Let’s just say that fly fishing is to Montana what wine tours are to Italy, or the Golden Gate Bridge is to San Francisco. There are a lot of places one can fly fish around the world, and of those that do, none of them would disagree that Montana is one of the world’s best fly fishing destinations. The Grizzly Hackle happen to be our neighbors in downtown Missoula, but also the leading fly fishing guide service and fly shop in the state.  They have been a client since 2017 and we currently manage their digital marketing, including their SEO.

As their local SEO was performing quite well, we wanted to expand visibility for broader Montana fly fishing terms and river-specific keywords. One of our blog posts from 2018, “18 Places to Fly Fish in Montana”, that supported this strategy targeted “fly fishing in Montana” along with specific river keywords. This post provided informative recommendations positioning Grizzly Hackle as a thought leader within their target market.

As a result, Grizzly Hackle was able to obtain a featured snippet or “position zero” for the search term “fly fishing in Montana”, which averages 2,400 searches/month. Featured snippets are a small summary block at the top of search results pages. In content marketing, this is the holy grail. There are three types of featured snippets: paragraphs, lists, and tables. By designing a strategy that leverages a list style blog and incorporating the most relevant river keywords, we were able to target this position with success.

Grizzly Hackle moved into the first position for many montana fly fishing related terms (Montana Fly Shop, Fly Fishing Montana, Western Montana Fly Fishing) because of this blog post, 18 Places To Fly Fish In Montana. They also experienced position increases for all river specific fishing terms by implementing new internal linking structures. The blog post drives 13.2% of organic traffic and is the top organic landing page – even before the homepage! Overall, organic traffic has increased 33% and online revenue from organic traffic has increased 159% in 2019 vs. 2018.

“Since we’ve been using TOMIS, our digital marketing, from our website to Google Adwords, has been simple and easy. They know exactly how to optimize content to reach the maximum number of potential customers.” – Rick Marcum

Contact us to learn more about our SEO and other digital marketing services for tour operators!