What is a sitemap? How to create one for your outdoor recreation website

A sitemap is an XML file that helps Google find every page on your site. Learn what it is, whether you already have one, and how to create and submit one.

alpnAI/ 5 min read

If Google can’t find your pages, it can’t rank them. A sitemap is one of the cheapest insurance policies in SEO - a simple file that tells search engines exactly what’s on your site and where to find it.

For outdoor recreation businesses, this matters more than most. Your site probably has trip pages buried under booking platform iframes, seasonal content that goes dormant for months, and photo galleries full of images Google has never catalogued. A sitemap helps solve all of that.

What a sitemap is

A sitemap is a file - usually in XML format - that lists the URLs on your website along with optional metadata about each one: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and what type of content it contains.

It’s not a page visitors ever see. It lives at a URL like yoursite.com/sitemap.xml or yoursite.com/sitemap_index.xml, and it’s written for search engine crawlers, not humans.

Google describes it this way: a sitemap provides “information about pages, videos, and files on your site and their relationships,” helping Google “crawl your site more efficiently.”

The emphasis on efficiency is the key point. Crawlers have a limited budget for each site - they don’t browse endlessly. A sitemap lets them spend that budget on your actual content instead of wandering through nav menus and footers hunting for pages.

The three types you’ll encounter

XML sitemaps are the standard. Each URL gets an entry with a <loc> tag (the address) and optional <lastmod> and <changefreq> tags. XML is what Google Search Console expects, and it’s what every major plugin and CMS generates automatically.

Image sitemaps are an extension of XML sitemaps that add metadata about images on each page. For a rafting company or fishing guide with hundreds of trip photos, this is worth knowing about. Image sitemaps help Google discover and index photos that might otherwise be missed, which matters for Google Images and for surfacing visual content in search.

Sitemap index files are used when your site has so many pages that one sitemap can’t hold them all. A single sitemap file is capped at 50,000 URLs and 50MB. If you’re above that, an index file points to multiple individual sitemaps. Most small outdoor recreation sites won’t hit this limit for years.

One tag worth ignoring: the <priority> field. It looked useful on paper - you could set homepage priority to 1.0 and old blog posts to 0.3. Google has confirmed it ignores this entirely. Don’t spend time on it.

Does your site already have one?

Probably. Check by visiting yoursite.com/sitemap.xml. If you get an XML file with a list of URLs, you have one. If you use WordPress with Yoast SEO or Rank Math installed, your sitemap lives at yoursite.com/sitemap_index.xml and updates automatically whenever you publish or change content. Squarespace generates one at yoursite.com/sitemap.xml without any configuration.

If your site is on WordPress without a sitemap plugin, that’s the gap to close. Install Yoast SEO (free) or Rank Math (free), enable sitemaps in the settings, and you’re done. Both plugins handle the whole thing - generating the file, keeping it updated, and excluding pages you’ve marked as noindex.

For custom-built sites or booking platform microsites, check with your developer. Platforms like FareHarbor create booking pages that aren’t always linked in your main navigation. A manually crafted or developer-generated sitemap that includes those URLs gives Google a direct path to them, which affects how well your booking pages get crawled and indexed.

How to create one from scratch

For a small site with fewer than a few dozen pages, you can write an XML sitemap in a text editor. The minimum structure looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://www.yoursite.com/trips/whitewater-rafting/</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-03-15</lastmod>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://www.yoursite.com/trips/kayak-rentals/</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-02-01</lastmod>
  </url>
</urlset>

Save the file as sitemap.xml, upload it to your server root, and submit it to Google. That’s the whole job.

For larger sites, use a generator. Screaming Frog (paid, $259/year) crawls your site and exports a clean XML sitemap. The free plan handles up to 500 URLs, which covers most small outfitter sites. Online tools like XML-Sitemaps.com handle basic jobs at no cost.

Submitting to Google Search Console

Creating the file is half the work. Submitting it tells Google where to look.

In Google Search Console, go to Indexing → Sitemaps. Paste your sitemap URL - something like https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml - and click Submit. Google will show you how many URLs were submitted and how many it actually indexed. That gap between submitted and indexed is where the interesting diagnostic work happens.

A second method: add this line to your robots.txt file:

Sitemap: https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

Any crawler that reads your robots.txt file will find the sitemap automatically. This is worth doing even if you’ve already submitted through Search Console - it catches other search engines too.

What to do after you submit

Check back in Search Console after a week or two. You’re looking at two numbers: URLs submitted and URLs indexed. If they’re close, you’re in good shape. A large gap usually means one of a few things: duplicate content on multiple URLs, thin pages Google doesn’t consider worth indexing, or technical issues like 404 errors on pages that are listed in the sitemap.

The Sitemaps report also surfaces specific errors - things like URLs that return server errors or pages blocked by robots.txt. Fix those as you find them. It’s quieter work than writing blog posts, but it compounds.

If you’re running a seasonal business, update your sitemap before each season opens. Pages that sat idle over winter should have a fresh <lastmod> date once you’ve updated them with current pricing and trip details. A stale last-modified date is a small signal, but signal accumulates. The same principle applies to your broader off-season SEO work.

The sitemap is infrastructure. It doesn’t generate traffic on its own - no file does. What it does is remove an obstacle between your content and the people searching for what you offer. Pull up yoursite.com/sitemap.xml right now and see if it loads. If it doesn’t, that’s a fifteen-minute fix with more upside than most things on your SEO to-do list.