An SEO Case Study – SEO and the Snakes of Utah!
Introduction
One of our first Search Engine Optimization ("SEO") projects was in 2006 for a non-profit organization located in Moab, Utah. Moab is a small town in the desert between Arches and Canyonlands National Parks. It's a gateway community of 7,000 residents that sees 1.5 million visitors annually.
The Book
Cliffs of the Colorado Plateau Near Moab, Utah
This non-profit organization is responsible for operating the visitor information centers and gift shops in more than 20 of the national parks, national forests, state parks, and other recreation areas located in the beautiful high desert of the Colorado Plateau. Their mission is to support these natural treasures.
The organization also has a website with an online store, and they contacted us to help them increase their website traffic and online sales.
Although the organization had hired a marketing agency to set up their paid adword campaigns with Google and Yahoo, nobody was really reviewing the data. They were just paying the monthly bills and hoping for the best.
SEO Status Audit
Once we gained access to the paid accounts and the server statistics, we reviewed the numbers for the past year. We quickly determined that this site didn't need any paid adwords. They were getting between 11,000 to 80,000 hits per month, primarily from organic searches and referral links. The site was linked to by the websites of some of the most popular national parks in the U.S. However, the site did not have a very high ranking on any of their actual keywords or phrases in search results.
We reviewed the site technically, and noted some issues that were affecting their statistics. For example, their META keywords were too generic (such as "DVD" when it should have been "Arches National Park Car Tour DVD"). Far worse, although they had a large number of products, the product pages were all created dynamically by a database, and the descriptions were not visible to the search engine bots. There was very little text content available on the site to reinforce the keywords. For example, there were almost no descriptions of the parks that they represented, so I wrote several to serve as examples. Each park should have had its own page, with links that would take users to the parks' products available in the online store, and links on product pages back to the parks.
The website had high traffic levels, but they were shallow visits with few returns. We thought it should be able to do better.
We completed our audit and research, and wrote a report with our methods, findings, and recommendations. I was invited to present these to the Board of Directors meeting.
Report to the Board of Directors
I presented our report to the Board of Directors, which included the park superintendents and representatives of several federal and state agencies. I did not go into too much technical detail, and I kept the descriptions of our recommendations at a high level. I said that basically our main advice was to add content to the website as often as possible, plus some other basic tips.
Then I listed the Top 10 search keywords from the previous month, because these searches revealed a specific business opportunity and a way to significantly increase their website visitor traffic. I was trying to show them how to use the information from their website for business intelligence to grow their business.
In descending order, with the most popular search phrases listed first:
- snakes of utah
- arches national park
- rocky mountain tree
- snakes in utah
- canyonlands national park
- magic school bus
- national park stickers
- arches national park webcam
- utah snakes
- onto the desert
Of course, by the time I reached the third snakes keyword, the whole meeting cracked up.
Western
Diamondback Rattlesnake – Do Not Disturb!
Then I pointed out that most of the IP addresses for users searching for information on snakes were coming from German ISPs, and that brought down the house.
To appreciate the joke you need to know that German tourists really love the American desert national parks. However, they are also wary of its [very real] dangers, and sometimes their caution and fear make them behave oddly in the eyes of people who are used to the vertigo of vast distances and judging the risks involved in being out there.
(For example, I was once "stalked" by a man while hiking by myself on a lonely trail in Arches. It was really scary but he turned out to be just a very frightened German tourist. He didn't want to let me out of his sight because he was afraid of getting lost.)
I was talking to an audience with a lot of personal experience working with this particular group of park visitors, and they were all very much amused.
Once the laughter stopped I suggested that they put their book on desert snakes onto the front page of their website, above the fold, and include the title and description translated into German. I also recommended translating the entire book and printing a German edition.
Then I pointed out all of the keywords to Arches and webcams; there were even more further down on the keywords list. There were a lot of visitors coming into the website looking for information on snakes, and for webcams in Arches. So I also recommended that they stop paying for adwords, and use the money instead to put a webcam on the roof of the Arches National Park visitor's center. I guaranteed that if they did nothing else but these 2 things: put the desert snakes book on their Home page, and install a webcam in Arches, their website stats would go through the roof. I even suggested that if they put a donation button right under the webcam on their site, it would probably bring in a considerable sum of money all by itself, and help to increase their memberships as well.
Arches
National Park Visitor Center Under Construction in
2005
It was good advice, wasn't it? This image shows the new visitor center under construction in 2005. Moab is located just a couple more miles down Hwy 191, which is the road to the right. The webcam would have pointed up at the cliffs that tower over the switchbacks of the main entrance road up into the park. These cliffs glow like molten gold in the last rays of the setting sun...
Results
Nothing.
They implemented none of our recommendations.
They did not put the book on the home page. They did not add any park descriptions or other contents. And even though they received permission from the National Park Service to put a webcam on the Arches visitor center roof, aimed at the red cliffs high above the road, to this day they have not done so.
Instead, the non-profit organization built a shiny new faux adobe building for their offices and product warehouse. They have added several more parks to the list of visitor center shops they operate, and I'm sure they're making money. But even after all these years it's still painful to think about this project, and the size and scope of the opportunity they passed by because they were "too busy right now to deal with all that web stuff".
We can't force people to help themselves to increase their revenues and cut costs if they're bound and determined not to.
Postscript – the Punchline
Fast-forward to 2009, a couple of years after we'd returned to Pittsburgh. I was having lunch with a client, who is German, in a Chinese restaurant in Shadyside, and we were talking about hiking in the desert. He had been to Zion and Bryce while on a trip to Las Vegas with some friends, and he said that although they thought the parks were very beautiful, they'd mostly seen them from the car and the Scenic Overlooks. They had not done that much hiking. He was absolutely appalled when I described how much Don and I love to go out hiking off-trail through the desert wilderness, preferably on hot summer afternoons.
"But aren't you worried about the snakes!?" he asked.
I could hardly believe my ears. Amused, I said "No. The snakes are very shy, and if you make some noise while you're hiking you'll never see them."
"But... but... what if you stick your hand into a crack between a couple of rocks?"
I looked him right in the eye and said: "Are you kidding? Why on earth would I want do that? There might be snakes in there!"
He was completely shocked.
And to this day, I can't read about snakes without thinking of the non-profit organization, SEO, and the Snakes of Utah.
– Mary Ecsedy, 10/20/2010, Pittsburgh, PA
