Maximizing Your Theater’s Online Impact: A SEO Triumph for Cinemas
Expanding your Cinema’s Reach: Your Ticket to SEO Triumph
As a movie theater owner, you know that an outstanding cinematic experience is at the very heart of your theater’s success. But in a digital era where exhibitors now compete with at-home and internet-based entertainment, a compelling — and competitive — online presence is essential for attracting more moviegoers, engaging new audiences, and keeping loyal customers coming back for more.
Whether you’re a luxury cinema delivering gourmet food and drinks directly to moviegoers’ seats or a local theater with enough history to charm every customer off their couch, you can’t expect to expand your theater’s reach without being one of the first results customers find when they go searching online. The higher up your pages rank online, the more likely customers are to visit your website. If however, your webpages first appear on, say, the fifth page of Google search results, it’s unlikely you’ll get any organic search traffic at all.
The Challenge: Overcoming the Plateau
Let’s say you own a premium cinema chain with over 25 locations, each offering the finest in luxury seating, gourmet food, and in-theater dining. You’ve done your research, considered your options, and launched a site using the Boost platform because you needed automation, customization, and speed so you could spend more time on delivering a top-notch cinematic experience. Your auditoriums are clean and decked out to the nines. Your cinema offers some of the best food and cocktails anyone can find in the city, if not the state. And you’ve got a competitive loyalty program. On top of that your new website has increased traffic and even gotten more customers to convert, but you notice those new stats are beginning to plateau. So, how do you take things to the next level? That’s where a well thought-out SEO (search engine optimization) strategy comes in.
The Strategy: A Movie Theater Page Makeover
Time and time again, our team finds cinema websites brimming with untapped keyword potential. If you’re not familiar with SEO, a keyword refers to the words and phrases customers use when searching for information or products on the internet. The more strategic your cinema is about its keywords, the higher it’s likely to rank when a customer goes searching online which, again, means more traffic and sales. Most of the overlooked opportunity is hiding in plain sight on your local landing pages. Local landing pages are those touch points that hold vital information about your theater. Search engines would like to rank these pages higher, but lackluster content and configurations lead them to bypass your pages for more compelling and relevant alternatives instead, meaning your local landing pages get less traffic and even less clicks.
When a cinema partners with us to help them boost its keyword rankings, we usually initiate a complete redesign of its local theater pages. It sounds like a high task, but with our website solution a redesign is painless and doesn’t require the time-consuming back-and-forth with a team of developers. The primary goal is to add valuable content that will propel pages for a cinema like yours to the top of search results. That means adding content that highlights all the amenities and features of your cinemas, from Food & Drink options to special events, parking availability, private rentals, promotions, local maps, contact details, and more.
The Results: A Box-Office Hit
When we talk about positions in SEO, we’re referring to the position on the results page of a search engine like Google. Positions 1–10 are those results that show up on the very first page, and positions 11–20 are those on the second page. As mentioned, customers are highly unlikely to visit pages beyond the second page because it simply means more work.
When Boxoffice partnered with a cinema that was looking to amplify its online presence, the theater started with a total of 9,661 keywords ranked in positions 1–20. Since the redesign and launch of its new pages, the results have been nothing short of spectacular. Its keyword rankings saw significant improvements over the course of just three months. They improved their website’s visibility on search engines by ranking 25% more of their keywords in the top positions 1–3 in search results. Additionally, they saw a 40% boost in search rankings for keywords ranked in positions 4–10 and an impressive 48% increase for keywords positioned in 11–20 on search engine results pages.
Why Expertise Matters: Bad SEO Backfires
But make no mistake. SEO isn’t just about adding keywords all over your cinema’s webpages. In fact, keyword stuffing can lead search engines like Google to rank your pages even lower than if you hadn’t added any keywords at all. And there is more to SEO than words. It’s also about optimizing the technical aspects of your webpages, like title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, and content that don’t make your pages take forever to load. That’s why working with a cinema-dedicated SEO team is essential to your cinema’s success.
The Challenge: Turning Around a Stale Website
Another Boxoffice client was struggling with SEO issues like duplicate content, broken links, 404 error pages, and zero keyword strategy. On top of that, their website was in need of a major revamp. We worked closely with the circuit to ensure that the new website was an SEO powerhouse by optimizing key local landing pages with content and meticulous attention to title tags and header tags. Technical issues were also high-priority, and it was essential that the site remain error-free.
The Results: A Healthy Online Presence
In January 2019, the client’s website had a moderate SEO health score of 61%, and it ranked for 1,986 keywords in the top 3 positions and 3,517 keywords in positions 4–10 on search engine results pages. Fast forward to June 2023, when the health score reached an impressive 87%. The number of keywords ranked in positions 1–3 increased by an astounding 304%, and there was a 168% increase in additional keywords in positions 4–10, despite some locations closing. The organic traffic contribution grew from 71% to 78%.
Key Takeaways for Your Theater’s Digital Success
When it comes to promoting the experiences your cinema has to offer, it’s not enough to attract customers the same way you did ten or even five years ago. Why? Because the landscape has changed. That shouldn’t, however, make running a cinema more challenging. With the right strategy, your online presence can even do some of the heavy-lifting for you. Take the first step to optimizing your movie theater’s online presence with a cinema-dedicated SEO audit so you can tap into a pool of customers your cinema hasn’t yet reached. Get started here
