Marketing & SEO Brief

Yellowstone Snowmobile Tours · snowmobileynp.com Prepared for Kyle James · August 2026

The short version

You have a genuinely good website and a real competitive advantage that you are not currently using. Three things are holding you back, and none of them are hard:

1. You have no prices and no dates on the site. Every competitor publishes both. Right now a visitor who wants to book cannot find out what it costs or when you run. That kills conversions and it kills the AI answers, because an AI assistant summarizing "Yellowstone snowmobile tours" has nothing concrete to quote about you.
2. You are invisible to Google as a business, not just as a website. No Google Business Profile means no map pack, no reviews, no "near me" results. This is the single biggest gap and it's a chicken-and-egg problem we can work around.
3. You have zero reviews and zero social proof anywhere on the site. For a $500-per-person purchase from a brand nobody has heard of, this is the biggest trust gap you have.

Fix those three and you are competitive. Everything else in this document is about compounding from there.

Your actual advantage, which you should say out loud everywhere: You are an authorized National Park Service concessioner. Some of the operators you're competing with in Google results are resellers — BrushBuck, for example, states plainly on their own page that they book Yellowstone trips under someone else's concessioner permit through a sister company. You are the real thing, and you are owner-led with three guides. "Book direct with an authorized concessioner. No middleman, no call center, no markup." That's a positioning line, an ad headline, and a landing page all at once.

1. Google Business Profile — the chicken-and-egg problem

This matters more than anything else on this list. A Google Business Profile (GBP) is what puts you in the map results, gives you a star rating, and lets people leave reviews. For a local tour operator it's usually the #1 source of organic leads.

What to actually do

Register as a Service Area Business (SAB), not a storefront. Google has a category for businesses that go to the customer rather than the customer coming to them. You hide the address entirely and define a service area instead — for you, Jackson / Teton County / Yellowstone National Park. This is exactly what you are. You do hotel pickup. You have no retail counter.

Some specifics that will save you a headache:

• A PO Box will not work. Your contact page lists PO Box 1010, Jackson, WY 83001. Google explicitly rejects PO Boxes and mailbox-service addresses. For an SAB you don't display an address publicly, but you still enter one during setup for verification purposes — use a real physical address (your home is acceptable and stays hidden on an SAB listing).
• Video verification does not require an office. What Google is actually checking is that the business exists and that you're the one operating it. For a mobile/service business, filming typically means: your branded gear and equipment, your snowmobiles or trailer, any signage or vehicle wrap, business documents (your NPS concessioner contract, business license, insurance certificate), and you operating the equipment. Google wants continuity — one unbroken take moving from location signage to equipment to your business documents.
• Do the Flagg Ranch shoot. You raised this yourself and you were right. Even if it isn't a permanent location, filming your operation at the South Entrance staging point with sleds, gear, and your concessioner paperwork is far more credible than an empty office. Wait until your gear order lands so you have branded equipment in frame.
• A vehicle wrap or magnetic door signs on the tow rig is the cheapest thing you can buy that materially improves your odds of passing video verification, and it doubles as advertising.

Timeline reality check: verification can take a few days or a few weeks and sometimes fails on the first attempt. Start it now, not in November. If your first attempt is rejected, you can request a live video call with a Google support agent, which has a higher success rate than recorded video.

Once verified

• Categories: primary "Snowmobile rental service" or "Tour operator"; secondary "Sightseeing tour agency," "Adventure sports center."
• Add every tour as a Product with a price. GBP is a real search surface now.
• Reviews are the whole game. Set up a system before your first tour runs: a short link (g.page/r/...) that goes straight to the review form, sent by text the evening of the tour while the guest is still glowing. Aim for 25+ reviews by the end of your first season. That number alone will move you in the map pack.
• Post weekly. Photos, conditions reports, wildlife sightings. It's a small ranking signal and a large credibility signal.

2. What's wrong with the site right now

Full page-by-page detail is in 02-seo-audit. Here are the headlines.

