time out but like give me a little bit of time to process your question in this webinar okay so brief introduction hello there my name is Vitaly over the last ten years or so I've served as director and VP level marketing executive at a number of technology companies in Silicon Valley

4:00 — Have helped over ten so thin valley companies grow and I am directly responsible for about a hundred million dollars in revenue over that course of time so I do marketing as a as a career this is what I do and I ended up somehow in a boat trip operator business which was not my intention but it just kind of happened I I essentially was a bit burnt out and in 2007 I decided to take a break and I we

4:38 — Decided to go walk the community Santiago community I go for anyone that's not familiar as a amazing pilgrimage that occurs in that's that's all it happens to Spain but like you can go through Portugal for France all over the all over Europe pilgrims have been making this Trek to Santiago for centuries and I decided to go do this as like a spiritual experience for myself I did half of it and I decided I was like you know what my feet just don't work

5:12 — Anymore I walked for two weeks straight it was a wonderful experience but I decided to go and like take a load off and I have some family in Tenerife and so I decided to take a little break hang out on a beach relax and this opportunity was presented to me by a gentleman who runs a travel agency there he said we'll listen we we currently send all of our business to these partners if we had our own boat and if we had our we did our own charters we

5:45 — Could keep all the profit and so why don't we do that and so that's what I did I bought a boat I bought a beautiful 49 Bavaria I loved it and I learned how to sail and I learned how to run the business and I enjoyed it I enjoyed it tremendously and so through this process you know when I started this business I realized just how difficult it was no one was talking about what was working

6:21 — What wasn't working in the travel space especially not for Bill trip operators you know what's the best way to structure a website how do you do proper SEO how do you manage direct bookings how do you manage OTAs how do you like all of this all these questions there were no answers for me which is partly why I created this group because I this community to help others who may be starting businesses and and to grow I made a lot of mistakes we spent a lot of money and we learned the hard way we tried everything we tried social media

6:54 — Marketing our Instagram account has over 9,000 followers we did influencer marketing with like people who had millions of followers we did affiliate marketing we did work OTS and so much more and looking through this into all these channels we realized that our by far our best booking channel for direct bookings was organic search so actual commission so like we we did we have we

7:28 — Have a lot of resellers like a hundred hundred local partners we work with multiple OTAs and OTA and local reseller commissions add up very quickly we pay out an average of thirty five percent across all these partners a hundred thousand dollars hundred thousand euros actually I should correct that we've paid out over a hundred thousand euro in commissions in two years I don't know if you've ever liked taking the time to calculate how much it's actually cost you to do this but it may not be an

8:03 — Initial upfront cost right because like you were just like yeah just like partner with you and you sell it and you get a commission but over time and if you're building a long-term sustainable business it's not sustainable because this this should not be a primary booking source right it's incredibly expensive and so when we realized how much we were paying out to our partners we that's when we started really kind of heavily investing in SEO because I wanted to build something that was lasting and every time we pay out a commission its money that we didn't

8:39 — Invest in the business it's you know as an asset it's money that we essentially just spent to acquire a customer and then that customer flies away and then may not return ever again or may return you know once or twice to our destination right and so we realize that the faster we can build our own direct bookings and invest in our own assets the better it would be for us in the long term and so despite all these challenges we still managed to build a

9:12 — Four hundred and fifty thousand dollar annual revenue business sorry euro keep commuting the next step mixed up with only one passenger boat in less than two years sorry 110 passenger boat in less than in less than two years so these are phenomenal results but remember like we still paid out a hundred grand right in just commissions so SEO is by far the best drag bookings channel it accounts for 50% of our direct bookings today and here are some

9:49 — Ways to start thinking about how about your website and about your online presence about SEO right so if you're serious about a long term business you want to build this thing to last it's totally worth it for long term results so here's a really simple comparison of what it looks like to invest in PPC which is pay-per-click advertising like at Google Ads right or SEO so from PPC you put money in and you almost

10:22 — Immediately get results you have to do a couple of modifications right but if some fundamental if someone's searching for you and they click on your ad you you get a booking so this is great initially but when you realize that all you're doing is spending money and you're building Google you're not building yourself then you realize that that's not really the way that that's not a sustainable vision right and so SEO is more of an upfront cost but has significantly higher returns later on so

10:58 — You can see like in this chart they're essentially saying that somewhere between six and twelve months is when you start seeing real results I think you see them a little sooner I think if you if you if you actually follow the methodology that I have in this presentation you'll be able to start seeing results within six months and you will very quickly realize just how powerful it is to have something that is sustainable you don't have to continuously invest in and that just produces results for you automatically right so like now like for

