How to improve your eola marketplace SEO
Our goal is to get more people enjoying fantastic experiences outdoors. The eola marketplace is is designed to make finding and booking activities easier, by helping to connect customers with experience providers near them.
If you're using the eola bookings and management system you can easily enable the marketplace to reach more people. However, in order to get your marketplace page to the top of Google, Bing, and other search engine results, it’s useful to implement some simple SEO best practices.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for ‘search engine optimisation’. It refers to the fact that search engines like Google and Bing rank-order search results according to how relevant and useful they consider them to be.
It’s important to remember that search engines are not people, which means they cannot always figure out what a web page is about. That’s why SEO is so important.
Here are some actions you can take straight away to improve the search engine ranking of your activity centre’s eola marketplace page.
Use keywords and phrases
Keywords are ideas or topics that define your activity centre. Using them frequently and consistently helps search engines figure out what a web page is all about. Without them, it’s very hard to get your eola marketplace page to the top of search results.
It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to come up with a handful of keywords that your target customers might be searching for. For example, a surf school in Newquay might use the keywords ‘surfing’ and ‘Newquay’, but they might also include ‘lessons’, ‘Cornwall’, and ‘beginner’, to help reach a broader audience.
Key phrases usually involve one or two keywords that are used together as a search term. A potential customer for our Newquay surf school, for example, might be searching for ‘surfing lesson’, rather than just ‘surfing’ or ‘lesson’.
Source: Big Green Surf School
Once you’ve decided on some keywords and phrases, you should try and include them in a few important areas on your eola marketplace page:
Activity centre description
To edit your activity centre description, click Toolset (1) in your dashboard menu, then Outlet settings. (2)
Your activity centre description (3) is the largest piece of text on your marketplace page, so make it count! Use keywords to describe what your activity centre does, where it is, and who it’s for.
Activities
Your eola activities feature multiple different text samples in which keywords can be used to boost your SEO.
To edit your activities, click Products (4) in your dashboard menu, then click Activities (5). On the activity you would like to edit, click Edit. (6)
Activity titles
Use one or two keywords in each of your activity titles to help boost your search engine ranking.
Remember, the type and duration of your activity will be automatically displayed, so you don't need to mention these in the activity title. (7)
This title might work for your customers, but it won’t improve your SEO.
‘Learn to surf for beginners’ is a much better activity name than just ‘1 hour lesson’, because it clearly indicates to search engines that your activity is related to the search terms ‘surf’ and ‘beginner’.
Activity descriptions
You can use multiple keywords in your activity descriptions to improve SEO.
For example, see below. (8)
This is a very basic description. It might provide a customer with the details they need, but a search engine would not be able to tell that this activity is all about surfing in Newquay, for instance, and so it wouldn’t rank the web page very highly.
Adding keywords and phrases can resolve this quite easily.
This description is still short and simple, but it contains a lot more keywords that will help search engines find your web page!
Customer comms
You can use keywords in your ‘Customer Comms’. (10) Remember to keep these sections simple, as this information should first and foremost help your customers.
You should also specify your meeting point for the activity (11), as this data will help search engines understand the web page further.
Once you have used keywords to help you fill out all of this information for each activity, your marketplace page will have much stronger SEO, and should start ranking higher in search engine results.
Optimise your images
Images are extremely powerful tools for inspiring and engaging your customers. Using imagery properly will improve your customer engagement rates and thus your SEO.
eola will automatically optimise your images for display on the marketplace, but it’s important that images are not too small or else they risk being blurry and distorted.
This image is only 500 pixels wide, so looks blurry when displayed as a banner.
Images that are between 1500 and 2500 pixels wide will work best across a wide range of formats.
This image is 1500 pixels wide, so looks much more crisp.
Check your links
Last but not least, it’s important to make sure all the links on your eola marketplace page are working. This is because search engines use links to help them figure out whether a website is trustworthy and reliable.
On the Outlet settings page, you can include a link to a trusted review site (12) and your own website. (13) Make sure there are no spelling mistakes in these links that could be preventing customers from getting to your web page.
SEO is an important part of running your business online. We hope these tips have been useful in helping you improve your eola marketplace page’s ranking in search engine results.
For more tips and tricks as well as guidance on how to use the eola platform, be sure to visit the eola academy.
Read more
How to add your activity centre to the eola marketplace
How to use images to inspire and engage
