7 Common Digital Marketing Mistakes Made by Dive Shops and Liveaboards

Over the last couple of years of working as a digital marketer, building out www.bogoubj.com, and studying thousands of dive shop/liveaboard outward marketing efforts, I feel like I’m ready to put to paper some clear cut erroneous tendencies that dive shops are making.

In this series of articles, I will outline the basics and begin working on a comprehensive guide.

Mistake #1. Poor Websites

人们没有意识到该网站是by far他们的数字营销活动中最重要的要素。有些人的设计看起来像是1999年建造的，而另一些人则拥有美丽的网站no search visibility任何。其他人则将自己视为超级巨星，他们决定他们可以对“最佳水肺潜水”进行排名，并加入0胜诉的俱乐部。1zplay

And practically all of them view the website as a static brochure - something that they updateonce a year一旦他们获得了新的价格清单。这不是Google，他们的客户尊重的nd especially not potential customers.

怎么修？

花费时间和金钱来获得一个可用的网站，该网站已优化当地的搜索。不要尝试排名SCUBA DIVING’。

You should be targeting - ‘Scuba Diving in’ or ‘Dive Courses in’。If you are a small country you can go as far as country, e.g. ‘潜水。这种定位不是技术问题，也不能将其外包给您的“ IT”人 - 他们对您的业务，尤其是您的客户一无所知。

不要试图用在线预订系统和类型的星星拍摄星星，只需提供电话号码，电子邮件和ACONTACT表格，以及对您的服务的简单描述。

专注于审美设计，功能设计和搜索引擎营销。

The internet is full of amazing learning materials that will take you very little time to learn the basics and will save you lots of money in the long run. If you invest $2000 in a website that has no traffic, or the wrong kind of traffic, you wasted $2000. Unless you have the budget for very experienced SEO professionals, you don't have an option but to learn how to identify your search market yourself.

Mistake #2. Facebook. Religiously. Forget all else.

Probably the biggest mistake is the absolutely systemic over-reliance on facebook by the WHOLE industry. It's the biggest shot to one's foot that one can imagine, I see it day in and day out.

Dive Shops post well-written articles to their facebook feeds ONLY,not their websites首先，然后在Facebook上链接到他们，但直接链接到Facebook。这是可怕的，因为所有本来可以索引的搜索引擎友好内容，并为您提供了所需的本地排名，这些排名将在Facebook不可索引的“墙”后面冲洗掉。这个文章will explain more, don’t take my word for it.

怎么修？

Facebook is a tool that can help generate traffic to your website, which as mentioned in point 1 should be your go to conversion tool.Facebook itself is NOT the end, it's a means.

So, whenever you want to publish a new picture or a new article, do so on your website first and then you can either post a link on your facebook it OR, you can even duplicate it and post the same thing there. New content, especially rich content should go on your site.

错误3：Facebook洪水Twitter

这个point kills me even more. It seems that the Scuba Industry真的不会twitter…当然很少有例外。

因此，作为对Facebook上瘾的扩展，逻辑是简单地将您的Facebook连接到您的Twitter，只是spam your twitter feed与非描述性auto-garbage流动your Facebook. Its actually painful how often I see this, and frankly it doesn’t make sense.

如果这样做的人意识到这种活动的不存在（CTR）点击率和这种方法的垃圾邮件性质，那么他们就不会首先费心去做。

Twitter is a fascinating platform - in my opinion far more powerful than facebook, but gets neglected OR misused.

Another example is just another form of spammy tweeting with absolutely not aim. Take a look at this flood from @divessi

What is the aim of this? Who would find this interesting? It's almost like speaking to yourself.

这是我要做的：

• Use an auto scheduler to space these tweets out.

• 将它们链接到相关页面，即SSI网络上的潜水商店个人资料或潜水商店的网站。1zplay

• 有一些引人入胜的副本，使单击变得有趣。

How to Fix

Do it right or don’t do it all. Carefully find relevant users by either looking for them on the followers of bigger accounts such as@padi@scubadiverslifeor@thesub2o您也可以只搜索“ Scuba {country}”。1zplay例如，如果您是Flordia的潜水员，请搜索'1zplayScuba Florida’ or‘Diving Florida’and you’ll get tweets that contain those. Engage with those users, they are your customers. Flooding the twittersphere with spammyfb.com/941kjfkjjk1链接不会帮助您发展底线，at all.

Mistake #4. Outsourcing Everything

It's evident from a lot of the footers, that the digital marketing aspect of many dive shops is completely outsourced to someone with no scuba knowledge, nevermind local scuba knowledge. The issue is that you have large amounts of money spent on websites where the budgets get wasted on some notion of perfect and custom design, which really is not that important. Usability and ‘findability’ get neglected and within a few months this look is outdated and irrelevant.