11:35 — Us we spent like we knew SEO was gonna be a big part of it from like you know month three or month four we started investing right away we're sixteen months later fifteen months later and now we're in the top positions for like all of our keywords and when tourism restarts I don't have to start ads again I don't have to do social media advertising and I don't do any of that stuff I just know that I'm gonna get bookings because that channel has been built right that's an asset now

12:07 — That I own and so SEO is invest in an asset not quick results so I'm not saying that you should replace your advertising budget entirely but my recommendation is that you subsidize it you move you shift your some of your budget from advertising to SEO because that's what builds your long-term sustainable business it takes time we've got to be patient it's easier than you think once you know the process content is king in SEO and I'll show you how to do that really

12:42 — Easily and don't wait this is now now is the time start now especially right now when you're not busy SEO is by far the best thing you should be investing in because you may not see those results now but you'll see those results in six months or 12 months in your next very heavy season and you'll be able to be able to capitalize on all of that effort that you put in to do it now so let's get into it how to help customers find you that are already looking for you okay so people out there are already searching are

13:21 — Already looking for what you have to offer SEO in SEO is entire kind of goal is to place you in front of or in the middle of the flow of traffic that already exists around the world people are already looking for this right so it's simple this is pretty much keyword research and I'm going to show you how to do this you find the search terms that your customers are already using to describe what you offer okay and you incorporate those words into your

13:53 — Website into the title tag into the headings and throughout the page and there's like a bunch of stuff around this that we can talk about it some other time but are you this is fundamentally it you know it's not overly complex you don't know there's no you have to worry about things like keyword density and there's like a whole bunch of technical technical terms for you you just need to figure out what is your MVC I call this the most valuable content most valuable content is a simple formula its keywords or content that has high volume low difficulty and

14:28 — A high commercial intent okay and I'm gonna explain and break this down all of this for you right now so you build your content around your MVC alright so some tools that you can use for keyword research to figure out like what are people actually typing to find me so keyword mixer is a great tool it allows you to create your own content or your own keyword ideas because you know your business better than anybody else Google search console I highly recommend installing it's a free tool it's a piece

15:01 — Of code that you put on your website and essentially it's an administrative tool that Google provides you that gives you access to data that you don't have access to anywhere else so Google search console will give you keyword data and ranking data for free that you won't see your Google Analytics Google Analytics only show you traffic and keywords or people don't have privacy enabled but now a days 98 percent of the people have privacy enabled and Google shows you

15:37 — That in a Google Analytics as not provided because they don't have the rights to show you but search console Google search console is an aggregate tool that shows you all the keywords that you all are already ranking for so if you're in position 9 or 10 for a really great keyword then it doesn't take much to put some work in to get that to then into the top 3 position right and so it gives you a lot of really really great tools uber suggests is a free keyword research tool Google Keyword planner is another

16:11 — Free keyword tool but will only give you aggregate data still useful and then 8h RF switch is a professional tool that I use that's a hundred dollars a month and it's by far the best keyword research tool that I found so we're gonna do a little live demo time so essentially in the comments if you want me to kind of give you some suggestions and we can do this live put your website address and the country where the majority of your customers are coming from put that in

16:44 — The comments right now and I'm gonna show you how to use some of these tools to find out your keywords all right here we go so we got flame of Africa calm so let's see this website I'm just gonna do look quick quick look at it to see if what we can do to help very cool so I'm gonna I'm gonna you look like a little bit

17:19 — More of like an OTA kind of and you have a lot of different kinds of packages here let me actually take a look at this real quick yeah so you have you have yeah I'm not gonna do this one right now it's a little bit too heavy I'm just doing a little more simple simpler so it's easier for people to follow follow along sorry about that I'll be happy to help you later let me

17:52 — Just take a look at a couple of these yeah so this is like this is this is uh this is a good simple site we'll use this one as an example so wine boot boat the wine cruise so essentially have what Prague cruise and wine so who's a long historical parts of the city center and taste five examples okay cool so you essentially offer you a wine cruises in Prague so what we essentially want to find out is well what are people already searching for that you could capitalize on right how do you insert yourself in

18:26 — The flow of existing intent there's people already out there looking for you how do you just capitalize on how do you capture that that a desire Benjamin McDonald is the the woman again said please be gentle so so here's what we're gonna do we're gonna look at these some keyword examples so here's some common ones and obviously yours are all change like for instance yours is going to be yours also going to include wine cruise oops

19:02 — Right so I'm curious how many people are searching for wine cruise in Prague right so we're gonna do is go whoever suggests who posted the wine cruise one whoever posted that tell me what's the who's who Andre gellick hang on let me let me unmute you Andre can you hear me yes I can awesome hey what's uh what's your primary target like audience like where do people come from like your your primary audience so until now before the

