A lot of nature and wildlife travel-related businesses, non-profits and entrepreneurs in the space are not very well-versed in search engine optimization. Not to worry, it’s not something most people think about.
If you’re in that boat, here’ s a brief primer. in a nutshell, it involves:
a) the tactics used to ensure that your website and its content are created and structured so as to appear as high up on the search engine results page (namely Google, but others as well) as possible.
b) the off-page trust and authority signals you send to Google in the form of links back to your website from other trustworthy, authoratative websites in your niche, as well as niche-related directories and other important local-level search engine optimization.
The end goal with SEO is to maximize your website’s visibilty in the search results and establish a sustainable and long-term lead generation channel that requires far less working capital than paid advertising, once the intial investment has been made.
Paid advertising and paid lead generation certainly have their place, and we do offer Facebook, Instagram and Google Advertising services, but SEO tends to be the most cost-effective, high-ROI digital marketing tactic long term.
Why search engine optimization makes so much sense in the nature and wildlife travel industry
SEO is an ideal digital marketing and lead generation tactic in the nature and wildlife travel industry for a few key reasons:
- Authority and Trust, part of Google’s Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trust (EEAT) content-evaluating metrics, are already built in, which makes you much more competitive from a ranking perspective than a lot of the other upstream websites in the niche competing for search engine results.
- Backlinks (one of the most valuable currencies of trust and authoritativeness) from other websites can be easier to acquire because nature and wildlife-travel related businesses are easy for Google to understand and verify, meaning they easily meet the standards of rigorous external linking policies.
- There is an abundance of keywords at every level of the sales funnel.
- The high-ticket-price nature of many nature and wildlife travel experiences means upfront investments in strategic SEO can be recouped quickly.
Baked-in authority and trust
As Google continues to change its algorithm and its search functionality to favour expert, authoratative, trustworthy content backed by demonstrable, first-hand experience, it makes it easier for actual businesses (like yours) to rank well on the search engine results page.
From a link building perspective, it also makes it easier to build backlinks (very important for ranking and organic traffic) to relevant, authoritative websites.
Keyword abundance
The nature and wildlife travel industry is characterized by an abundance of keywords at every level of the sales funnel, there is a healthy percentage of low competition keywords (those which aren’t heavily targeted and dominated by big industry incumbents), and higher competition keywords that your previously mentioned trust and authority make you all the more competitive for.
This means good opportunities to create high-ranking content that informs, showcases and gets people booking with you.
High ticket price to competitiveness dynamic
Search Engine Optimization is not universally viable across industries and niches.
If you’re a fledgling business in certain low price-per-unit industries and the market is thoroughly dominated by high trust, high authority incumbents that have already claimed the most high-converting, high value commercial keywords, and have massive marketing departments and budgets defending their search engine positions, then SEO is going to be a tough and very expensive slog.
Other industries, however, like nature and wildlife travel, are in a completely different boat. A few-thousand-dollar upfront investment in strategic, Google-approved SEO can be recouped in a booking or two. Now you’ve got yourself a long-term lead generation channel that doesn’t require you to constantly pump money into it (unlike paid advertising) and which will allow you to capture more of the revenue from each sale because they will be directly through you, instead of via commission-taking travel agents, resellers and aggregators.
What’s more, your social proof (i.e., customer reviews, social media profiles, brand mentions), online business profiles, and press and media history give you a solid trust and authority leg up on the websites and upstream businesses that tend to dominate the search results in this industry.
Even if you have been thus far outcompeted on the search engine optimization front by businesses that have been at it longer, the ticket price of the experience you are selling, plus your inherent ranking potential as a business that has been living and breathing the industry, plus the availability of keywords with strong implied buyer intent, makes nature and wildlife travel businesses inherently good candidates for search engine optimization.
A recipe for SEO success
The bottom line is: if you run or own a nature and wildlife travel business (or non-profit)–a liveaboard, a dive resort, a lodge, camp or guiding company, a private reserve or biological station–and you’re not doing both content-based and off-page SEO, you’re almost certainly leaving money on the table.
This is simply not feasible in the nature and wildlife travel niche, where almost every business venture is capital-intensive and low-margin.
