Fishing Up Leads With Hurricane Charters

Hurricane Charters is a Panama City based inshore fishing charter business providing chartered trips for small groups for redfishing, trout fishing, kids trips, tarpon fishing and more. They reached out to Tortoise and Hare Software for help building their website in 2020 after deciding to launch the business. They had requirements for:

• Providing information on fishing packages and rates
• A blog to post fishing reports
• Social media integration to help showcase their services
• An easy way for prospective customers to reach out
• Competitive rankings on search engines
• The ability to make self serve updates to the website

Video Overview

With a minimal budget we were able to build them a WordPress website that checked all the boxes. We created a master page on initial launch that showcased their fishing packages and rates, which was later expanded to dedicated pages for each type of package.

We added a blog to the site so that they could post monthly fishing reports to help other anglers understand what could be expected from booking a trip with this charter fishing company.

Since many of the pages were relatively short and straight forward, we incorporated a sidebar into the pages to help people move straight to the fishing packages page and learn more about current happenings on social media. We integrated the most recent posts from Facebook into the sidebar via a plugin to increase engagement.

Panama city is a tourist driven town and there is a significant surge of visitors that come in from all across North America and are looking to take part in the many leisure activities, fishing included. Therefore it was important to have rankings on search engines for local searches of people trying to find fishing charters in Panama City. We were able to help them rank for local queries and generate traffic to their site for searches like:

We were also able to help them move up the rankings to the top spot for their own brand name. Something that hadn’t happened yet with a do it yourself approach.

Our last requirement was filled by building the site with a drag and drop page builder that allowed them to add new content to the site in self serve manner, without needing to engage a developer for each update.

Hurricane charters was able to book well over 60 trips in their first season and lessen their dependence on external lead generation sites like fishing booker and attract direct bookings from search engines. These direct bookings save commissions and increase profitability.

Conclusion

Hurricane Charters was able to roll out a charter fishing website on a shoe string budget and combine it with a local SEO and social media strategy to book over 60 trips in their first season and all in the middle of the Coronavirus crisis no less, while tourism was significantly reduced. We can’t wait to see how their seasons evolve moving forward.

Need help building your hunting or fishing guide website for your charter business? Reach out to Tortoise and Hare Software today and learn more about how we can help.