19:35 — Lockdown and everything most of our guests were from either us or from northern Europe Scandinavia or Western Europe because our tours are like premium-priced so it's currently like wouldn't be that affordable for locals so Prague wine cruise you would say is probably something there like people might search for you right this is very like we're specific right let's say like Prague wine cruise let's see many people in the United States are searching for Prague wine cruise

20:11 — But I have ten searches because I'm not oh no my daily limit alright I apologize I'm gonna use my I'm gonna use a href switch is my own tool for this then but usually what you would do is you click on you would put frog wine cruise here and in an uber suggest and they would tell you how much volume it has and a couple other really key metrics but since we can't use that one right now because I was testing it earlier we're gonna do a href if you need like an uber uber suggest is actually really really easy to use so I recommend it so Prague

20:46 — Wine cruise and the United States and it's on Google I'm gonna search so we're gonna update this if it says it has no data that means there's not that much existing traffic for it already right people are not searching for Prague wine cruise but I'm gonna show you how to use a couple of these tools real quick that makes this a little easier now this might not all be exact but let me show you how we use keyword mixer skewered mixer essentially gives you several lists of keywords and then it mixes them all together so in this case we're gonna do you know whale watching dolphin

21:19 — Watching the crowd I don't need these but boat trips sailing you guys do sailing hundra know what you do like boat charter boat rental wine cruises are all keywords that may come up for you right yeah and then we're just gonna do Prague what our primary our primary idea right now is to figure out what do people search for around be around your topic right and so Prague could you also expand the geographia on that you want

21:52 — To do like the whole the whole country or you think it's just Prague people are just searching for Prague oh I think brag is even more famous than Czech Republic is so we'll do that so we're gonna take these key words that this key word make sure by the way if you had multiple so you can do like I don't know how to spell check that's check so like if you had multiple key words here and here and here so like I'll give an example you could do oops you could put these here and then these here and you can do best top compare you know and

22:29 — So what that does is it just gives you like a whole list of keywords so like this is something that it's useful from your own experience you know what people are gonna be searching for and you know what kind of boat tour you offer so this is the way to do that so you essentially do that let me just pull these out because I just want the prog ones so what's it doing I was pulling a blank here so we're gonna pull these and we're gonna put them in keywords Explorer so

23:01 — By the way there's no search volume for prog wine cruise from the United States okay but let's see if there are other ones so we're gonna put in all these and missing keyword can find it okay so prog boat rental prog boat trips so there's really not that much traffic for Prague boat tours actually let's do this from Prague boat or yeah all right there we go this is actually what your keyword is Prague river cruise Vltava River cruise I don't know what that is what's vltava

23:36 — Narrator that's the name there's a purpose there you go so that's actually a really great way to look at how to structure some of your content right because people are searching for Prague river cruise they're looking for Vltava River cruise they're looking for river cruise Prague which are really interchangeable here and all of these key word difficulties by the way uber suggests it gives you the same thing all these key word difficulties are all really low so it's really easy for to rank in these if you do follow the steps in this webinar essentially right by the way there's a lot of different ones

24:08 — Prague River tour right there they're not huge in search volume but I'll say that like you know we we rank for by the way huge CPC nine dollars per click so people are paying to Google a nine dollars for every one of those clicks if you can get in the top three position for progress or cruise every one of those clicks are coming in for free an ongoing basis so that's why it's one of the reasons I love us you and you can see like the search results here by the way this is only you yes all right so like Viking River Cruises is number one right

24:43 — 20:21 progress avalon waterways so these are the guys that are in top two positions in the United States for progress or cruise but look at this they have very little backlinks and-and-and backlinks to their site right like this is really easy to compete with because this means that you can like you get like ten links and all of a sudden you're more authoritative for Prag River Cruises than they are right now their domains are much heavier right they have

25:16 — A very high domain ranking by the way these are all technical details that we will talk about later if you want jacket questions later but like our primary goal here is to find a keyword difficulty that's low that has a high CPC right so like remember we talked about this this is the MVC formula high volume low difficulty and high commercial intent so commercial intent is easily suggested by the cost per click the higher the cost per click the

25:51 — More likely that there is money behind those clicks right meaning that like why would somebody spend money on a click that they weren't gonna be able to make money you know after the after the person clicked so you can tell that like for instance vltava river cruises is only two dollars and fifty cents by the way is still great but there's some in here there's like a dollar a 10 so boat trip Prague very cheap so this is a great one to go after you have 364 clicks that you can get you have a high class per click you know that the highest volume and it's a low keyword