As the old joke goes in the dive shop/liveaboard niche, and it could equally apply to the safari camp and eco-lodge market: how do you make a small fortune in this industry?
Start with a large fortune.
You’re in this business because you love nature and wildlife, are passionate about conservation and wouldn’t want to live any other way.
Maintenance, upkeep, low season, property tax, land lease payments and protected area fees, unforeseen events like Covid-19…even if you’re saving on labour costs, these ventures cost a lot to run and why give up even more of an already precarious margin to travel agents, resellers and affiliate marketers when you could be doing your own search engine optimization (both on and off-page), dominating the search engine results and enjoying more direct sales?
A well-researched and well-planned content strategy, underpinned by good keyword and trend research, and fortified and supercharged by experienced link building, provides one of the most cost-effective, long-term lead-generation strategies there is.
An upfront investment in good search engine optimization can pay dividends for years to come.
My SEO expertise
In addition to spending the last decade travelling the world as a wildlife photographer, videographer and guide, I have also been immersed in the world of digital marketing–as a freelancer and then as head of content and digital PR at highly respected link building agency, dofollow.io.
I’ve been on the cutting edge of search engine optimization for years and I understand what it takes to research and write content, as well as build and acquire backlinks, that Google likes and will reward with higher search engine rankings and organic traffic.
Not only that, but the proof is in the pudding. In one year, I’ve taken this very website from just under 650 unique monthly visitors to over 21,000. The vast majority of my traffic comes from organic search.
The nature and wildlife travel industry tends not to do good SEO
A lot of nature and wildlife travel businesses–lodges, camps, dive resorts, live abords and guiding companies–don’t do good SEO, which means they are often outcompeted by the industry’s resellers, travel agents and aggregators–the websites and people that act as middlemen between your business and your target market.
Yes, these resellers, travel agents and aggregators can be a good source of leads and revenue, but they take a big chunk.
The fact of the matter is, you are leaving money on the table when you don’t invest in search engine optimization–both content and link building.
You are also leaving your visibility to chance in the midst of a massive sea change in search engine optimization.
The importance of SEO in the nature and wildlife travel niche
The most important thing to keep in mind when it comes to search engine optimization in any niche is that the top three search results get more than half of all search traffic.
What this means is that everything that is not competing for those top three spots, is competing for the other half of that organic traffic.
Given the extent to which Google’s paid advertising currently dominates the top of the search engine results page and its increasing forays into affiliate marketing in the travel industry (i.e., sending people to places like Booking and Agoda), it is more important than ever for businesses to maintain a presence on the first page.
If people have to click through to the second page of the search results or scroll for a long time, you are losing out on a significant amount of organic visitors to your site.
The fact of the matter is that a lot of dive resorts, liveaboards, lodges, private reserves, and camps don’t do good SEO.
Not only that, but they rely too heavily on Google’s curation at the top of the search results page.
Take a look at the search results for “best dive resort Bali.”
The first thing you will see is the the top of the page is dominated by Google’s own aggregation:
Google wants people searching for dive resorts in Bali to click on one of the thumbnails, which takes people through to this page:
Google then wants a searcher to click on one of those big aggregators (both Booking.com and Agoda are owned by the same holding group), make the reservation and Google collects a commission off that.
That’s all well and good, and Google has definitely designed a very useful process that gives people ample social proof (i.e., customer reviews) throughout their buying journey.
But it doesn’t give you, the business owner, complete control over the narrative and what you have to offer.
You don’t get to tell a story (complete with multimedia like video and images) in a way that makes you stand out from your competitors.
What’s more, you leave the lion’s share of the organic traffic to businesses and websites willing to do a bit of SEO.
Your losing out because you, as the nature and wildlife travel business, already have the raw materials necessary to dominate the search engine results page, you just haven’t done the search engine optimization.
Nature and wildlife travel businesses outcompeted on SEO
Most of the best SEO in the industry is done by travel agents, resellers and large aggregators that then link to your business and take a cut of the revenue when someone books.
Again, take a look at the results for “best dive resorts Bali.”
