Promote your tour through your own website

Your website is one of your most powerful tools for promoting your tour. It's a space you control completely, including the writing, the design, and the story you tell about yourself and your destination. Done well, it builds the kind of trust that turns a casual browser into someone who downloads your tour. And as a side effect, it also strengthens your tour's search engine rankings, which means more people find you in the first place.

This guide covers how to make the most of your website as a promotional channel. For a broader overview of how search engines work and what VoiceMap does on your behalf, see Optimise your tour for search engines.

Build your presence as a local expert

The most effective publisher websites share something in common: they make it clear, immediately, why this particular person is worth listening to. Listeners want to feel that they're in good hands and that the person guiding them through a city or neighbourhood actually knows and loves the place.

Google calls this E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It's the framework Google uses to evaluate whether a page and its author are genuinely credible. For tour publishers, this is less a technical checklist than a description of what your website should naturally communicate.

Your About page is the foundation. It should introduce you with your strongest credential first, whether that's decades of local knowledge, a relevant professional background, or the fact that you've spent years exploring the streets your tour covers. Be specific. "I've lived in this neighbourhood for 20 years" is more convincing than "I'm passionate about this city." Link to your VoiceMap publisher profile so visitors can see your full catalogue and the reviews your tours have received.

Many successful VoiceMap publishers have built strong personal brands this way. Cobble Tales, Tedd Long from Holy Toledo History, Anne Noble from Walk Frankfurt, and Ira from Lost in Bordeaux are all good examples, their About pages feel personal and grounded, not like a generic bio.

Here's how Annie Sargent from Join Us in France introduces herself:

"Bonjour, I'm Annie Sargent, tour guide and producer of the Join Us in France Travel Podcast."

Simple, specific, and immediately credible.

Write about your tour, not just for it

A link to your tour is worth more to visitors — and to search engines — when it sits inside original writing. A dedicated page or blog post about your tour, written in your own voice, does several things at once: it gives potential listeners a feel for your storytelling, it explains what the tour covers and why it matters, and it creates the kind of contextual content that Google rewards.

When you write about your tour, think about the story behind it. Why did you create it? What did you discover while researching it? What do most visitors miss that your tour reveals? This kind of writing is inherently personal and authoritative — it's the sort of thing only you can write.

Here's how RondaToday.com introduced their VoiceMap tour:

"So, I was asked to create the VoiceMap GPS Audio Guide for Ronda. Listening to me along the way (and also some captivating guitar music from the amazing Paco Seco), you'll pass breathtaking lookout points including the Mirador de Ronda and the Mirador de Aldehuela."

And Hello! Tokyo Tours took a slightly different approach in their blog post, explaining the appeal of self-guided audio tours for their specific audience before introducing the tour itself. Both examples work because the writing is genuine and the link feels like a natural recommendation, not an advertisement.

A dedicated page for each tour — rather than a single catch-all "tours" listing — also makes it easier to link to specific stops and gives you more room to write in depth about what makes each one worth doing.

Help visitors understand how it works

Many people who land on your website will never have used VoiceMap before. They might not know what a GPS-triggered audio tour is, or how it differs from a podcast or a traditional walking tour. A short explanation — a "how it works" section or a simple FAQ — removes the uncertainty that might otherwise stop someone from downloading.

Publishers who do this well tend to address the practical questions visitors actually have: Do I need a data connection? What if I miss a location? How do I start the tour? Holy Toledo Tours include both a getting-started guide and a FAQ on the same page. Cobble Tales and High Proof Productions have built FAQs tailored to their specific audiences. That Girl in Victoria lays out a step-by-step walkthrough. MadeiraXperience focuses on the benefits of the format rather than the mechanics.

You don't need a long explainer — a few sentences or a handful of bullet points is often enough. The goal is to answer the question a hesitant visitor might have before they've even formed it.

Use listener reviews

Listeners who've done your tour are often your most convincing advocates. The reviews they leave on your VoiceMap tour page are publicly visible, and you can quote them on your own website too. A short testimonial near a call to action — a link to download the tour, or a button pointing to your VoiceMap page — can make a real difference.

You'll find reviews in the Questions and Reviews section of your tour's description page. When you use a testimonial, follow it up with something that gives the visitor a clear next step:

"After trying several tour apps, I found VoiceMap to be the most intuitive and engaging." – Sarah M. Ready to experience it yourself? Start our Greenwich Village audio tour.

Keep testimonials short and specific. A review that mentions a particular highlight or moment from the tour is more compelling than a general endorsement.

Link strategically to your tour's locations

Rather than always pointing visitors to your tour's cover page, link to the specific location pages when the context warrants it. Every stop on your tour has its own URL, and if you're writing about a particular landmark or neighbourhood, linking directly to that location creates a more relevant and useful experience for the reader.

You can find the URLs for all your tour's locations in the Distribution tab of your dashboard. Click on QR Codes and then Show all tour locations — the links are listed there and can be copied directly.

A few ways to use this:

• If you're writing a blog post about a specific building, street, or historical event, link to the relevant stop rather than the tour overview.
• If you're writing about the destination itself, link to the destination page on VoiceMap — for example, https://voicemap.me/tour/paris.
• On your About page, link directly to your publisher profile rather than to a specific tour. Visitors can browse your full catalogue from there.

A note on using download credits for your own channels

If you want to offer your tour directly through your own website — for example, through a booking form, an online shop, or as part of a package — you can do this using VoiceMap's voucher code system. Voucher codes let listeners download your tour without going through the app store or VoiceMap's website directly, which can be useful if you have an existing audience or a specific sales channel in mind. Each voucher redemption uses one download credit.

This is covered in more detail in the guide to distributing your tour privately.