26:24 — Difficulty ubersuggest gives you the same same exact data so that's how you identify the keyword that you want to go after right for SEO purposes right I mean even for PPC if you even if you wanted to to bid on Google ads this is the same way you would do that you would essentially find the keywords that you need to go after right and then and then set up the ads bid on those keywords yeah I mean imagine imagine and I had nine bucks a

27:01 — Click I mean imagine how much value that's gonna be if you can be in the first you know top three positions of that one okay so that's how you do keyword research and those are some of the tools that you would use it you to do that okay Andre I'm gonna mute you back again so we can go continue moving forward okay targeting people who are ready to buy and not just browsing so talking about commercial intent by the way this is the most important thing that I am going to share with you guys today if you can if

27:34 — You can learn this and apply it and other aspects of your marketing you will be far more successful in all your marketing so simply it's a buying cycle determination we're in the process of buying is some is is what is a customer right so informational commercial transactional navigational let's go through each one of these informational intent are searches and when people actually are looking for something well

28:08 — They say like well what is or when or where or how or the guy during examples are on tips so like you know what is the best thing to do and in Tortosa when is the best time to visit Tortosa where in toe to toe so do I stay how do I get to Tortosa like these are all informational intent they have the lowest probability of conversion because people are not ready to buy they're just researching they're just trying to get answers about a certain topic at a very high level right you have commercial intent commercial intent or people that are

28:42 — Much closer to the transaction people who are actually looking for the best boat trips in Tortosa the top boat trips and Tortosa the best reviews or the the reviews of the of boat trips in Tortosa right like these are people who are like actually starting to get a starting to get ready to buy something I think you have transactional intent which is the clearest indicator that they're ready to buy something the one they're actually typing and I want to book a trip or I want to buy I want to best on the price run on a discount you see some overlap in between

29:16 — Commercial and transactional but transactional is this is where your money is at right and then you have navigational intent which is primarily around your own brand searches people who are already looking for you you essentially have people that are looking for you specifically using your brand and price so in one case you know you got like who's got gate gayleen charters so there's someone who's having the gayleen charters price booking help directions right you don't really need

29:48 — To optimize for this you should have pages on your website for all these things but Google clear this clearly understands that you are that brand and that that's the page people are looking for so like this needs these need to exist but you don't need to like actually do work to optimize those this just happen naturally so what does this look like in practice so I'll give you an example of the tenerife that fun website so on Tenerife that fun website here is our our MVC is whale-watching Tenerife it has a commercial intent people are looking for

30:23 — Trips that are whale watching in Tenerife and so they type in we're watching Tenerife now there's a bunch of other content that we create that has informational intent because we want to be informational we want to help people understand where to go whale watching what's the best time to go whale watching what's the infographic like I want to see like an infographic like a little travelers guide we made what are the whale species in Tenerife and then the commercial intent right you

30:56 — Essentially have the whale watching Tenerife and then we have private charters in Tenerife now this doesn't have that many searches private charters and tender it doesn't have any searches but it's a high high margin high profit product nice we make a lot more off of this one as well so we still optimized for it we have a page that's just dedicated to private best sailing trip in Tenerife transactional book a whale-watching trip into Tenerife transactional these are product pages all right look this is a

31:28 — Product page book a whale-watching trip and Tenerife is a product page it's a tour page where they where they can actually click and book best whale watching in Tenerife these are all transactional we have pages for all these we have pages for these we have pages for these we don't know page for this yet because we haven't even started to optimize at this high of a level things to do in Tenerife and things things to do as a search term anywhere that you are located is gonna have the highest audience size but also it's the hardest to convert them into customers because they're just looking for

32:02 — Information you need to create such compelling content at that stage that they have to essentially say wow I didn't even know that I could go on a boat trip I want to go on a boat trip and I want to go with this provider so there's a lot of work that needs to get done there from from the marketing and sales perspective but if you can figure this out it makes it makes a lot of money we're actually starting to get into this now so how do you structure your website for the best results okay this is the typical information architecture that I see for the websites

32:37 — Have and for boat trip operators and information architecture simply means how do you organize your website how do you actually put the pages how do you structure it right and so most people put like we have a home page with some information they've got tours a tourist page they've got a blog page and then Contact Us page and then below that they have like all their products and below that below blog they have all of their posts right this is not an ideal information architecture for small websites okay it's not great because what you're doing is you're

33:11 — Burying your most valuable content your home page by default has the most authority so let's pull up an example again from gayleen charters and by the way I'm sorry I'm using you as an example it's nothing personal I just want to point out so this right here this page this homepage has by default the most authority of any page in your website because it is your home page so like it sits at the top of a hierarchy right and so what often times

