As a DMO or (online) destination marketer, you are always busy promoting your destination in the best possible way. The website is one of the tools in your marketing toolbox. With our online toolbox Plaece, you have the tools to build your online ecosystem. We believe in working together, so that not everyone has to reinvent the wheel. Our joint drive is therefore to become the "best in class" in the field of online hospitality.

You set up the website with a structure that matches your proposition and target group. You create specific landing pages for top tasks and write web texts for your visitors.

You then ensure that your carefully composed content reaches the right target group in the best possible way. In doing so, you can use online (and offline) campaigns, social media and/or search engine optimisation (SEO). As Insiders, we always like to help think about how we can make a destination land even better with potential guests. We do this on a strategic level, but also on a technical level.

Search, Find and Be Found.

We recently organised a partner session with a number of partners to see how we can all ensure that we can be found even better by the right visitor at the right time. We would like to share the valuable input and contributions of Eindhoven365, Marketing Drenthe, Toerisme Veluwe Arnhem Nijmegen, Merk Fryslân and VisitBrabant with you.

One of the most important ways to get your story to your potential guests is to be easily findable in Google (currently simply the most used search engine) and other search engines.

Besides practical issues such as optimisation for SEO, we also looked at trends and new technologies in the field of findability. Some of the topics discussed:

1. Rise of voice search/search phrases
2. Voice Search Optimisation
3. Personalisation
4. Combining 'events', 'locations' and 'packages

Search engine optimisation

When it comes to search engine optimisation, we do not sit still. Behind the scenes, we continue to develop continuously to make the websites even easier to find. Optimising the website is done in a couple of different ways:

• Code optimisation (better, smaller and faster code)
• Improving findability
• Improving load time
• Improving indexing

Improving load time

By optimising the back-end of the website (the underlying code), gains can be made in several areas to make the websites even better. We are working almost every day to make Plaece's back-end code even better. By writing more efficient code, the page can be loaded faster. That is nice for the visitor and also for Google.

In recent months, we have already achieved great results optimising the code. These small improvements are often not even visible to the naked eye, but they all help to significantly improve the websites in terms of code.

In the near future, we will implement quite a few optimisations (e.g. code compression, new WebP image format and optimisation of Lazy loading), so we will keep you posted on the progress.

Improving findability and indexing

The biggest improvements in findability can be achieved through good content. But in the background, we can technically ensure that everything can be found properly. By sometimes using smart codes, we help search engine crawlers index the websites better (which in turn makes them easier to find).

Think for example of adding canonical URLs or adding rich snippets and extra metadata on pages.

Did you know that we also include additional event metadata on all detail and overview pages?

We also have numerous new developments in the pipeline in the field of findability and indexing. As an example: we will adjust the URL structure for all Base detail pages, so that only one URL will appear in Google's index. Furthermore, we will investigate the possibility of generating sitemaps of all Base pages.

New hosting environment in the Netherlands

We already announced it during Citynavigator Day, but we are busy rigging up a new hosting environment. By migrating to Google Cloud, we are not only prepared for the future, but we are also physically moving from Ireland to Groningen. With the new hosting environment and servers, we also have new techniques at our disposal which will allow us to optimise the websites even further. For (local) Google search results, the fact that our servers are in the Netherlands is also very nice.

Internal search engine

Not only external search engines are valuable to us, the internal search engine is also important in the search of our potential guests.

We are currently looking at how to optimise the search results of our own search engine to provide even more relevant results.

Together with the partners mentioned above, we will check whether the planned optimisation of the internal search engine produces the desired results. After this improved search function has been tested, we will make it available to everyone.

Evolution of Plaecec

Besides all the "practical" things to make the websites even better, in the background we are working on all kinds of new developments, opportunities and possibilities. Think (for example) of the need to cooperate more broadly in the region, to share data on a larger scale, personalisation and links with internal and external data sources.

Plenty of great current topics to think about, but also to discuss together with all (60+) affiliated DMOs.