Of course, Tripadvisor is top of the pack, but of the next 9 results on the first page of Google, only two are actually dive resort businesses:
and
All of the others–Zulu Diving, Dive-The-World, Travel Mag, Padi–are middle-manning you.
Instagram and other social profiles are an important part of lead generation in the niche (people want to see what they’re getting), but people do additional research via Google and no one is going to do your business justice (in terms of photos, media, and narrative) the way you are.
People want to read (especially enthusiastic and knowledgeable nature and wildlife travellers):
- Detailed, media-rich descriptions of the ecology
- Detailed experiences
- A detailed breakdown of the amenities
- Detailed transportation logistics
- And a breakdown of the wildlife they can expect to see
Check out this long-form piece we did for Crees Manu’s Romero Rainforest Lodge in the Manu Biosphere Reserve.
This is the kind of content that serious nature and wildlife lovers want to see before they make the decision to spend their hard-earned money on an experience.
A lot of the resellers, affiliate marketers, and aggregators that tend to dominate the search results when someone searches terms related to your business–“best family safari in Kenya,” “best dive resort in Bali”–don’t do your business and the location justice when describing and promoting it.
Maybe they’ve got some boilerplate marketing copy and a handful of images from one of the big travel agents and aggregators, but they don’t have anything to make it special (i.e., unique, original images and video).
There are plenty of keywords with strong buyer intent that your business can and should be targeting in order to appear higher up the search engine results page and capture more of that organic traffic.
Your SEO competitive advantage as a nature and wildlife travel experience
Google’s ranking algorithm is, in many important ways, unknowable. While the world’s largest search engine does make official statements about what it likes and doesn’t like when it comes to content for the web, a lot of search engine optimization, at the end of the day, is educated guesswork.
What Google really wants to see, above all else, and what it constantly advises websites to do, is to create content that demonstrates E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trust).
1. Experience
Experience means first-hand evidence, and it is best communicated via things like original content (images and video).
If you’re an eco-lodge in the Peruvian Amazon or a safari camp in Tsavo, you can claim that you are the “best lodge in the Amazon for families” or the “best safari camp for families” by showing people evidence–the huge supply of photo and video evidence.
There are very few resellers or travel agencies out there who can outcompete you on experience, which is the foundation of how google appraises and ranks content.
2 & 3. You've also got an expertise and authority advantage
If you’re a liveaboard that has been taking people into the Sea of Cortez to dive with Great White Sharks for 20 years, or you’ve been running bird-watching tours in Brazil for a decade, your opinion, backed up by social media profiles and publicity elsewhere online that send strong authority and expertise signals, carries a lot of weight.
That authority is very hard to replicate for websites that do lead generation and affiliate marketing in the nature and wildlife travel niche and authority, along with good content, is key to ranking well.
The fourth component, trust, has a lot to do with what others say about you. This includes both satisfied customers leaving reviews and your off-page SEO. Your link building efforts.
Trust Signals and Links
Trust is low online (for good reason), and search engines want to show people websites they can trust.
Your content conveys trust (to readers and Google) in different ways–your web design, citing other authoritative sources, standard cybersecurity procedures like the use of an SSL certificate.
Reviews on places like Booking, Tripadvisor and else where also send powerful signals–both to search engines and to potential clients.
But perhaps the biggest trust signal sent to the algorithm is when other websites link to your content.
This is where link building combines with search engine optimized content to establish sustainable long-term organic lead generation.
What is link building?
Link building is the process of reaching out to relevant, high-authority websites in your niche and negotiating the placement of a link back to your website either in brand new or existing content.
The idea is that the website hosting your link receives something valuable (i.e., content for their visitors and readers) and you receive a trust signal in the form of a link back to your site.
The quantity and quality (both together) of links a website has from other relevant, respected websites are highly correlated with where in Google rankings it falls and, consequently, how much organic traffic and lead generation it enjoys.
Nomad Nature Travel's SEO Services
SEO is a double whammy of content and link building. To build links, you first need solid content for other websites to link back to. Our search engine optimization services include both content planning, writing and optimization, as well as link building.
Content
Keyword research
Content creation
On-page optimization (meta tags, correlational SEO)
Publishing (if required)
Link building
Target page selection
Prospecting
Outreach
Anchor text selection
