I started this morning with a fairly simple question.

“I wonder which resorts rank #1 on Google for searches like ‘[their state] ski resort’ and such…”

So I Googled “utah ski resort” and “colorado ski resort” and “vermont ski resort” to start things off. No resorts in the top three or top 5 results in some cases. So I tried more. Washington? Nope. Idaho? Nope. California, Maine, New Hampshire, Wymoing, Montana? Nope, nope, nope.

And then I got to South Dakota.

There aren’t a ton of Google searches for any one of these phrases, but there are a healthy amount. But think about the people who might type this phrase into a search engine:

• They’re skiers
• They may be traveling or moving to the area
• They’re eager to find their options

You talk about first impressions? You talk about owning a place in a prospect’s mind? Tough to beat a situation like this where someone is asking a question for the first time and a resort like Terry Peak becomes their answer.

Easy/hard
On the one hand, accomplishing this can be tricky in a high-competition market. Because it’s not just you, it’s all the ski-related sites who also want a piece of this pie which may not be the case in a state like South Dakota.

But half the battle is simply trying, and notice Terry Peak’s title tag:

“Terry Peak Ski Area – Ski and Snowboard Resort in the Northern Black Hills of South Dakota”

Most resorts simply don’t try. And that’s okay.

But there is quality, free traffic to be hand with SEO and it’s not as hard as you think to snag some of it especially when you apply one of my favorite approaches of finding stuff that almost ranks high and making a few changes to help it actually rank high.

An hour long process that can yield surprisingly significant results.

Kudos
So kudos to Terry Peak for putting in the small amount of effort to capitalize on this free traffic channel. They are one of three resorts I could find (Mountain Creek and Arizona Snowbowl being the others) that ranked higher than the OnTheSnow’s and SnowPak’s and everyone else to claim that top spot for their state.

Regular SEO strategy is another one of those things that’s never going to increase revenue 15% next season, but it’s one of a few dozen things that, together, certainly could.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.