Key fixes for this week

Phone number consistency (Resolved). In our initial audit, the footer had mismatched numbers across pages (307-690-5501 vs. 307-413-3011). As of August 17, 2026, this has been verified and resolved: 307-690-5501 is now live and consistent across all pages and the contact form. Maintain this as the single source of truth and ensure it matches your Google Business Profile exactly.

"(Draft content — pending Kyle's review.)" is live on your Prepare page. It's published, it's indexable, and any visitor can see it. Remove it.

You have no llms.txt. We talked about this. It's a plain-text file at snowmobileynp.com/llms.txt that tells AI assistants who you are, what you sell, where you depart from, and what it costs, in a format they can read without guessing. I've written yours — it's in assets/llms.txt and just needs prices and dates filled in before it goes up.

The bigger structural gaps

No prices. Competitors publish: Scenic Safaris lists Old Faithful and Grand Canyon snowmobile tours from $525 and their snowcoach from $450; another Jackson operator publishes $490 for a single rider plus a $50 park fee, and $300 for a passenger plus $20. You publish nothing. A visitor comparing three tabs closes the one that won't tell them the price. Publish yours — even as "from $X per snowmobile." If you're premium, say so and say why.

No dates. Every tour page says "Dates for the upcoming season are being finalized." That's fine in August. It's fatal in December. Get a departure calendar up before Thanksgiving even if it's a static list.

No social proof. Not one review, testimonial, guide bio, or photo credit. Your competitors embed live TripAdvisor feeds. You have three guides with Wilderness First Responder and Certified Interpretive Guide credentials and 25 years in the ecosystem — that story is on your About page as prose, but there are no faces, no names besides yours, and no third-party validation. Add guide bios with photos immediately; add reviews as soon as you have them.

No structured data. This is the JSON-LD we discussed — a hidden block of code that spells out for Google and AI systems exactly what each page is: this is a tour, it lasts one day, it departs from Jackson, it costs $X, these ages are allowed. Without it, Google is guessing from your prose. I've written the blocks in assets/schema-jsonld.

Your page titles don't target searches. "Old Faithful — Yellowstone Snowmobile Tours" is a brand title, not a search title. Nobody googles "Old Faithful." They google "Old Faithful snowmobile tour from Jackson." Rewrites are in assets/meta-tags.

No content beyond the eight core pages. No blog, no trip-planning guides, no "what to expect," no comparison pages. This is where the long-term organic traffic lives and it's the piece AI assistants pull from most heavily. Section 5 covers this.

3. Google Ads — where your first-season leads actually come from

Be realistic: SEO for "Yellowstone snowmobile tours" against operators with a decade of domain history and thousands of reviews is a 12–24 month project. Ads are how you fill sleds this winter. SEO is how you stop paying for every booking in year three.

The one thing that makes ads work

Conversion tracking. This is what I meant on the call about "reinforcing what's working." Google Ads doesn't optimize toward clicks, it optimizes toward whatever you tell it success looks like. If you don't tell it, it optimizes toward cheap clicks, which are worthless.

Your conversions, in priority order:

1. Contact form submitted (primary)
2. Phone call from a website click, lasting 60+ seconds
3. Email link clicked
4. Tour detail page viewed for 45+ seconds (secondary signal only — never optimize toward this)

Do not launch a single ad until #1 and #2 are firing correctly. The full setup spec is in assets/conversion-tracking-spec. This is a 2–3 hour job for whoever built the site.

Campaign structure

Full keyword lists, negatives, and ad copy are in assets/google-ads-starter. Structure in brief:

• Campaign 1 — High intent (60% of budget). Exact and phrase match on "yellowstone snowmobile tours," "snowmobile tours jackson hole," "old faithful snowmobile tour," "yellowstone winter tours." These convert. They're also expensive.
• Campaign 2 — Long tail (25%). "Yellowstone snowmobile tour with kids," "first time snowmobiling yellowstone," "private yellowstone snowmobile tour," "3 day yellowstone snowmobile trip." Cheaper clicks, better fit, matches your small-group story.
• Campaign 3 — Brand defense (15%, small). Your own name plus competitor terms. Cheap, and it protects you when someone hears about you and searches.

