How to get your RV park on Google.

First, understand what you are trying to get into

A search like "RV park Buena Vista" returns two things that matter. The map pack: three parks on a map with ratings, chosen by Google's local ranking. And the organic list below it: ten links, ranked by Google's normal web ranking. Parks can appear in both, and they are won by different work. The map pack is mostly about your Business Profile, reviews, and consistency. The list is mostly about your website. Do both.

1. Claim and finish your Google Business Profile

This is the pin on the map and the panel on the right. Go to business.google.com, find or create the listing, and verify it. Then fill in every field, because Google ranks complete profiles above incomplete ones:

• Category. Primary category "RV park" or "Campground," whichever fits, and secondary categories for cabins, camping, or a store if you have them. The wrong category is the single most common reason a park does not show.
• Hours by season. Set regular hours and add special hours for the opening and closing dates. A profile that says open in January when the gate is locked gets marked by guests, and Google notices.
• Phone and website. Exactly as they appear on the site.
• Photos. Twenty or more. Sites, the office, the bathhouse, the view, the road in. Profiles with photos get more direction requests, and Google shows them in the map pack.
• Attributes. Big rigs, pets, WiFi, pull-through, whatever Google offers for your category. These become filters.
• Description. Two or three plain sentences: what and where, the kinds of sites, the one thing guests come for.

The profile, field by field.

2. Make the website say the same thing

Google cross-checks the profile against the website. The name, address, and phone must match exactly: same spelling, same suite or lot number, same phone format. A park listed as "Snowy Peaks RV Park" on the profile and "Snowy Peaks RV Resort" on the site is two businesses to a machine.

Then the site needs to say what and where in the places Google reads first. The page title: "Snowy Peaks RV Park, Buena Vista, Colorado" rather than "Home." The main heading. The first paragraph. The footer, with the full address. A page title of "Welcome" is the most common way a good park stays invisible.

3. Get reviews, steadily, and answer every one

Reviews are the largest single factor in the map pack, and steady beats sudden. A park getting three or four reviews a month all year outranks a park that got forty in one week last July. How to get them: ask at check-out, put the review link on the receipt and the WiFi card, send it in the thank-you text or email the day after departure. Google gives you a short link for this in the profile dashboard.

Answer every review within a week, good ones with a sentence, bad ones with a calm reply that says what you did about it. Guests read the replies more than the reviews. So does Google. How to ask, and what to say back.

4. A page for each kind of guest

The homepage cannot rank for everything. A guest searching "monthly RV sites Prescott" and a guest searching "RV park near Prescott for a weekend" are two searches, and a page written for each one catches both. Which pages depends on the park: big rigs, families, monthly, cabins, groups, winter. Each page says in plain words what that guest gets, with the site lengths, the hookups, the rates or a rate range, the rules that matter to them, and a book button.

One thing not to do: a page for every nearby town. "RV park near Salida," "RV park near Leadville," "RV park near Nathrop" with the same text and a different town name. Google has been marking that pattern down for years. One good page for your town beats a dozen thin ones.

5. Be listed everywhere, and say the same thing everywhere

Apple Maps, Bing Places, Yelp, Campendium, RV Life, Good Sam, the state tourism site, the chamber of commerce, and the dozens of directories that copy from each other. Google reads them all. When they agree with your profile, Google trusts the profile more. When they disagree about your hours, your phone, or whether you are still open, Google trusts it less. Most parks have an old phone number or a former owner's name floating around a dozen directories from years ago. Cleaning that up is slow, unglamorous work, and it moves the map ranking. Our Listings + Reviews band does it every month. How we handle search.

The mistakes that undo the work

• Keyword-stuffed business name. "Snowy Peaks RV Park Best Camping Buena Vista Colorado" as the profile name violates Google's rules and gets suspended. Use the real name.
• A profile nobody owns. Created by a former manager, verified to an email nobody has. Recover it before doing anything else.
• Two profiles. The park and "the office" or an old name. Merge them.
• Closed for the season set to permanently closed. Use special hours or the seasonal setting, never "permanently closed."
• A slow site. Google measures speed on phones. A heavy template on a phone at a rest area with one bar is a ranking problem and a guest problem.
• Setting it up once. Everything here decays. Hours change, reviews stop, a directory re-imports old data. The parks in the map pack are the ones where someone looks at it monthly.

What to expect, and when

Profile changes show within days. The map pack usually moves within two to six weeks once the profile, the site, and the listings agree and reviews are coming in. Organic rankings for the town take two to four months. Report on what matters: searches you appeared for, direction requests, calls from the profile, website visits, and bookings, all of which the profile dashboard and Analytics show. If nobody is reading those numbers monthly, nobody knows whether it worked.