Optimise your tour for search engines

Most listeners first discover our tours through a search engine. Search engine optimisation, or SEO, is about getting your tour to the top of their search results. This can seem technical, but you only need a few simple tweaks since we've already done the work for you. Every page of voicemap.me has all sorts of metadata under the hood, amplifying whatever effort you make on your own.

SEO has two parts: on-page and off-page optimisations. Google and other search engines look at what's on a particular page (the title, length, and quality of the content) and rank its relevance for specific search terms. They also look at what is happening off the page, at the number of links to your tour from other websites, along with the authority of those websites. A link from the New York Times, for example, sends a much stronger signal than a link from a regional paper. But you don't need to get your tour featured in the New York Times for it to have strong off-page links.

Off-page optimisation tends to be more powerful, and we share practical steps in our guide to promoting your tour through your own website to help with both.

On-page optimisation

You can't actually do all that much on-page SEO for your tour. It is an audio tour after all, and the script needs to work for the human ear, not Google's web-crawling spiderbots. But you can use the fact that every location has its own page, with its own url, to your advantage.

Let's use our Theatreland Tour with Ian McKellen as an example. You'll find the cover image along with all the final touches at https://voicemap.me/tour/london/theatreland-tour-with-ian-mckellen. For the tour's map along with the script for the first location, just add /sites, i.e. https://voicemap.me/tour/london/theatreland-tour-with-ian-mckellen/sites. For the location about the longest running play in history, at St Martins Theatre, add /st-martins-and-the-ivy to /sites, i.e. https://voicemap.me/tour/london/theatreland-tour-with-ian-mckellen/sites/st-martins-and-the-ivy. And so on for every location on the tour.

Each of these urls is its own page and for the right keywords, its on-page optimisation is an automatic byproduct of the way we structure our tours. There are three ways of using this to your advantage:

1. Don't just share the link to your tour's cover page, with the photo and final touches. If you're referring to a specific location, share the url for that location instead.
2. Use the link to your tour's featured location to help promote your tour. Listeners can preview the first three locations and your featured location for free, so make sure to choose a featured location that's an intriguing snapshot of your tour.
3. Choose the titles of your locations well, so that they match the script and resemble the sorts of keywords people might use in searches. (Our editors try to help you choose titles that improve your tour's SEO.)

Off-page optimisation

Off-page optimisation comes down to one thing, at least for the purposes of this guide: links to your tour from other websites. If you have a website of your own, it's the most direct and accessible place to start. Not all links are equal, though — links embedded in original writing carry far more weight than a bare URL in a sidebar, and the words you use to link matter too.

For practical steps on how to do this well — including how to write about your tour, structure your website, present your expertise, and use location-specific URLs — see our guide to Promote your tour through your own website.

The hardest aspect of off-page SEO is getting other websites to link to your tour. This article about VoiceMap on CNN is one example of the kind of coverage that makes a difference. Links like this validate your tour and drive referral traffic, which is more than twice as likely to lead to sales — and they push you further up Google's search results than just about any other factor. For more on how to pursue this, take a look at this post on our blog.