The season is more concentrated than outsiders realize
The visitor volume report McKinley Research Group prepares for the Alaska Travel Industry Association put summer 2024, meaning May through September, at 2,702,900 out-of-state visitors. Winter 2024-25, October through April, came to 376,300.
That is roughly seven visitors in the five summer months for every one across the other seven. Of the summer arrivals, 66% came by cruise ship and 31% by air, and Anchorage accounted for 72% of visitor air exits.
If your revenue tracks that curve, your website has an eight-month job that has nothing to do with taking bookings.
Rankings lag, which is the whole argument
Here is the timing problem that catches seasonal businesses every year.
A page published today does not rank today. Local search results move over weeks and months, not days. So a page written in May, when you finally have a spare afternoon and the season has already started, is competing for traffic in August at the earliest.
Which means the page that earns your June bookings has to exist by roughly February. The off-season is not downtime with an optional website task attached. It is the only window in which the work can be done early enough to pay.
Every summer you spend too busy to work on the website is a summer that guarantees the next one looks the same.
Do not take the site down
People still do this to save a hosting fee, and it is expensive in a way that does not show up until spring.
A site that goes offline loses its indexing. Coming back in April means starting the ranking clock from close to zero, right when you need it most. Hosting for the winter costs less than one lost booking.
The same applies to the Google Business Profile. Mark it as closed for the season rather than removing it. A removed profile does not come back with its reviews and history intact.
Change the ask, not the site
A closed business with a "Book Now" button is a bad experience. A closed business with no way to make contact is a worse one.
Swap the primary action rather than deleting it. Options that work, in order of how well they tend to perform:
- Next season's waitlist. An email field and one honest sentence about when you reopen. This is the highest-value thing a seasonal site does all winter.
- Advance booking for the season. If you can take a deposit for June in January, take it. Your competitors are not.
- Gift certificates. Real winter revenue for tours, charters and anything experiential.
- An honest banner. "Closed for the season. Reopening May 15. Join the list for first booking." Specific beats vague.
Make the hours tell the truth
Seasonal hours on the Business Profile, closure dates marked, reopening date in the description. A visitor who drives to a closed door in October leaves a review that outlives the season by years.
Same on the site itself, in the footer where hours live, and in any schema on the page. It is one of the specific failures in the profile mistakes post and it is entirely avoidable.
The content you cannot write in July
The off-season is the only time you have the material and the hours at the same time. You just finished a season. You remember every question you answered forty times.
Worth writing:
- The questions you got asked constantly, written out properly. Those are search queries.
- A page for each distinct thing you offer, instead of one page listing all of them.
- A page for each area you actually operate in, if that is more than one.
- The photos from this season, sorted and captioned while you still remember which trip is which.
- Reviews collected and asked for, from customers who are home now and have time to write one.
That last one is underrated. A customer three weeks off a trip writes a better review than one you catch in the parking lot.
Do the technical work while nothing is at stake
Never migrate a site in June. Obvious, routinely ignored.
Winter is when a rebuild, a platform move or a speed pass should happen, because a mistake in January costs you a quiet Tuesday and the same mistake in July costs you the year. If the site needs replacing, a redesign started in November is live and indexed by February.
It is also the right time to fix load performance, which for anyone serving customers outside the road system matters more than it does in the Lower 48. The reasoning is in the speed post.
A month by month for a summer business
October. Switch the hours and the primary action. Sort this season's photos. Ask every customer from the last month for a review.
November and December. Any rebuild or migration happens here. Write the service pages. Run gift certificates if they fit your business.
January and February. Publish everything. This is the deadline that matters, because it gives the pages three to four months to be found before the season opens.
March. Update pricing and availability. Test every form from a phone. Check the site on a slow connection.
April. Flip the hours back, switch the button to booking, email the waitlist you spent the winter building. That email is usually the best-performing thing a seasonal business sends all year.