The 'things to do in [your town]' page: the highest-value content you can write
There is one page most outdoor businesses have never built, and it might be the best SEO move available to them right now.
Not another trip page. Not a gear list post. A real “things to do in [your town]” page. A page that helps visitors plan their entire trip, not just the two hours they spend with you.
This sounds like giving away traffic. Why write about other businesses? Why create content that doesn’t pitch your service? Because Google rewards pages that answer questions completely, and the search volume behind “things to do in [town name]” is larger than almost anything else your customers are searching for. Capture that traffic and a percentage of it books with you. That’s the trade.
Why this page beats most other content
“Things to do in Moab” gets searched tens of thousands of times per month. Year-round. Not just summer. People search it while debating where to vacation, while planning long weekends, while trying to convince a partner that Moab is worth the drive. The query captures a much wider audience than anything activity-specific.
Compare it to “whitewater rafting Tennessee.” That’s a real keyword for an outfitter, but the volume is a fraction of the destination search. The “things to do” visitor is still deciding how to spend their time. Your rafting trip or guide service or kayak rental can be the answer. They just haven’t found you yet.
There’s also a conversion dynamic here that isn’t obvious. Someone who finds your site through a destination search is already planning a trip to your area. They’re pre-committed to being there. The intent is different from someone doing early research. When they find your activity on a page they already trust, the barrier to booking is lower.
What actually belongs on it
Think like a local who knows their area well, not a tourism board writing copy for a brochure.
Your activity goes first and gets the most space. You’re not pretending to be a neutral guide. You run a rafting operation or a guide service and this is your page. Write a real description of what the experience is like, who it’s for, what to expect. Link to your booking page. Don’t bury it.
After that, be useful about everything else. The restaurants you’d actually send a customer to. The hiking trails with honest difficulty ratings. The thing every visitor misses that every local knows about. What to do if it rains. Where the crowds are and when to avoid them.
Ask your guides if you’re not sure what to include. They’ve had the “what else should we do while we’re here” conversation hundreds of times. They know exactly what visitors want and what disappoints them. Their answers are the raw material for this page.
The goal is a page someone could land on and plan their full trip without needing to open Google again. That’s a high bar and worth aiming for. Pages that do this well rank, stay ranked, and keep getting traffic years after you published them.
How long it should be
Longer than you’d expect. Not padded out with thin content, but thorough.
Most travel pages that rank well for “things to do in [city]” run 1,500 words or more. Not because length is a ranking factor in itself, but because a real area guide covering outdoor activities, dining, lodging, transportation, and seasonal tips has a lot to say. If your version is 400 words, it isn’t actually answering the question. Google can tell. Visitors can tell faster.
A useful benchmark: if a visitor could read your page and then call you with a question that isn’t answered there, the page isn’t done. Not answered means not comprehensive enough to rank. Work through the common questions. What’s the best time of year to visit? Where should we eat? What if we have kids? What if someone in our group doesn’t want to do the outdoor activity? These are real questions. Answer them on the page.
The practical floor is probably 1,200 words. The ceiling is whatever you need to cover the area honestly. Some towns have more going on than others. Don’t pad to hit a number, but don’t cut short because you ran out of patience writing it.
How to set it up so search can find it
This page shouldn’t live in your blog. Blog posts feel dated and impermanent. This content belongs at a clean URL like /things-to-do-in-[your-town]/ and should be treated as a permanent resource you update over time, not a post you file away.
Structure it with H2 headers for each category: outdoor activities, restaurants, where to stay, rainy day options. Each section needs real content, not just a name and a link. Two or three sentences about why you’re recommending something, what to expect, who it’s right for.
Put your town name in the page title, the opening paragraph, and at least one H2 header. “Things to do in Asheville NC” is the search. Your title should reflect that. This is the same principle behind local keyword targeting for activity searches, and it works the same way here.
Link to this page from your trip pages. A visitor on your half-day kayaking page who wants to know what else there is to do should be able to find that answer on your site, not on someone else’s. Understanding what customers are searching before they book makes it clearer why keeping them on your site matters.
The authority it builds over time
A site that covers its local area in depth reads differently to Google than a site that only talks about its own services. Topical coverage signals that you actually know the destination, not just your corner of it. Travel blogs rank well for destination searches because they’ve built that full picture out. You don’t need to become a travel blog. One well-maintained area guide does a lot of that work.
This also matters for AI-powered search. When someone asks Google’s AI overview what to do in your town, it draws from pages that have demonstrated they understand the destination. The way AI search surfaces outdoor businesses is changing, but the underlying pattern hasn’t: comprehensive, local, specific content gets cited. Generic content doesn’t.
Keeping it current
This page decays if you ignore it. A restaurant you recommended closes. A trail gets rerouted. A new spot opens that everyone’s talking about. Update it. A page that was last touched in 2022 signals neglect, and visitors can usually tell when the information is stale.
Set a reminder to review it twice a year. Not a rewrite. Just a pass to check that everything is still accurate, add anything new worth including, and remove what’s outdated. An hour of work twice a year keeps a page that took you two days to build running at full strength.
Seasonal notes earn their keep. What to do in December is a different answer than July, and visitors searching in winter are real customers too. You don’t need a separate page for each season. A section explaining how the area changes by time of year handles this and gives the page more keywords to rank for without requiring you to build and maintain multiple URLs.
One thing some operators miss: this page can also pick up traffic from nearby towns. If you’re in a small community near a more searched destination, mention the proximity. “Fifteen minutes from [larger city]” in your page copy catches people who are planning around the bigger destination and looking for things nearby. This doesn’t require a separate strategy. It’s just accurate information that also happens to rank.
Where this fits in your content work
The five pages every outdoor site needs cover the core: trip pages, homepage, about, contact. This page is different. It sits alongside that foundation and catches a different audience at a different moment in their planning.
It also generates material for other content. A detailed area guide is the hub from which a dozen blog posts can branch. “Best hiking near [your town]” and “where to eat after a float trip” are posts that live naturally inside the same content world. Knowing what to blog about gets easier once you have the hub built.
Most outdoor businesses are not thinking at this level. They’re writing about their trips, their guides, their gear lists. All of that is useful. This page is useful in a different way because it catches people earlier, before they’ve even narrowed down their activity. And it sends qualified traffic. Someone arriving from a “things to do in Durango” search is already going to Durango. They’re not casually browsing. That’s the visitor worth reaching.
Build it once. Update it twice a year. Let it earn.
