Visit St. Pete / Clearwater:
Serving Residents and Attracting Tourists Through Intelligent Search

Situation

After launching a newly redesigned website, the team at Visit St. Pete/Clearwater quickly discovered one of its shortcomings: the search.

Solution

After a demo from the Cludo team, Visit St. Pete/Clearwater knew that with a little bit of love and logic, this was the solution to move forward with.

Impact

With effortless customization and easy-to-implement tools, their team is able to update content in a timely manner and curate the experience to every site visitor.

“It’s priority for us to have information searchable, reachable, approachable. You can only accomplish so much through your traditional menu of navigation. That's why it was important for us to really find a good search solution.” – Eddie Kirsch, Digital Producer at Visit St. Pete/Clearwater

St PeteWith a population of roughly one million and nearly 15 million visitors annually, the St. Petersburg/Clearwater area is one of Florida’s most sought after destinations. An impactful resource for the local economy, Visit St. Pete/Clearwater is a destination marketing organization for Pinellas County. Their objective is to provide inspiration and information for travelers, meeting planners and those considering visiting the area on business or vacation.

After launching a newly redesigned website in early 2022, the team at Visit St. Pete/Clearwater quickly discovered one of its shortcomings: the search. Within a few months of visitors, residents and employees using the website, they realized the search was falling short and not providing results in the way they should be delivered.

The search requirements

To provide the best user experience, Visit St. Pete/Clearwater began researching comprehensive search solutions. When evaluating search providers, the questions they needed answered were:

  • What does the timeline for implementation look like?
  • Were there machine learning capabilities that would enhance the search over time?
  • Would this require much dedicated developer time on their end?
  • What was the cost?

After a demo from the Cludo team, Visit St. Pete/Clearwater knew that with a little bit of love and logic, this was the solution to move forward with.

Ensuring content exists for all audiences

Whether a site visitor lives in the area or vacationing, it’s important to easily discover how much there is to do. Since most people aren’t staying long, the team at Visit St. Pete/Clearwater recognizes the need for specialized content, whether it’s highlighting gluten-free restaurants or displaying wheelchair accessible beaches.

“For us, content is a such a huge priority, and getting people access to that content is incredibly important.” says Eddie. “We have all this different content that you can’t cram into a single place, so having search is very useful.”

One way Visit St. Pete/Clearwater has transformed their search results is by using a date filter. This is especially useful for those who have limited time and can only attend events on certain days.

Date Filter VSP

Visit St. Pete/Clearwater has strong connections to local LGBTQ+ resources for travelers and residents. The area has a high LGBTQ+ population, and the team has not only reflected that in the search, but by creating dedicated pages and sections of content that can serve an array of results for visitors.

LGBTQ VSP Results-1

Being a highly utilized resource for the local community, the Visit St. Pete/Clearwater team makes a point to publish and promote events for community members. When one member wanted to know how visible their upcoming event would be, the web team was able to explain that beyond the dedicated Events page, visitors could turn to search. The event being accessible in a variety of ways was not only a comfort for the community member, but it was another way for Visit St. Pete/Clearwater to effortlessly serve their residents.

Visitors to the Visit St. Pete/Clearwater site also come from all around the world with a variety of needs. As an international destination, it’s important that there is content available in different languages that is easy to find for those who need it. Through Cludo, Visit St. Pete/Clearwater can ensure visitors are offered results in their preferred language, whether it be English, Portuguese, Spanish or German.

Keeping tourist worries at bay

As a destination marketing company, a large portion of Visit St. Pete/Clearwater’s site visitors happen to be from out-of-town. When tropical storms impact beach conditions, the marketing team must be especially diligent when it comes to publishing timely information.

For instance, in late 2022 there was a period of red tide following a hurricane. A naturally occurring issue, red tide is an algae that removes oxygen from the ocean water. It can be harmful to humans and is very dangerous for fish and wildlife.

When situations like this occur, there may be news press and increased coverage, which can be alarming for St. Pete/Clearwater leisure travelers. Through Cludo, the Visit St. Pete/Clearwater team was able to assess how many “red tide” related terms were being searched and act from there. Initially, they debated displaying information on the home page, but ultimately decided to create a banner within the search that would be prompted by specific search queries. This way Visit St. Pete/Clearwater was able to serve timely information for those searching for information about red tide while avoiding creating unnecessary hysteria.

Red tide

A little bit art, a little bit science

Being such a valuable resource for locals and out-of-towners, Visit St. Pete/Clearwater is happy that their search is equipped to highlight what a bustling destination it is. With effortless customization and easy-to-implement tools, Eddie and his team are able to update content in a timely manner and curate the experience to every site visitor.

“There's just so much content on a destination website, that you need an effective search function that is going to be a little bit art and a little bit science. We're able to put in inputs that can help orient a search but also works with what people are searching for.”

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