Critical negatives from day one: rental, buy, used, for sale, jobs, hiring, salary, free, cheap, map, weather, road closures, non-commercially guided, DIY. You will otherwise pay for a lot of people who want to buy a snowmobile.

Budget guidance. Jackson Hole winter tourism keywords are competitive; expect roughly $4–9 per click on the high-intent terms. At $50/day for the season that's about $4,500 over three months and maybe 600–900 clicks. If your lead-to-booking rate is 20% and a booking averages $1,000, that math works comfortably. Start at $30–50/day, watch it for two weeks, then scale what converts. Do not turn on Performance Max until you have 30+ tracked conversions in the account — it needs data to work and without it will spend your money on nothing.

Ad extensions to set up: call extension (your one consistent number), location (once GBP is verified), sitelinks to each tour, callouts for "Authorized NPS Concessioner," "Owner-Led," "Hotel Pickup Included," "All Gear Provided."

4. Customer profiles and landing pages

This was the part you asked to understand better. Here's the plain version.

When someone clicks a Google ad, they land on a page. If that page is your generic tours page, it speaks to everyone and lands with no one. If a couple planning an anniversary trip clicks an ad about a romantic winter escape and lands on a page that talks about anniversary trips, small groups, and photo stops, they convert at two or three times the rate. Same ad spend, more bookings. That's the entire idea.

The work is: figure out who your buyers actually are, write a page for each, point the matching ads at it.

I've drafted four profiles and the corresponding page specs in assets/icp-landing-pages. In summary:

Build them one at a time in that order. The family page first — it's your largest segment and your December-January revenue.

5. Content strategy

The honest framing

Search is splitting in two. Google still matters, but a growing share of people ask an AI assistant "where should I book a snowmobile tour in Yellowstone?" and get three names back. You want to be one of the three. That happens when (a) your own site clearly states the facts an AI needs, and (b) other sites — Reddit, TripAdvisor, travel blogs, the NPS operator list — mention you.

That means content work splits into three buckets.

Bucket 1: Make your own site answerable (do this first, ~2 weeks of work)

These are the pages that answer the questions people actually type. Each is 800–1,500 words, written once, works for years:

• Snowmobiling in Yellowstone: The Complete Winter Guide — your cornerstone page. Regulations, why guides are required, BAT sleds, entrances, season dates, what it costs.
• Guided vs. Non-Commercially Guided: Which Is Right for You? — high search volume, and it lets you honestly explain why guided is easier while showing you know the alternative. Trust-builder.
• What to Wear Snowmobiling in Yellowstone — the single most-asked question in the category. You already have most of this on the Prepare page; expand it into a standalone piece.
• Yellowstone Winter Wildlife: What You'll Actually See — bison, wolves, eagles, coyotes. Photo-driven. This is your Instagram content in article form.
• South Entrance vs. West Entrance: Where to Start Your Tour — you depart from the South via Flagg Ranch. Own that comparison.
• Is Snowmobiling in Yellowstone Safe for Kids? — targets the family segment's #1 objection.
• How Much Does a Yellowstone Snowmobile Tour Cost? — publish real numbers. This page will rank and it will convert, and right now nobody in the market answers it well.

Bucket 2: Get mentioned elsewhere (ongoing)

• The NPS authorized operator list at nps.gov. Confirm you're on it. This is the highest-authority link available in your entire category and it's free. If you're not listed, contact your concessions management office.
• Jackson Hole Chamber, Jackson Hole Travel & Tourism Board, Wyoming Office of Tourism directories.
• TripAdvisor listing — set it up before your first tour so guests have somewhere to review you.
• Local partnerships: front desks at Jackson hotels, Jackson Hole Traveler, jacksonholewy.com directory listings.
• Reddit: r/Yellowstone and r/JacksonHole get "which snowmobile tour" threads constantly. Participate honestly as an operator. Do not astroturf — it will backfire and Reddit users will find you.