33:46 — I see is this happening where the actual product and the yacht's and rates and all of this information is buried on a second level so this is less than ideal ideally what you want to do is have your MVC at the very top so on the very first home page you want to have on that page all of the content and all the information that is directly related to

34:21 — Your MVC and what people are searching for right so in our case it's tenerife whale-watching we have a much bigger site now it's hundreds of pages but when we first started we put all of the boat information and everything that we had we put it all on that home page because that home page gets the most authority and so my recommendation is to take all of these products right and then right you need to put a lot more content in

34:57 — Here about like who you are what you do probably what you have in the About section if you have like some really great information here you need to take take all of this content and you just put it all on here on the home page because this is much easier to rank for then it will be for you to have a really thin homepage and then have your content buried somewhere else right so the way you structure that is you have your MVC that you're going after right here right by the way I realize now the gayleen

35:29 — That you're in Miami I don't know why how I couldn't find that before anyway contact me later and all run you through a bunch of stuff to help you and so MVC is on the top and then from there you have the links directly to your tours tour one to two or three you ever contact us and then your blog but then your best blog posts don't bury your best blog posts keep your best blog posts on that first level I call this essentially a flattened hierarchy now you flatten your website don't bury

36:03 — Your good content you certainly have you have a direct link from your MVC to your blog from your this MVC by the way is also your home page from your home page to your best post and then your home page against your second post you need to have that you flatten the architecture okay so content grouping and silos are a way to tell Google and other search engines how to essentially rank Authority on your on your own website you know like for instance if you have one page that links out to

36:35 — Fifteen other pages and you have all 15 pages linking to that page you're essentially telling Google that that by about one page is right in the middle and that clearly has the most authority and so it gives search engines structure and it gives them structure for authority so this is related but not dependent on information or architecture that we just covered to give you an example of how we do it so we have a page for where to go whale watching the best time to go whale watching infographic on whale watching and what whale types are in tenerife

37:08 — Like we just talked about those are informational then we have commercial intent which is this one right here which is whale watching Tenerife and a high volume plus low difficulty plus commercial antennas there NBC this is a private charters in Tenerife page and to show you exactly what this looks like in practice it's not that complicated here's our guide or essential info for travellers right there's tons of content in here but then here are the pages that I was just talking about we essentially link to them and then from them we link

37:42 — Back best time of see the whale watching the ultimate guide so we just create this we tell Google about authority just using just using structure in linking interlinking okay so then we also have best sailing trip and Tenerife book a whale-watching trip and then best whale watching in Tenerife in and some of these are blog posts and other ones are products product pages and you can see like right here here are links to products these are our products

38:15 — And then throughout the website there's links to the other articles that I mentioned to you right so and you'll by the way you see how like here's our this is our our navigation bar and on our home page so this is our home page on our home page do we have that we have a drop down menu bar here for Tenerife guide this goes this very first link goes to that blog post that I just showed you because I wanted to flatten that architecture right anyone Barry I

38:48 — Didn't want to bury my most valuable content three or four level clicks deep into the website I wanted to bring it up as high as possible and flatten that architecture and so directly from the home page which has the highest authority you can click on that and you go directly into this blog post that gives you all the information you need to go whale watching in Tenerife okay so that's that's how you flatten it and that's how you create a content group using interlinking strategy okay this this strategy alone right here if you

39:23 — Just if you just do this your rankings will increase because it will tell Google even it cuz like most I will say I'll tell you you have a huge leg up there's not that much competition like there's not other people that are sitting on this on webinars like this learning about how to do SEO for their boat businesses okay so the competition is super low across most of your like local regional areas okay so if you even if you just do this alone and create the right content it will significantly

39:56 — Improve your rankings and bring you bring your business ok so I know that I just showed you like a ton of content and creating content is is hard creating good content is hard okay I I'm not the best writer in the world and it takes me a very long time to try to write something but I'm a very good speaker and once I have an outline and once I for me this is my process my process might be different for you but I highly suggest you checking checking it out but you essentially want to have an idea of

40:31 — What kind of content you want to create after you've established your MVC right and after you've established your informational and then your commercial and transactional intense and which pages belong where then you essentially what you do is you know you don't write it yourself like I don't write it I wrote I write I write outlines and so what I do for me is I I write an outline and that a record meet a video of me talking about about it and just going but point by point through the through the outline and then I send it to a

41:05 — Writer I just send the whole package to a writer and I write hire writers on up work and I'm money-making SEO.com they these guys did such a great job for me that I actually invested in their company so I highly recommend them they're they're SEO firm that specializes in travel companies it's fantastic so decent writers will charge somewhere between fifty and a hundred dollars per 500 words somewhere between five and ten cents a word the longer the article the less you pay per word so here's how I do it I just create an