The website becomes un-editable by anyone outside the guys who built it, the budget dries up, and the site doesn’t generate revenue and eventually becomes a relic of the past.

How to Fix

Do the keyword research inhouse. Create a sitemap that most simply outlines your websites and leave out everything that is not critical - dont waste time on it. For example, if your primary business is not selling equipment, dont bother trying to create a complete catalogue with photographs of all your items. Just provide a brief list of the types of items & brands that you hold. Even if you do it once, it's something that constantly needs to get updated and it will either get neglected or take up too much of you valuable time.

Mistake #5. No Blog

我不是说Facebook页面，没有一个真正的博客，例如在yourwebsite.com/blog上。这是如此重要，我can’t even begin to emphasizethis enough.

Once your website has all the basics, your locations, your team, your contacts etc. it needs some耀斑。它需要显示您角色的东西，并提供对您日常生活的见解。正如我提到的，您的主要信息来源必须始终是网站。其他一切都回荡了它，并最终驱使人们那里的人。

How to Fix

Insist on using a simple platform, like wordpress for the creation of your website, and ensure that whoever sets up the website for you teaches you how post on it.这个beginners guide to wordpress应该教您所有您需要知道的一切。接口真的很简单。诚实地。

Post regularly. Set yourself a schedule. Delegate to a member (younger) of your team to blog about what's going on. It can be anything, logs of the days diving, fresh photography shot by your customers (with their permission of course).

Mix up between local based articles, e.g. “Top 10 Dives in ” and ‘evergreen’ content like “The Biggest Misconceptions About Scuba Diving”.You will see your traffic grow steadily through ‘long tail’ keywords until eventually you will see the real value in it through increasing number of leads.

Mistake #6. Not Optimizing for Local Search

As I mentioned before as a local business, you need to reach ‘local search’ i.e. someone looking for a business in your area. Besides optimizing your website for localized search terms like ‘1zplay水肺潜水附近’还有其他资源可以帮助您找到。lol比赛视频2019

我很少看到潜水商店使用这些1zplay免费且非常强大的资源。lol比赛视频2019

How to Fix

Using Google Business Listings, Yelp and other newer resources, like www.bogoubj.com to create profiles of your business.

例如，一旦您使用Diveadvisor列出了您的业务 - 我们创建一个页面，其中有几点可以帮1zplay助您进行本地搜索：

• 您的名字 + URL，例如1zplaywww.bogoubj.com/dive-shop-name

• 您在地图上的确切位置

• 您的地址和联系方式

Like other local search resources, our service has SEO targetting of local businesses, for example,//www.bogoubj.com/extra-divers-qantab

The Description of this listing is: "Qantab1zplay额外的潜水员, Scuba Dive Shop & Dive Center in Muscat, Oman"

You will then see like ‘1zplay1zplay水肺潜水肌肉’ or ‘Scuba Dive Oman’ or ‘Qantab1zplay额外的潜水员’ or ‘额外的潜水员1zplay肌肉’ are all variations of the terms in this title, which is exactly the sort of long tail localized traffic you need to be targeting.

Let's move further - Backlinks. If you notice, on//www.bogoubj.com/oman/dive-shops, you will find Extra Divers Qantab in the list with a link to the shop. Now since that directory page has an article written on Oman, and probably gets the most backlinks for Oman's related info, it will pass on plenty of ‘link juice’ that will boost the rating of the shop page.

错误7。不投资品牌

Finally, I feel only 5-10% of the entire scuba industry put in any creative thought process into the naming of their operation. Usually it's something like “Scuba Adventures”, “Global Scuba” or “Best Scuba,”or something totally cliche.

As for the brand, 95% of the brands go for a blue-color base.

And a lot of them either using some variation of a diver or the DAN logo as their logo. Brand recognition is really important and when you have such a big blurb of identity-less operations, it really doesn’t ring well with customers.

How to Fix

Avoid the word Scuba in your name. If possible, avoid the Diving or Divers and just spend some time coming up with a play on words or even something that is not straightforward. Secondly, invest some money into developing a unique logo with illustrations and some clear characteristics that stand out.

Finally, avoid the color blue, a planet, or the DAN symbol.

Conclusion

The scuba industry is a rather poorly represented community digitally. Essentially, this was our ultimate motivation to launch diveadvisor - to simplify and organize the necessary information into a usable form.

I hope you found this article useful.

To make this more interesting - if this post gets over 250 social shares or over 1500 views, I will write a detailed step by step guide on how to develop a world class web presence for $500 or less, and for it to generate plenty of search traffic and therefore leads.