Bucket 3: Social (Instagram first)

You started the account a week ago and you're posting every few days. That's the right instinct. Focus:

• Reels beat photos, heavily. A 15-second clip of a bison on the trail outperforms any static shot.
• Geotag Yellowstone National Park, Jackson Hole, Flagg Ranch, Old Faithful on everything.
• Content that works in this category: wildlife encounters, first-person helmet-cam trail footage, steam rising off geysers at 20 below, guest reaction shots, "what we provide" gear layouts, guide-knowledge micro-explainers.
• Put the Instagram feed on your website and the website link in the bio. Right now they're disconnected.
• Your guide with existing Yellowstone winter photos is your most valuable content asset. Get his whole archive, with permission to use it, before the season starts.

6. AI workflows for content

This is the part I'd most like to help with, and it's the piece with the best leverage for a three-person team. The goal is that you or your GM can sit down for 45 minutes on a Monday and produce a week of content, without either of you being a marketer.

The full set of copy-paste prompts is in assets/ai-content-workflows. The shape of it:

A brand context file. One document that describes your voice, your tours, your prices, your differentiators, your rules (never promise wildlife sightings, never guarantee weather, always mention gear is included). You paste this at the top of every AI conversation. Everything downstream gets better because of it. I've drafted this for you.

Four repeatable workflows:

1. Weekly social — brand context in, five captions plus shot lists out. 20 minutes.
2. Monthly article — brand context plus a topic from the Bucket 1 list, out comes a draft you edit. 90 minutes.
3. Ad copy refresh — feed it last month's performance data, get new headline variants. 20 minutes.
4. Review response — paste a review, get a draft response in your voice. 2 minutes.

A word of caution, and this matters in your category: never publish AI-written content about Yellowstone facts, regulations, or wildlife without checking it. Models get park regulations and season dates wrong. Your credibility as a guide is your entire product. Use AI for structure, first drafts, and volume; you supply the facts and the voice.

The compounding version of this — and where I'd spend real time with you — is connecting the AI to your Google Analytics and Ads data so that "what should I write next month?" is answered by what's actually converting rather than by guessing. That's a later-phase project, once there's data to feed it.

7. CRM and lead tracking

CRM stands for customer relationship management — it's just the place you keep track of everyone who's contacted you, what they asked about, and what happened next. On the call I said "contact management," which is the same idea.

Why you want one now, not later: every inquiry you get this winter that doesn't book is worth something next winter. Every guest who does book is your best source of referrals and repeat business. Without a system, all of that lives in your inbox and evaporates.

What to use

Start simple. You're a three-person team with maybe a few hundred inquiries in year one.

• Simplest that works: a shared Google Sheet plus Mailchimp for email. Free to $30/month. Honestly fine for season one.
• Better, still simple: HubSpot's free tier. Real pipeline stages, logs emails automatically, connects to your website form, upgrades gracefully. This is what I'd recommend.
• Industry-specific: FareHarbor or Peek Pro — these are booking platforms with light CRM built in. Scenic Safaris runs on FareHarbor. Worth evaluating when you add online booking, because combining booking and CRM is much better than bolting them together later.

What to capture on every lead

Name, email, phone, tour interest, group size, target dates, and — you already have this on your form, which is good — how they heard about you. That last field is genuinely valuable; it's your reality check against what the analytics claim.

The four emails that pay for the whole system

1. Instant auto-reply when the form is submitted. Confirms you got it, sets a response-time expectation, links to the FAQ and Prepare pages. Reduces the "did they even get my message" anxiety that makes people go book with someone else.
2. 48-hour follow-up on any inquiry that didn't convert. One paragraph, from you personally. This alone will recover bookings.
3. Pre-tour email, 3 days out: what to wear, when pickup is, what to bring. Reduces day-of chaos.
4. Post-tour email, same evening: thank you, photo link, review request. This is your review engine.

A note on your contact page

The form says "our adventure strategists will check availability." That phrase is at odds with everything else you're selling. Your whole pitch is that you're small and the owner picks up the phone — and the same page says "you'll talk to the owner or GM directly" two paragraphs later. Change "adventure strategists" to your and your GM's actual first names, or just "we." The corporate-sounding language makes you sound like the call center you're competing against.