41:38 — Outline for the whole shebang right like I put together everything that a customer may want to know about whale-watching in Tenerife or about any other topic that I'm writing about and then I essentially order like a five thousand word article to be written about all of this content that I want to run through all of it and then after I get it delivered I break it up into multiple different articles so it saves me a lot of money I pay something like two or three cents a word you know which is significantly cheaper so the higher

42:10 — Volume that you order the the cheaper it is so here's a great example of me just talking through an outline like this outline here's here's the eyeliner rope by the way anyone can do this outlines are super easy to write be essentially like here's the title that I that I that I have created intro and like what I want on the intro and then like why Tenerife is a great place you can go whale watching anywhere and then information about each place and then all the different types of whale watching you take anyway so I essentially just I put together this long outline and then I just recorded a

42:45 — Video of me talking about it for like 45 minutes or an hour however long it took me to get through the whole thing and then I just packaged it up and sent it to a writer and I got back 5,000 words of content in like a week or two I mean five thousand words is like two weeks of work but it's but the writers will research it they'll listen to you they'll find supporting facts and and put their own personality and in and put your personality in it because they got chance to see you on video talking about it so a good writer can synthesize all this information and put together some really valuable some very useful content and

43:20 — That's by far by far the easiest way I've found by the way to create content so you essentially have identified your MVC you have structured your website you've created the content you've created an information architecture and the content grouping and now we essentially get to well you have all the stuff like well how do you do how do you then rank competitively in competitive spaces so like how do you how do you outrank TripAdvisor for instance how do

43:53 — You outrank you know get your guide how do you outrank boat rental calm like how do you rank these aggregators that specialize in this kind of stuff well you do this by essentially increasing the authority of your website right and so the way you do this is called link building the more websites around the internet that link to you link to your content link to your website the higher your authority increases because links external links coming in to your website or the number one ranking factor and all

44:28 — Search engines any search engine there's a matter if you're a Google or and X or baidu or does it doesn't matter they're all looking for which article has the or which article or which website has the highest authority so there's a bunch of different ways to do this I'm not gonna go into every single one of them right now because that by itself is like a whole lesson but let's just go through a few of them so by expired domains so you can go to pool calm and pool calm

45:01 — Essentially has a bunch of sites that are already already being deleted or are deleted so mm-hmm so I essentially have you go to delete it deleted domains and you do a quick search so let's just say for instance that I wanted to buy a domain you only want to buy expiring domains that have backlinks and that have authority and I don't have any spam backlinks coming into them so and then what you do is after you buy that you

45:33 — Just three you create a 301 redirect to your own website so let's just say you want to stay within your space within your industry so boat would be a good one if you have a jetski you can type in jetski but you essentially look for searches sorry I got a login yeah so like all of these domains here are all being deleted and so what you do is you take one of these that looks like it's you know that would be valuable to you you take one of these you copy it and then in uber suggests

46:06 — The tool I showed you you just plug it into or suggest and you let it tell you if there's backlinks and authority and all that kind of stuff right so that's how you do that guest blogging is another great example you essentially you write articles on other people's websites that will get that you can insert your own link into so if you're ever curious and like how to do that like you just type in to Google Travel and then write for us or boat write for us because this is a very common way that website administrators will

46:40 — Describe the opportunity for you to to write content from that for for their blogs so you can see like right for us and unpractical wander lost calm we are travel girls calm the right the right life calm the travel manual calms like all these are examples of websites that will take your content submissions they have to be good if the content has to be good has to be relevant to their audience but if you write the content you get a link back you can do a link link exchange we just did one of these in butcher bob writers

47:14 — Group maybe we'll do another one sometime soon local directories and associations there's tons of like tourism boards and local associations in your state or your country that you can join and they will give you a link back in their directories a competitor backlink analysis this is like a more technical way to approach websites that are already linking to your competitors so if they're already linking to your competitor you can reach out to them and say hey we noticed you're linking to

47:45 — Them we also have this and we're different and better because of XYZ reason maybe you should link to us as well so there's a whole process there and then there's lots of things to do in etc and in a place posts right so like things to do in what was that Tortosa thanks to doing Tortosa there's tons of articles so there's one Lonely Planet travel inspires Spain holiday so what you do is you look at all of these you reach out to them and you say hey we're

48:18 — A great thing to do in Tortosa would you consider including us in your article right so this manually takes a lot of work I don't have the time to do it I have a lot of other things going on and so I use I hire I all source this outsourcing is a in this particular case I found to be one of the most cost effective uses of my resources because doing this myself I have to create the process I have to create the emails I

