Well, let’s just pop up a graphic here and you can see…..
These numbers are from a recent client. Actually, they’re from a site we completed at the end of February. So basically you’re looking at the numbers for March & April. What we’re seeing here says a lot to me.
Standard search engines carry the day. Google, Bing, and Yahoo drive a lot of visitors to the website. Behind the standard search engines? RVParkreviews.com. Not surprising, that site is becoming one of the “go to’s” for RV’ers. The park is also a Good Sam park, so the next two sets of refers comes from users going directly to the Good Sam site and looking up the park from there.
What’s interesting to me is the fact that the bulk of the client’s refers come from free links. Google and the rest of the search engines are providing a ton of traffic. RV Park Reviews, also a free service, sends along a fair amount of traffic. I just find it interesting and telling.
One thing is for certain. RV’ers are definitely using the Internet when they’re planning their trips, or while traveling.
As I didn’t post the whole graphic (it’s really long with lots or smaller referrals) we’re looking at over 3,600 referrals in two months. So that’s an average of 1,800 potential customers per month. For the average RV park, let’s say $30 per night, that’s $54,000 in potential bookings per month.
I wonder if these mobile websites really have value for a park……? 😉
Comments 2
I find searching for RV parks or campgrounds so frustrating that I seldom do it. I use Google for general searches. For some things it’s great; when you’re looking for something like RV parks near a certain location, the quality drops greatly, with a lot of crappy travel link-farm sites and almost no websites for the parks, let alone on-line reservations. A quick search just now returned four campgrounds for a particular area in Kansas — one was just a blank screen, another resulted in a 404 error. Of the two that came up, one gave little info about the campground, no pictures and no on-line reservation. The fourth was a KOA. Most of the time, we default to web sites we’re familiar with rather than going through the pain of finding something different.
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Mike, personally I’ve had similar issues. I love the 404 pages for businesses that are still running. That’s part of the reason we do what we do. Trying to help the parks.
I will say, using AllStays really helps in finding parks now, RV Park Reviews is a fantastic site. I also have the USFS & BLM campgrounds app, and recently I got the Ultimate Campground Project app (which covers public parks).
In the end though, if the parks don’t have good sites, or any site, then yeah we’re out of luck.