Experience Grand Rapids’ digital strategy: Made for today’s travelers & tomorrow’s search landscape

Overview

Experience Grand Rapids has partnered with Granicus Destinations for more than a decade, steadily evolving its online presence to meet changing traveler behavior, search trends, and internal workflow needs. What began as a customer relationship management (CRM) and content management system (CMS) has grown into a fully integrated digital ecosystem that prioritizes search engine optimization (SEO), as well as content governance, search visibility, paid media performance, and efficient media asset management. The destination marketing organization (DMO) positioned itself to adapt confidently to an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven search landscape while saving time and reducing internal complexity.

SITUATION

Digitally disconnected

After years of website growth, Experience Grand Rapids accumulated more than 400 pages of web content. The team faced challenges of little content governance, limited SEO structure, and difficulty maintaining relevance across leisure, meetings, and partner audiences. “When leisure content isn’t structured correctly, you lose people,” explained Andrea Robyns, marketing technology director for Experience Grand Rapids. “If meeting planners land on leisure content and can’t easily move between what they need, they drop off — and that was the last thing we wanted. We needed content that worked for every audience without creating friction.”

The DMO also juggled disconnected systems for digital assets. Images and videos lived in multiple places — CRM, CMS, calendars, internal networks, and third-party tools — which required repetitive uploads and made it hard to find the right content quickly.

Perhaps most pressing, Experience Grand Rapids needed a more intentional approach to its online presence as traveler search behavior evolved. With the rise of AI tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews, traditional SEO could no longer be the only player in the game; the DMO needed to optimize its content to be easily extracted by AI-driven search engines and large language models (LLMs).
 

SOLUTION

SEO + DAM = the perfect pairing
 

Experience Grand Rapids worked closely with Granicus Destinations to build a cohesive digital strategy that was:

• Rooted in SEO best practices.
• Supported by paid media expertise.
• Compatible with modern digital asset management.
• Future-proofed for the growing AI-generated search environment.

The DMO began by investing in SEO services early, shaping how content was written, organized, and maintained. During a major post-COVID website redesign in 2021, the team audited every page on the site — reducing total pages from more than 400 to just 164 — and implemented a formal content governance plan where:

• “Blogs” were reclassified into “articles” to improve search performance.
• Content review cadences were established to improve the internal process.
• Credibility was strengthened through citations and updated data.

As these efforts improved performance, Experience Grand Rapids expanded into Simpleview Digital Services, pairing organic SEO with paid search and strategic media planning. The result was a more balanced approach that protected organic visibility while driving high-intent conversions through paid efforts. Robyns described the paid media process as follows:

To support content creation and distribution at scale, the DMO also adopted Simpleview Digital Asset Management (DAM) powered by Cloudinary. Migrating from Barberstock, the team rethought how assets were structured and used — introducing consistent naming conventions, structured fields, tagging, and curated collections tailored to specific audiences like meeting planners, media, and internal teams. “With DAM, we finally have a higher-level solution that helps us actually find what we’re looking for through better searching, tagging, and structure,” explained Robyns. “We shifted our mindset by using curated collections to represent the best look of our city, and now both our external partners and internal teams can use those assets easily.”

The DAM integration with CMS further reduced friction, while AI-powered features now automatically generate image descriptions — saving time and improving accessibility.

“The integration and one‑click image description generator are huge time savers, and it fills a gap we didn’t have solved before,” said Robyns. “It’s allowed us to really utilize DAM to its full extent.”
 

RESULTS

"Your site came up first”

Experience Grand Rapids has seen measurable gains in visibility and performance while achieving meaningful internal accomplishments. As Robyns described, “I love it when people tell me, ‘I searched this and your site came up first.’ That’s what we’re doing. That’s why we’re here. I think that's really important right now as we step into AI and see our information show up in search results.”

Experience Grand Rapids reported the following increased impressions and sustained organic performance, even as AI-driven search and zero-click results change user behavior:

• Organic search click activity declined year over year in line with broader industry trends. However, overall visibility increased to 7M impressions (+7% YoY), indicating broader exposure across relevant search queries despite lower click activity.
• Average ranking position improved significantly to 9.58 (+54% YoY), reflecting stronger prominence and more frequent appearances in high‑value search results.
• The site now ranks in the top three positions for more than 50% of the top 20 terms, reinforcing its authority across core thematic searches.

The DMO also attributes a variety of other results to the digital strategy reboot:

• Higher conversion confidence through paid search, reinforcing SEO efforts without sacrificing long-term organic growth.
• Significant time savings through DAM integrations and AI-generated image description.
• Improved internal alignment and reduced frustration.
• A scalable content framework that supports LLM discovery through structured articles, FAQs, and governance.

By treating Granicus Destinations as a true extension of its own team, Experience Grand Rapids built a digital foundation designed for today’s travelers and for tomorrow’s search landscape. When asked about the DMO’s extensive digital transformation in the age of AI, Robyns said, “If you’re not doing it, you’re already behind — and that’s okay. What matters is finding the right partners and tools, so you’re not trying to do everything yourself. I think it's worth every penny if you're going to really utilize it to the fullest extent.”