Gem Webb is the content creator for Bruce County Tourism’s highly successful Ontario vacation website,”ExploretheBruce.”

Gem also is a big, big, big Raven fan. We love our big fans as much as they love us, so I asked Gem to talk about how he uses Raven as a content creator for a tourism website.

What was your company’s initial problem?

Our website offers things to do, where to stay, eat and shop across all the towns of Bruce County.

Our diverse product offerings were always a juggling act for reaching our various target markets. For example, there is a difference between marketing to people looking for a Sauble Beach cottage vacation versus a motorcycle tour up towards Tobermory, Ontario.

This was a big problem for our small Internet marketing budget, and it seemed hopeless without investing lots of money in outsourced high priced SEO companies. So the question became, “How do we get insights from high volume/low competition local and global keywords?”

What was your initial goal or solution?

We began to cast the net larger and wider towards vertical markets that are complimentary of our wide range of indoor and outdoor activities. We realized we needed to break down each keyword term into groups and organize them based on our website’s content structure.

How did you use Raven to track your initial goal?

Raven’s support team introduced me to tagging keywords for better organization in tracking SERPs. That made it easy for me to present a monthly report to my Tourism Supervisor segmented by activity, town, must-see or accommodations. (Before Raven, I would plunk down a large keyword report that would look like a word storm on anyone’s desk.) This new report also provided me with a focused direction on what keywords to use in upcoming blog articles. Focused keywords help our landing pages rise in organic results week to week. I usually focus on two or three keyword terms a week to keep it manageable.

Since then, how have you used Raven to refine your goals?

We have now started using Raven’s Social Monitor tool in coordination with our marketing plans based on buzz and mentions week to week. We are finding a strong correlation to interests by following the real time conversations on the web. The best part is that those conversations are delivered straight to my e-mail inbox, saving time.

Another time-saving function we use regularly is the Raven Firefox Toolbar that can add a website I want to link to or from with a few button clicks. This is very supportive to our link building strategy that gives more exposure to Bruce County towns. Sometimes it is easy to forget to check if a website has linked back to us, but now this tool bar keeps us informed with notices.

What’s the end result, to date?

Our new segmented reports — to which Raven lets me add a simple paragraph synopsis — has created deep insights for my tourism team. Now, we can have more constructive conversations in meetings where time is not always our friend and get everyone’s input into what keywords we could focus on for upcoming seasonal article marketing.

In the end, it always comes down to making it easy to find out if our efforts online are assisting our goals of being found by our target market vacation searchers. Now we can easily log in, get a report and get strategic insight with a few simple steps.

Thanks Raven, for a very helpful and intuitive analytics product!