Utah Office of Tourism

Utah’s Mighty Five™ national parks are a primary focus for out-of-state tourists and the Utah Office of Tourism (UOT) alike, each year generating over $10 billion in overall travel spending and over $1 billion in Total Tourism-Related Tax Revenue for the state. As overcrowding of the parks continues to rise, UOT must be deliberate in how it manages its strong search presence and on-page communication around national park visitation. Love was presented with the challenge of prioritizing the search presence of high-value national park pages, maintaining and improving ranking positions, while continuing to support UOT’s strong initiatives around sustainable tourism, distribution of visitation statewide, and quality visitation.

Client
Utah Office of Tourism
What We Did
National Parks SEO
Tags
digital marketing, SEM, SEO, tourism

Focusing on Sustainability

Love collaborated with UOT on new content structures for each national parks page, bolstering each with relevant content and technical optimizations. Furthermore, Love created supporting pages for each national park to address activities, camping, and itineraries that would act as organically valuable content clusters and provide travelers with better resources for planning. A focus among new pages was regional itinerary content, pointing users to destinations “off the beaten path” as part of a 5-day visit. Both national parks pages and itinerary content were supported with a paid search campaign. In response to unprecedented industry trends related to the COVID-19 pandemic, drive market searches (i.e. Las Vegas to Zion) were strategically targeted to capture those with the highest intent to travel.

Deeper engagement for travel planning

As a result of our optimizations, UOT saw an increase in organic rankings, page sessions, and average session duration for national parks pages. The site gained top rankings and 3 new featured snippets for national park search terms. Thes site also saw a 16.81% increase in average time spent on page and a 15% increase in average rank for target search terms across all optimized national park pages.