For many years the fishing charter industry was driven by human word of mouth. If you were going fishing in a particular city, you tried to find a buddy or friend of a friend who had been there fishing before. If that didn’t work, you waited until you arrived in said city and made your way to the local bait and tackle stores or marina to ask around and see what valuable information you could get out of the locals who surely know who to get on the boat with to go catch some fish.
Well that ship has sailed, today the industry is driven by internet and digital marketing. At the forefront of the new era is Google and its leaps and bounds ahead of other online advertising opportunities like Facebook, Instagram, and many others. I know your buddy who runs charters has 42,000 youtube followers and says it’s the greatest, but I’m telling you right now there is nothing that competes with Google when it comes to making your phone ring.
Typically, you’ll hear that Google has three different “spots” where you would like to find yourself; organic rankings, Google local / Google my business / Google maps (that one has a few different names), and pay per click placement. I often tell clients that Google has three plus one and that fourth one is websites where people are selling the fishing charter business using Google to drive the business. The big example here is FishingBooker, who is believed to be spending about 10 million a year just on Google ads.
Let’s start with organic rankings, this is the tried and true, good old ranking in Google. A recent study revealed that 52% of the world’s population uses Google and that Google has an 85.5% market share with yahoo and bing picking up the remainder. With todays competetion in most markets its nearly impossible to rank on page 1 of Google without professional help or making the time investment to learn how to rank websites yourself.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine. That’s the definition of SEO and I’m sure you’re wondering well how do I do that? The answer is you don’t, but we do. We have spent the last ten years mastering the art of ranking fishing charter websites on page one of Google.
This is done both onsite and offsite using a tried-and-true process to bring your website to the top and outrank your competetion. The onsite part is where we’ll make sure that your website has the content that it needs to rank. In simple terms Google is smart enough that they want to send the searcher to a site that has the information that the searcher is looking for when they type something in the search box. I know, it’s scary, but its real.
Once we get your website just the way we want it, some of these changes will be on the front end for you to see and others will be behind the scenes, we’ll start looking for backlinks. This is “authority” sites that point at you saying this is the guy to use, like your local chamber or tourism website for example. Then Google starts see people pointing at you and wa-lah, your site starts climbing in the rankings.
That’s organic ranking in a nutshell, but it’s hard to do and most likely there’s a few captains in your market paying a marketing agency or firm to do it for them. The next important component of Google is Google local / Google my business / Google maps that you can learn about here, and lastly is Google Ads which is pay per click advertising that we go over in detail here in our blog.