How Tempest’s Events Content Strategy Achieved Record Website Traffic for Visit Long Beach

Family-friendly attractions and museums — like a historic ocean liner and California's largest aquarium — join eclectic shopping districts, whale watching excursions, a diverse group of international eateries, and a calendar of can’t-miss events in establishing Long Beach, California, as a must-visit west coast destination just a short drive from major hubs like Los Angeles and San Diego.

A longtime Tempest website, CRM, Destination Signals and Growth Marketing client, the Long Beach Convention & Visitors Bureau (Visit Long Beach) promotes leisure activities within the sunny, Southern California waterfront city. Tasked with increasing organic traffic to the destination website, Tempest’s Growth Marketing team explored new content opportunities that would establish the visitors bureau as the leading authority on events in the region; ranging from small weekend markets to major international racing competitions.

Identifying Content Needs

For several years, Tempest assisted in maintaining a highly valuable page on the destination website: a roundup of the can’t miss eventsa roundup of the can’t miss events occurring in Long Beach over the next month. Thanks to Tempest’s monthly work updating the featured events and optimizing the content for organic search, this page has upheld top rankings for coveted, highly-searched queries such as “Long Beach events this weekend” and “things to do in Long Beach this weekend”.

To expand upon the historical success seen with events content, in 2022 Tempest performed a content gap and competitive analysis to identify content opportunities to pursue within the Visit Long Beach website. Tempest prioritized content opportunities around a number of factors, including the competitive landscape for the search term (could Visit Long Beach effectively rank for and receive traffic for the topic), the event’s overall importance to the destination’s story and experience, and the information available — or not currently available — online for the event.

Research revealed several opportunities for major annual events that occur yearly within the city but were underrepresented on VisitLongBeach.com. These high profile events, including a Grand Prix that sees race cars roar through the streets of Downtown Long Beach, were previously only recognized on the website via event calendar listings with very minimal details, or related blogs about where to eat nearby.

Developing & Maintaining Helpful Content

Tempest classifies these events, with high search volume and unique, destination-defining characteristics, as “Destination Drivers.” These marquee events, attractions and other destination experiences are core to a traveler’s planning and central to the destination’s appeal. As such, the destination organization should strive to become a leading authority on these key elements.

Specifically, Tempest focused on developing content for the aforementioned Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach, as well as Long Beach Pride — an annual, weeklong celebration for the city’s LGBTQ+ community. New pages for each event were developed within the Annual Events section of the website’s information architecture, with each piece of content highlighting essential event details (dates, times, locations) as well as more in-depth background information such as the event’s history, significance to Long Beach, and more.

Content was curated by referencing top keywords pertaining to each event, such as “when is the Long Beach Grand Prix” or “Long Beach Pride parade”, with a goal of ranking not just for core event searches, but also related long tail queries. Copy was thoughtfully formatted in a way that was easy to scan for both users and search engines, while making sure information was helpful and applicable to leisure visitors and community members looking to engage with the festivities. Tempest also proactively scheduled regular content updates to ensure each page was relevant when search demand was at its highest leading up to each event, with the most recent updates occurring in early 2023 — a year in which Visit Long Beach witnessed the strategy pay of immensely.

...in 2023, Visit Long Beach witnessed record organic website traffic with over 827,000 organic website visits, an impressive 59% year-over-year increase and the most organic sessions ever to VisitLongBeach.com.

Record-Breaking Results

As a result of this “Destination Driver” events strategy and coupled with the fantastic storytelling completed by the Visit Long Beach team, in 2023, Visit Long Beach witnessed record organic website traffic with over 827,000 organic website visits, an impressive 59% year-over-year increase and the most organic sessions ever to VisitLongBeach.com.

Central to this success were the pieces of event-related content published, updated or otherwise optimized by the Tempest team throughout the course of the year. Each piece of content climbed within their respective search rankings and achieved significant year-over-year growth, including the Grand Prix annual events page, which drove over 21,000 organic sessions for a +12,601% year-over-year increase. Similar success was achieved with the updated Long Beach Pride annual events page, which saw +4,227% year-over-year growth with over 27,000 organic visits. The longtime “anchor” for Visit Long Beach’s organic traffic success, the “This Weekend in Long Beach” page, also reaped year-over-year growth with nearly 33,000 organic sessions — a +42% increase on 2022’s performance.

These organic traffic strategies were enhanced by other Tempest Growth Marketing efforts, including a paid media and PPC campaign promoting ticket sales for upcoming events, concerts and performances in market, with results including over 1 million ad impressions at a cost efficient $5 CPM rate, 170 partner referrals, and 800 “Buy Ticket” clicks to the booking websites for each event.