8. Reporting — knowing what's working

You asked how you'd track ranking. Detail is in assets/reporting. The essentials:

Set up immediately, all free:

• Google Search Console — the only tool that tells you truthfully what queries you appear for and where you rank. Non-negotiable. Verify it this week.
• Google Analytics 4 — traffic, sources, behavior.
• Google Business Profile insights — once verified.

Why you can't just google yourself: as I mentioned, results are personalized by your location, your history, and your device. You'll see yourself ranking higher than you do. Search Console shows you the real average position across everyone.

Weekly, 15 minutes: leads received, leads by source, ad spend and cost per lead, Search Console impressions and clicks, new reviews.

Monthly, 45 minutes: ranking movement on your target keyword list, which pages get traffic, which ads and keywords converted, cost per booking, what to change next month.

Paid tools if budget allows ($30–130/month): Semrush or Ahrefs for automated rank tracking and competitor visibility. Worth it once you're actively investing in SEO; skip it for now.

9. Suggested plan

Phase 1 — Before the season (now through October)

Foundation. Nothing here is glamorous and all of it compounds.

1. Remove the draft-content note from /prepare (phone number inconsistency is now resolved)
2. Start Google Business Profile verification as a Service Area Business (this has the longest lead time — start it first)
3. Verify Search Console and GA4
4. Publish prices and season dates
5. Add llms.txt and JSON-LD structured data
6. Rewrite titles and meta descriptions
7. Add guide bios with photos
8. Confirm you're on the NPS authorized operator list
9. Build the brand context file for AI workflows
10. Set up the CRM and the four automated emails

Phase 2 — Pre-season ramp (November)

11. Wire up conversion tracking and verify it fires
12. Build the family landing page, then the couples page
13. Publish the first three cornerstone articles
14. Launch Google Ads at $30–50/day
15. Instagram to 3 posts per week using the AI workflow
16. Set up the review request system so it's ready on day one

Phase 3 — In season (December through March)

17. Weekly reporting; shift budget toward what converts
18. Aggressive review collection after every single tour
19. Two articles per month
20. Build the remaining landing pages as the ad data tells you which segments respond

Phase 4 — Post-season (April onward)

21. Full-season review: what drove bookings, what didn't
22. Email the whole list about next season and referrals
23. Plan year two with a full season of real data instead of guesses

10. Who should do what

You said you'd like to own the accessible parts and hand off the rest. That's the right call and here's where I'd draw the line.

You and your GM own:

• Google Business Profile verification and ongoing posts
• Review collection — this has to come from you, it can't be outsourced
• Instagram posting, using the AI workflows
• Responding to leads (this is your competitive advantage, don't delegate it)
• Weekly reporting review

Outside help for:

• Technical SEO implementation — schema, meta tags, llms.txt. This is Mekki's territory if he's willing; it's a few hours of work for someone who knows the codebase.
• Google Ads setup and management. Ads are easy to run and hard to run well, and the failure mode is spending $4,000 on nothing. I have a contact who does this and a strategist who runs the customer-profile process; I'll make introductions.
• Content strategy and the AI workflow build — this is where I'd be most useful, and it's a build-once-then-you-run-it arrangement rather than a retainer.

Rough costs

My rate is $150/hour, and I'm happy to scope any of the above as a flat-rate package with a fixed number of hours so there are no surprises.

Next steps

1. Read this with your GM
2. Tell me which pieces you want to own and which you want to hand off
3. I'll make the two introductions (Google Ads and the customer-profile strategist)
4. We scope Phase 1 as a fixed-hours engagement so you know the number up front

The one thing I'd start today regardless of anything else: Google Business Profile verification. It has the longest lead time, the highest failure rate on first attempt, and the biggest payoff. Everything else can wait a week. That can't.

Sources

• Scenic Safaris — Jackson Hole Winter Tours (competitor pricing: $525 snowmobile, $450 snowcoach)
• BrushBuck — Yellowstone Snowmobile Tours from Jackson (reseller disclosure, review strategy)
• Old Faithful Tours — Yellowstone Day Tour (competitor pricing)
• NPS — Ride a Snowmobile or Snowcoach in Yellowstone (authorized operator list, season and oversnow travel rules)
• NPS — Snowmobile Access Program Logistics