Hurricane Ike's impact on Planaroo's traffic

Now that I'm running this little travel site, I'm spending a lot of time thinking about the things that are important for vacationers.  Weather is a big one for Orlando-bound vacationers.  It's weird to be thinking of hurricanes while sitting here in sunny San Jose, but if a hurricane is heading to your destination around the same time you are, you're going to be very interested in the weather. 

So when Ike was way out in the Atlantic on its path to points unknown in the US, I threw up a hurricane information page on Planaroo and kept it updated twice a day.  I submitted the page to Google, Yahoo, and Live, and waited.

It didn't take long for Google to pick up the page because there wasn't much competition for the term "Hurricane Ike Disney World" or "Ike Orlando" -- traffic surged and I had more visitors in 4 days than I had all of last month. This illustrated a key benefit that the web has over printed and infrequently updated online guidebooks -- immediacy and flexibility.

Once people found the page they kept coming back to the site.  By day 3, 75% of the users were return visitors. I started to see incoming users who came from Google by searching for "Planaroo" and "Planaroo.com".  I hope some of those users come back the next time they plan a vacation.

Although the traffic is dissipating now that the storm has moved on to Texas, I've learned a lot from this experience:

• Small sites can get big traffic if they anticipate events and web queries before they happen.  Planaroo was indexed days before people started searching for hurricane info.  As a result, two-month-old Planaroo consistently beat every other travel and media web site on Orlando hurricane-related searches.
• Page titles are critical. Naming the page "Disney World - Hurricane Ike Hanna Josephine - Orlando updates" seemed to work OK.  Planaroo did well in searches for "Hurricane Ike Orlando" but it was always at or near the top for searches for Disney and hurricane information.
• The sitemap file plays a huge role in getting indexed quickly and accurately.  Alerting Google when the sitemap has changed seems to have an immediate impact.
• Frequent updates (and sitemap.xml refreshes) really help with ranking, even if PageRank is low. Make sure you alert the search engines to your updated sitemap if they're not used to spidering your site daily.  Inlcude the update time and date in the sitemap if possible.
  
• Unusual short-term events can help to drive long-term affinity.
• My distrust of third-party widget providers is at an all-time high. One flaked out and prevented my page from loading, and another (from a major media company) consistently showed the wrong current conditions.  I finally removed all of them.

Comments

[Patrick Jarrett]

Excellent point, something I've utilized to moderate success with my gaming podcast. Magic the gathering releases new sets periodically and I work hard to establish pages early about those sets such that mine is seen as an elder page on the topic, etc. I get a fair bit of traffic from these off point searches but they yield excellent results based on time on site and bounce percentages.

-- Trick

[Orlando Tourist Attractions]

Interesting points. I wish I had been more on the ball with the cancelled holidays to Orlando and thrown up a relevant blog page!

[Orlando Tourist Attractions]

Interesting points. I wish I had been more on the ball with the cancelled holidays to Orlando and thrown up a relevant blog page!

[Orlando Tourist Attractions]

Interesting points. I wish I had been more on the ball with the cancelled holidays to Orlando and thrown up a relevant blog page!

[Orlando Tourist Attractions]

Interesting points. I wish I had been more on the ball with the cancelled holidays to Orlando and thrown up a relevant blog page!