SEO audit checklist for outdoor recreation websites (do-it-yourself version)

You don’t need to hire someone to tell you what’s wrong with your website. Most of the SEO problems that keep outdoor recreation businesses off page one are things you can find and fix yourself with free tools and a few focused hours.

This walks you through the same checks a professional would run, in plain language, without assuming any technical background. If you’ve already been through an off-season SEO audit, this goes deeper on the hands-on steps. If you haven’t, this is a fine place to start.

Check that google can see your pages

Open Google Search Console. If you haven’t set it up, do that first and give it a week to collect data before continuing. Go to the Pages report and look at pages that aren’t indexed. You’ll see them in one of two buckets: “Discovered, currently not indexed” or “Crawled, currently not indexed.”

The first means Google found the URL but didn’t bother crawling it. The most common reason is weak internal linking. If a trip page is only linked from one other page on your site, Google may not consider it worth the trip. Fix that by adding links to it from related blog posts, your main trips page, or your site navigation.

The second means Google crawled the page and passed on indexing it. That’s usually a content problem. A page with one paragraph of text and a booking button is not giving Google a reason to show it to anyone. Add the kind of detail a first-time customer actually wants: what the trip includes, what the water or trail is like, how long it takes, what makes your version worth choosing. If you need a framework for building those pages out, this breakdown of the pages every outdoor website needs covers the content that gets indexed.

Check your sitemap while you’re in there. Go to the Sitemaps tab, confirm it’s submitted, and look at how many URLs Google found. If your site has 40 pages but your sitemap only shows 12, something is off. Maybe old pages were removed without updating the sitemap. Maybe your CMS isn’t generating it correctly.

Run a speed test on the pages that matter

Go to PageSpeed Insights and test three pages: your homepage, your most important trip page, and one blog post. That gives you a representative picture without spending an hour on this step.

Three numbers to look at. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) should be under 2.5 seconds. Interaction to Next Paint (INP) should be under 200 milliseconds. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) should be under 0.1. Google groups these under Core Web Vitals, and they affect rankings.

For outdoor recreation sites, the usual culprit is images. That 4MB hero shot of your river canyon looks great but adds three seconds to your load time. Run images through a free compressor like Squoosh or TinyPNG before uploading them. Switch to WebP format if your CMS supports it. Most modern ones do.

After images, the next drag is third-party scripts. Booking widgets, review badges, chat plugins, social media embeds. Each one adds load time that compounds. If you installed a live chat widget a year ago and haven’t used it since, pull it off. If your booking embed loads slowly, ask your provider whether they have a lighter version. These are real seconds, and page speed directly affects whether visitors stick around to book.

Audit your mobile experience

Pull out your phone and use your website. Not the desktop preview in Chrome. Your actual phone, on a real connection, ideally the kind of cell signal your customers have when they’re searching from a cabin or a campground parking lot.

Try to do these things: find a specific trip, read what’s included, get to the booking page, find your phone number, and read a blog post without pinching to zoom. If any of those takes more than a few taps or involves frustration, your mobile visitors are hitting the same wall.

The most common issues on outdoor recreation sites are hero images that shove the real content below the fold, buttons too small or too close together, tables or wide images that cause horizontal scrolling, and interstitial pop-ups that cover everything on a small screen. Google has a mobile usability report in Search Console that flags some of these, but manually using the site catches what automated checks miss.

If you find more than a couple of these issues, it’s worth doing a full mobile overhaul rather than patching one thing at a time.

Look at what you rank for and what you don’t

Back in Google Search Console, open the Performance report. Set the date range to the last three months. Sort by impressions instead of clicks. This tells you which queries Google is at least thinking about showing you for, even if searchers aren’t clicking through.

Find queries where you have impressions but almost no clicks. That usually means you’re on page two or the bottom of page one. If you’re showing up for “fly fishing trips near Bozeman” but stuck in position 14, you’re close enough that improvements to the page itself, the title tag, or a handful of internal links could move you onto page one. That’s where the clicks are.

Then look at what’s absent. If you run kayak tours and there are no kayak-related queries in your data, that’s a gap in your content. You either don’t have a page targeting those terms or the one you have is too thin to register. The local keyword playbook walks through how to find the terms worth building pages around.

Pay special attention to queries that include your location or “near me.” Those are people ready to book. If you’re invisible for those searches, your local SEO needs work, and that starts with the next section.

Fix the technical issues that accumulate quietly

Some problems don’t show up unless you crawl the site. Screaming Frog is free for up to 500 URLs, which is more than enough for most outfitter and guide websites. Download it, enter your URL, and let it run.

Here is what to look for in the results:

• Pages returning 404 errors, especially old trip pages from previous seasons that were deleted without redirects
• Duplicate title tags or meta descriptions across multiple pages
• Missing or doubled H1 tags
• Redirect chains where one redirect leads to another redirect
• Images missing alt text
• Pages with very little content, under 200 words or so

Start with the 404s. Every broken link is a dead end for Google’s crawler and for your visitors. Set up 301 redirects from old URLs to their current versions, or to your main trips page if the trip no longer runs. Seasonal businesses accumulate these every year, and they add up.

Duplicate title tags come next. If “Half-Day Rafting” and “Full-Day Rafting” share the same title, Google struggles to tell them apart. Make each one unique. Include the location and trip type so both the search engine and the searcher can distinguish them at a glance.

Review your google business profile

For most outdoor recreation businesses, local search is where booking-ready customers come from. Your Google Business Profile carries as much weight as your website in those results.

Open your profile and check: is your business name, address, and phone number correct and matching your website exactly? Are your hours updated for the current season, or do they still show last winter’s schedule? Do you have photos from the last few months? Have you responded to every review?

Look at your business categories. The primary category should be as specific as Google allows. “Rafting” is better than “Tour Operator.” “Fly Fishing Guide Service” is better than “Fishing Charter.” The more specific your category, the better your chances of showing up in the right searches.

Then actually search for your business on Google Maps and see what comes up. Edits don’t always stick. Google sometimes overrides your information with data scraped from directories or aggregators. If your profile says you close at 5pm but you actually take bookings until 7pm in the summer, you’re missing calls and you might not realize it.

For the full walkthrough, the Google Business Profile guide for outfitters covers every field worth filling in.

Decide what to fix first

You’ve got a list now. Some of these fixes take five minutes. Others take a couple of afternoons. The order matters.

Fix anything preventing Google from indexing your pages before you touch anything else. If your pages aren’t in the index, the rest of this list is irrelevant.

Page speed is second because it affects both your rankings and whether someone stays on the site long enough to book. After that, work through broken links and redirects, then title tags and meta descriptions, then mobile issues, then content gaps.

Three fixes per week is a reasonable pace. If you handle the indexing and speed issues in the first two weeks, you’ve covered the items with the biggest return. The rest can stretch over the next month without losing momentum.

The operators who do this every off-season are the ones who don’t lose ground to competitors while they’re busy running trips. One focused audit, a few weeks of follow-through, and your site goes into the season in shape to rank.