48:52 — Have to create the content it there's a lot of production work value that has to go into it so I use money making it CEO calm and the Hoff again I use these guys because they they're specialized in travel and they're they're fantastic the Hoth is a huge company out of the UK that does SEO it's also fantastic to work with I've using multiple times let me give you an example like all the stuff that I just showed you right and like here's the kind of report that I get like I essentially I tell them here's my URL here's my keyword so I essentially gave them we're watching ten

49:26 — Or a whale and dolphin trip and whale watching trip and I gave them this is my target URL right and in two weeks they come back and they're as they say well we created all of these links for you on these web sites we created all of these links for you on these websites so let me know let me see if this is even live right now this was a while ago yeah so so like they created some page on business blog and here's all her products and it has a link back to our website so by far the best investment that I've

50:02 — Ever made into SEO services is link building you can see the leg they created these are all links that are coming in to that whale-watching tenerife MVC and all I have to do is pay and wait to wait two weeks and I just got it all back and this was not expensive by the way this was like $400 and I got hundreds of links out of it maybe even maybe even a thousand I don't even know but but it's definitely the best way to to do link building in my opinion unless you're trying to optimize for things like

50:36 — Disneyland yeah if you're doing like if you try to optimize for super competitive terms like Disney World or like you know these like big big places then your SEO strategy obviously has to differ from this this is for small local operators so our backlink profile you can see like I just gave you an example of the kind of work that we were doing this is our backlink profile when we really start putting our foot to the foot to the gas and going fast on this you can see that like our backlink

51:08 — Profile increased significantly at referring pages yeah we got like 6,000 pages that refer to us right now okay organic traffic continues to increase now you can tell like pretty much right here is like January chosen 19 is here we do those link building and then look our traffic after that all right so like when you put the effort in SEO your traffic search to really increase right we rank for over almost three thousand keywords now right and our traffic continues to increase so this is like a very the stuff I'm giving you is it

51:43 — Works I promise you it's it's a it's amazing and and now I don't I don't have to spend money on on on paid anything I don't have to pay money to social media advertising and to pay money for PPC and Google Ads everything's just organic just and now it's free I mean I've invested in initially but now it's free and you can see that like when we really started kicking organic traffic into gear or Organic our direct bookings from organic increased significantly right this is

52:18 — This is really fun and of course like we're very seasonal business so q4 and q1 for us or very low seasons q4 q 1 then we just we don't we just started here like you know 2018 and we launched our website and so like we did this in a very short period of time and grew very quickly alright so if you got any questions right now guys please throw them into the the chat I know we're running up here on our one hour and I don't want to keep you guys for too much longer poster Q&A please in the in the chat if

52:51 — You've got any questions right now to get help ongoing I want to help you guys as much as I can on this I think that like we all deserve to be be OTA free and and and and and actually making money on a regular basis ongoing and sustainable long term business so if you want to get help of course post questions in the Facebook group send me a message I will absolutely always do my best to help you on your journey just be specific with your questions please don't ask me you know how do I increase my rankings I'm

53:23 — Just gonna send you a link to this to this presentation right and then lastly I'm happy to help you guys out so you know thank you so much for investing this time with me if you're taking direct bookings seriously and you want to grow your direct bookings and you want to stop paying the crazy Commission rates or to resellers you can book a free 45-minute consultation with me I'll run through your website with you one-on-one instead of trying to like you know pick it out of the comments you can go to bt o doubt Leavitt dot

53:57 — [Music] be happy to just schedule a call with me there it's it'll set up a zoom call you can either join me on zoom' and if it's not if not zoom there's a bunch of international phone numbers you can join me on there arigon asks what's your website our website is tenerife fun so tenerife that fun so just kind of give you like a higher level perspective we started out as like a single boat trip upper operation and then once we

54:32 — Were doing that well for a little while and we were building up our authority on the website I essentially decided to shift to a more long-term strategy for the website because we were investing all this time energy and effort into building our authority on the website and so we started out just as like but you know booked our sailing sailing boat and booked our whale watching tours and then we started shifting into an OTA so now we're a regional OTA and we have something like 60 or 70 products on the website and you can book directly

55:06 — Through our site so now we're not only selling our own tours but we're reseller for a bunch of other tours and so our website is much bigger now and it continues to grow and we invest more and more into SEO and cetera um let's see we got a couple more questions Joan says what is the company where you bought the backlinks money-making SEO yes money making money making SEO calm yes these guys were essentially rebuilding the site right now but you can just sign up to be notified when they're back and

