Essential Solutions for Improving Your Adventure Guiding Website

• 8 min read

Your website is the digital face of your adventure guiding business, and it plays a crucial role in attracting and converting visitors into customers. To ensure your website effectively showcases your services and drives bookings, you need to ensure that your website checks the critical and necessary boxes. This guide outlines essential solutions for enhancing your adventure guiding website, focusing on user experience, page speed, content architecture, content strategy, page flow, proper use of call-to-actions, and tracking your success.

User Experience (UX)

UX, or user experience, is just a fancy term for how easy someone can navigate through your site. Think about it: is your site easy to use, or does it have quirky bugs that confuse people? If someone struggles to operate your site, how likely are they to book a trip? Your site is your only interaction with a potential customer before they decide to book a trip with you, so it’s arguably the most important part of your marketing.

How do you know if you have the right UX? Here are some things to consider and make sure you have dialed in with your UX..

  • Go through your site like a potential customer: Does the site operate properly, or does it have issues anywhere?
  • Are there broken links, broken images, things like this?
  • Can you find what you’re looking for easily?
  • How about mobile? This is likely one of the biggest areas of weakness for most sites. Since the majority of traffic favors mobile, your site needs to work just as well and as intuitively on mobile as it does on desktop devices.
  • Most companies still struggle with mobile experience, so this is a huge opportunity for you to gain a leg up on the competition by offering a great mobile UX.

Page Speed

Page speed can be considered a UX factor, but it also has implications for SEO and conversion rates. Nobody likes the experience of visiting a site where pages take forever to load. Often, people will leave a site quickly when pages don’t load in a timely manner.

SEO considers page speed similarly: is Google or any other search engine giving their visitor a good experience if they send them to a page that doesn’t load? Those people will likely go back to the results and look for another option.

With conversion rates, this is a huge deterrent to action. If pages don’t load and people are more likely to leave, they’re definitely less likely to convert on your website. Even if they stick around through the slowness of the site, the likelihood of converting them goes down considerably with every extra second of load time.

So how do you test page speed and improve if you’re not doing well? There are tools online you can put your website address into and get scores about your page speed, which even breaks down page speed by device. These same tools provide recommendations about how to improve your site, often involving areas that a developer will need to support for updating, such as:

  • How pages load
  • How content within a page is served
  • How big your files are and how to optimize them
  • Where resources are saved
  • Resources for device vs. one for all
  • A link to one such page speed tool is Google PageSpeed Insights.

The importance of page speed can’t be overstated. Make sure your site loads well, and you’re on the way to ranking well and converting more customers through your website.

Content Strategy

Content strategy is about ensuring you provide the content your potential customers are looking for and answering all of their questions to take them from being interested potential clients to becoming confirmed bookings. The content you provide on your website needs to be developed with your customers in mind. What are they looking for? What questions do they have? What are competitors doing in the same space? Some practices you should consider when it comes to your content strategy are:

  • What are people searching for when they come to your website?
  • Look to Google Search Console to understand what people are looking for and what pages they’re coming into.
  • Are they landing on the right pages, or are you missing pages that might connect better with their searches?
  • Do you offer a complete picture of the areas you serve, the activities you offer, and the specific trips that someone can book when interested?
  • What factors are important to a potential customer before they book?
  • Guide bios
  • Company credibility
  • Awards or certifications
  • Authorization for guiding on public lands
  • What are search trends? What are people searching for that you could be a resource for but lack the content?
  • What questions come up on your trips or on calls when people inquire with their questions?
  • What questions do customers have after booking but before their trip?
  • These are examples of variables that will inform your content strategy.

Content Architecture

Content architecture refers to the content you offer throughout your site and how it’s organized. Once you have improved your content strategy by creating all the content you believe your customers will need to make their booking decision, how will you organize the content on your site to make sure it’s seen during a visit? This can include what you put in your main menu, how you label your menu, how you organize sub-content in dropdown menus, and content that needs to be shared in many places, linked in multiple dropdown options, and also included within page content.

Some things to think about with content architecture:

  • Is your main menu intuitive and easy to navigate?
  • Are your dropdown menus clear and concise?
  • Do you have links to important content in multiple relevant places?
  • Is the content easy to find without excessive clicking?
  • Do you use confusing or misleading menu labels?
  • Content architecture should add a layer of usability and ease of navigation for people when they’re trying to find things. Making sure content is placed using common labels, common categories, and dropdowns, and using your own testing as a guide about how easy the site is to navigate might highlight areas where your content architecture could improve.

Page Flow

Page flow is all about guiding your visitors through your site in a logical way that makes sense for them. Think about the journey you want them to take from landing on your homepage to booking a trip. Is there a clear path? Are there too many distractions along the way? Streamline the flow to keep it simple and focused.

Page flow is a practice we like to use when thinking about creating page content. The very name infers what you’re after for page flow, and its use is to ensure you organize content on the page in a helpful way, and that you progress the content as you go, answering all the potential questions along the way, which leads to an ultimate ask at the end – you made it this far and we answered everything there is to know, still interested? Book now.

When thinking about page flow for your content, you need to think about the user. Where did they come from? Why are they on this page? What are they looking for in your content? What questions do they have about this content and offering? What all do you need to say to this person to help them make a decision to book your trip?

Organizing content in a hierarchy and page flow way will improve your conversion rates from traffic as you’ll answer all the potential questions, and leave them with a “what am I waiting for” sort of feeling.

Proper Call-to-Action (CTA) Strategy

Call-to-Action (CTA) strategy is about the effective use and placement of telling people what you want them to do on their visit. By doing all of the other things right, like page speed optimization, page flow, content architecture, this is the last critical piece to ensure you have dialed in on your website.

Not everyone coming to your site will be ready to book. Some might be passively looking with no interest to book in the future, some might be interested but not planning now, and others might be at various stages of finding and booking a trip. How to implement a CTA strategy is about ensuring you have a few consistent CTAs so you can capture as many people as possible for future marketing, but from something free like your email list or a social post.

The two easiest and most common CTAs for you to use are “Join for trip inspiration to your inbox” and “book now”. You can use these side by side in some cases, which will improve the conversion of the lesser action for those on the fence.

Tracking Website Performance

Lastly, it’s crucial to track your website’s performance to understand what’s working and what’s not. Use tools like Google Analytics to monitor your traffic, see where visitors are coming from, and understand how they’re interacting with your site. Look at metrics like:

  • Bounce rate: How many visitors leave after viewing only one page?
  • Conversion rate: How many visitors complete a desired action, like booking a trip?
  • Session duration: How long do visitors stay on your site?
  • By keeping an eye on these metrics, you can make informed decisions about what changes need to be made to improve your site and drive more bookings.

Closing

In summary, optimizing your adventure guiding website involves focusing on user experience, page speed, content strategy, content architecture, page flow, proper use of CTAs, and tracking your success. By addressing these areas, you can create a website that not only attracts visitors but also converts them into customers, helping your adventure guiding business thrive.