Search Engine Optimization & User Experience

Our SEO methodology and analytical research is based on hundreds of modern SEO, local SEO, and website experience best practices. Our process and execution has been fine tuned using our industry expertise gleaned from managing over 2500 tour and activity websites for over 10 years.

Importance of SEO

SEO helps your website rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs), which leads to increased visibility and traffic to your site.
SEO helps to optimize your website’s content and structure to make it more user-friendly and easier to navigate, which improves the overall user experience.
Strategic targeting via SEO helps attract more qualified traffic to your website, which can increase your chances of converting visitors into customers.
Compared to other forms of digital marketing, such as paid advertising, SEO can be a more cost-effective way to drive traffic to your website over the long term.

Features & Benefits

Our website builders will migrate all content from your current website while starting on a new project.
Before starting the website build, our team will complete the following to ensure your new site is best set for success:
- URL Structure/Page Nesting
- Title Tags
- Keyword Research
After an initial FareHarbor website has been built, our team will quality assess the following:
- Primary keywords for implementation
- Structural and usability of the site in general to see how it flows
- Relevant content to the pages and includes targeted keywords
- Internal / outbound linking
- Breadcrumbs, parent pages and proper URL structure
After your site is live, our team ensures the structure and performance of the website is up to SEO standards, including the following checks:
- Validating redirects
- Performing a technical audit for any errors and warnings to correct

Audit Types for FareHarbor Website Clients

Ensuring Google can easily crawl and index a website properly is the first step in our SEO strategy. Technical SEO errors can hold back a website and negatively impact search engine rankings, overall visibility, and conversions. To identify and fix these issues quickly, our SEO team will crawl the specified domain and create a report to show where there are potential problems and suggest recommendations on how to improve your website’s technical health. Our site audits offer a range of thematic reports covering crawl-ability, HTTPS, site performance, Core Web Vitals, and more. The SEO team will then fix any applicable errors / warnings immediately without client review.
Quality content is one of the most important factors to optimizing SEO on a website. Let our SEO team take a look at the content on homepages, activity pages, and category pages. The recommendations are based on keyword research for optimizing content, title tags, and meta descriptions to increase keyword rankings, organic traffic, and revenue. Our copy team will then deliver content recommendations based on the SEO keyword analysis when applicable.
Our copy team will do a thorough review of the specified website pages and will deliver content and copy recommendations (this does not include SEO optimization).
In this audit, FareHarbor will review high-ranking keywords and determine if other keywords should be added or better targeted. We will provides recommendations we feel will increase keyword rankings, organic traffic, and revenue.
Backlinks are one of the top factors in Google’s organic ranking algorithm, so building and managing a strong backlink profile is a major part of search engine optimization. Our SEO team will give recommendations based on keyword targets and competitor backlink portfolios.
Our team will complete a general SEO audit reviewing organic traffic, keywords, and more to improve technical performance.

*Only available for FareHarbor Websites

Interested in learning more? Contact your Account Manager to discuss which audit might be best for your business.

Initial SEO Optimization for New Website Builds

Over the course of a website build, and during the final double-check stage before going live, we ensure that our websites have a solid foundation for SEO — all based on data and research into today’s best practices. This includes:

Meta titles and descriptions via SEO plugin SmartCrawl
The right quality and quantity of text content
Attention to proper use of header tags
Image alt text
A check for the proper, contemporary use of keywords
Navigation menu organization
Permalink structure
Ongoing SEO support after a FareHarbor site is live

Importance of UX and Analytical Data

Website Optimization is a practice that incorporates User Experience, Website Design, and User Analytics methodologies to ensure a smooth, pleasant user journey from start-to-finish with the goal of increasing booking conversions on a website. If the design, functionality, layout, and organization of a site’s content is not created with a “user-first” mentality, a site will have difficulty converting users to make an online purchase and keeping users on a page . While SEO is an important factor into bringing qualified traffic to a website, it is User Experience that keeps a user on a site and takes them down a conversion funnel to make online bookings. This team works closely with the SEO team to provide SEO and UX recommendations for FareHarbor Sites clients to constantly improve websites once a site has gone live with FareHarbor.

Features & Benefits

The Website Optimization team offers continual User Experience recommendations and changes to qualified Fareharbor Website clients. This includes seasonality audits, Google Analytics insights and one-off audits, research of user behavior and assessing site performance to ensure our Fareharbor Sites are converting and designed with a user-first mentality.

We actively conduct website audits and help clients target users based on best practices, UX research and design methodologies, along with SEO best practices. The Web Optimization team is a data-driven team that looks into the quantitative metrics and insights behind the user journey to guide design recommendations. We assess Google Analytics metrics as a primary data source to understand where pain points and opportunities lie in the user journey for each individual website.

Fareharbor Website clients that meet the qualification to conduct an audit benefit from site updates, layout and content refresh opportunities to ensure users are moving through a booking conversion funnel with confidence. Web Optimization Seasonality Audits cannot be requested by clients, as these are audits internally identified by the team on a proactive basis. One-Off Audits can be requested by clients and Account Managers at any point in time.

User Experience Audits

These are proactive audits that the internal team qualifies specific sites that must meet the requirements that warrant an audit be conducted. These audits are not “at will” nor can a client request a seasonality audit, as these are targeted lists for clients that need substantial work done to update and improve their website based on Google Analytics metrics and online conversion percentages. These audits are offered to clients on case-by-case basis and a client needs to have had a Fareharbor Website for at least a year, among other requirements and parameters to qualify a site for a Seasonality Audit. Seasonality Audits are based off “peak seasons” we have identified for cohorts of clients. Updates and recommendations are made to these cohorts the month before a peak season begins, to ensure the site is optimized going into their busiest time of the year and converting the highest numbers of users as possible.
These are reactive audits that can be requested by any Fareharbor Sites client through their Account Manager. If a client is noticing user behavior abnormalities on their website, concerning Google Analytics data, or drops in conversions on the website, our team can assess the website in order to understand any pain points that may occur and develop a list of recommendations to update the site to increase conversions and smooth the user experience. These audits can also help troubleshoot Google Analytics metrics and dimensions and communicate UX questions that a client may have.

Timelines:
- Varies based on the request and severity of issue. One-Offs will typically be completed and returned to the client within 2-3 weeks of the initial request.
- Once a client has approved recommendations, the team will update the website with changes.

In addition to the two main audits we provide for our Fareharbor Website clients, the Website Optimization team conducts internal User Experience and Google Analytics research to provide insight and analysis into our WordPress custom theme and features being utilized across all Fareharbor Websites. The WOS team develops plans and assist research pertaining to site speed, best practices, and performance metrics to ensure Fareharbor Sites are continually improving our custom WordPress theme where applicable.

Interested in learning more? Contact your Account Manager to discuss which audit might be best for your business.