55:39 — They have they'll have details there for their different packages that they offer on link building Howie asks is there a difference between Don versus calm the dot-coms were taken [Laughter] and and I wanted something that was poppy that was easy to remember that was short that was very it was very powerful and so I bought a premium domain tenerife that fun is like a Tenerife is

56:13 — 15 million tourists no not 15 yeah I think it's 15 something it's not I said I don't remember the number exactly right now but I think somewhere in the 15 million or so twists on just that Island and I know sorry 8 yeah 15 million across all the Canary Islands 8 million in Tenerife that's a lot of people and so I kind of knew that like I kind of want to position us to be a learner to position us to be I have a more

56:46 — Long-term strategy on that Island and so that's why we invested in Tenerife to have fun and we built out a strong brand behind it another question is we're gonna asks which OTA do you use we use get your guide we use TripAdvisor we sign up for a couple others but they're not working for us so mostly just those two John says how do you monetize the bookings to other boats affiliate or Commission great question this is I'm glad you're

57:21 — Thinking about this because this is something that I've been thinking about for a while so affiliate or Commission both so if if if we have them listed on our website we get a commission if we don't have them less than our website then we have an affiliate essentially and so I'll give you the perfect example this was the whale watching guide so we started we're ranking number three right for whale watching in Tenerife but we were essentially only selling our own sailing tours our own boat trip and our own boat trip you know of all the boat

57:55 — Trips that are available there's hundreds of all the books that are available there's all kinds of different sizes and types and there's and and price ranges and I knew that like essentially what we're doing is we were people were coming to her site but not everybody was buying and so I wanted to essentially position us to be a great resource for anyone who was looking for whale watching trips in Tenerife and in part of that position our product well comparatively to other products so if that makes sense right so so

58:28 — Essentially if you can control the distribution channel you can control a conversation this is some much more advanced stuff and I'm happy to chat with you guys about later so what we did was we created a very comprehensive guide on everything about whale watching and then what we did was we said the five types of whale watching tours and of course here we are Tenerife that fund if you want a book a sailing trip here's the information right and if you click on this it takes you to to our page where you can select which of our boat trips you wanna you wanna you want a

59:01 — Book right now if they don't want to be in Coast that day if they want to be in los gigantes there's another sailing trip in los gigantes which is a different location but also a five-star or fantastic trip now if they click on this link they get taken to get your guide and that you're taking to get your guide with which we have an affiliate relationship with so if this person books third element we still get paid so on all of that effort and energy that we spent and invested in building the Tenerife that fun brand and the whale

59:36 — Watching guide now we get to monetize more of the traffic even if we don't sell only away even even though we're not selling just our own tour right so now we get paid regardless of which tour they they they they booked so for me it's a it's a strategic long-term kind of view for the way that I build websites what else we got here arrogant asks do you think bogan is successful for business I use bokken I think it's fantastic I know some people have morale

60:11 — Issues with them honestly I've worked with several other booking systems in the past and there they all seem to be just as immoral as bokken is I know TripAdvisor and bouken like they're going through a bunch of growing pains and a bunch of issues but frankly like I think it's uh I think I think booking is great I mean I think it's got oh look it's got connections to OTAs it's got its marketplace like we actually pull like all the products you see on our website are all pulled from the market place in Bokan and then all of the booking commission contracting

60:45 — Everything is handled automated by Bokan so like if somebody books through our website someone else's tour that book that booking just goes straight through us we like a commission and that book and go straight to us to the to the actual supplier and the supplier fulfills the order and that's it our website is built our website is built with two things it's built with Bokan as the backend and it's built with get local as the front-end if you're not familiar with

61:18 — These guys yet they're fantastic it's called get local it's an e-commerce and CMS solution for travel so it's kind of like WordPress except that lives on top of Bokan they're just getting started and they already have like here we are they also run flight center gray line board a boat like all these guys are the customers there's if they have they're growing very quickly and it's great and it's built directly on top of oaken and it's super easy to manage the guys are great if you're interested just send me

61:53 — A message if you're an introduction to the CEO there he's a really great guy okay I think I got through all the questions thank you guys all so much for joining me if you wanna me to dive in with your website just to kind of like you know you know we didn't get a chance to chat with Jerome and who else Gil so if you guys want me to like pop in your website's Geordi if you guys want me to pop in your websites for us to like actually do some more of this

62:25 — Investigative work and put together a game plan for you just go to BTO dot let me pick a time that works for you as schedule a time with me and we'll do some like keyword analysis we'll took a look at your website we'll just kind of put together a quick game plan if I can help great you know if not all good I'll see you guys in the group and tune in maybe in the next week or two we'll do another webinar with another very special guest thank you all so much and have a fantastic weekend have a great Friday bye bye