Local Search for Tourists

I’ve just done SEO strategy and content rewrite for a skydiving company. Skydiving is practically a definitive example of a field in which local search is the goal. The Skydive Experience, the company in question, has a dropzone in Louisiana into which skydivers must jump. Their customers are physically present. Their travel is only up and down.

So I was not immediately pleased to see, on checking out their analytics, that only about half their visitors were from Louisiana. My first thought was that their exciting pictures and videos were bringing in people who were visiting out of sheer curiosity. Not that we mind curious visitors, but I wanted them to have more folks who might actually go out and pay for a jump.

The visitors’ keywords told another story. Here are the things these out-of-state visitors were looking for when they found my client:

“skydiving near shreveport louisiana”
“place to skydive east texas”
“texarkana skydiving”
“louisiana skydive”

Far from being random droppers-in, these were people from Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arkansas, Colorado, New York, and California looking for a good place to skydive while they visited the general environs of the The Skydive Experience.

Apart from being relieved, what should the skydivers do?

Adding links for local hotels, restaurants, and points of interest would be a great service for those out of town guests. When they offer to swap links with other businesses in the area, they skydivers will be creating value for themselves, their neighbors, and the visitors.
Photos of the local area would help tourists plan their visits, give the skydivers the chance to use the alt attribute to get some good place-names into their web pages, and bring visitors back as they dreamed about their vacations — and planned where to go.
Make sure their content is clear and useful to out of town visitors. “Just north of the bypass!” doesn’t clarify things for the adventurers heading in from Utah. But giving the price for sport jumps for USPA licensed skydivers is a great thing to do to bring in those bold souls planning a skydiving trip across the country, even if it’s not as popular a service locally.

If you’re a local business that caters to the tourist trade — or you’d like to have some tourist trade to cater to — keep them in mind when you plan your website.