EVent Optimizatoin
Visit Vancouver Washington
Revving Up Visibility: How Rooted Rock Marketing Helped a Beloved Car Event Reclaim Its Spot at the Top For Visit Vancouver, Washington
Client Snapshot
Visit Vancouver Washington | Vancouver, Washington
Visit Vancouver WA is a destination marketing organization (DMO) serving Vancouver and Clark County, Washington. As the region’s official tourism authority, its mission is to strategically market the area for leisure travel, meetings, conventions, sports events, and group tourism, all with a focus on boosting visitor spending to stimulate local economic growth and community vitality.
The Challenge
After years as one of the region’s most anticipated annual events, Visit Vancouver Washington’s Cruise the Couve Car Show went on hiatus. Yet even while the event was paused, search data revealed something significant: people were still actively looking for it. Queries for “Vancouver WA car shows,” “Cruise the Couve,” and similar high-intent terms continued to drive traffic, showing strong ongoing interest despite there being no event to attend.
However, with no active event page, the site had lost nearly all of its previous search visibility. Competing cities’ car shows were now dominating the results and capturing the demand that once belonged to Vancouver. This left a gap: the audience was still searching, but there was no relevant content for them to find.
Rooted Rock Marketing saw an opportunity to bridge this gap and preserve valuable search equity. We proposed creating a new dedicated “Car Shows” landing page that acknowledged the history of the Cruise the Couve event while also highlighting other local and regional car shows. To support this, we added an events filter on Visit Vancouver Washington’s site to surface all car-related events in one place, giving users a reason to stay engaged with the site and the destination.
This strategy allowed Visit Vancouver Washington to capture ongoing search interest, rebuild topical authority around car shows, and keep the audience warm until Cruise the Couve eventually returned.
When the event finally relaunched for the Summer of 2025, we were able to quickly update the existing page to reflect its comeback, leveraging the search momentum and visibility we had already re-established.
Rooted Rock Approach
SEO & Content Execution
Search Interest Research: Analyzed how users searched for car shows, including keyword variations and search result layouts, to identify the most valuable opportunities for visibility.
On-Page Optimization: Optimized metadata, headers, and page structure with targeted keywords to improve visibility and align with user search intent.
Event Tagging & User Experience: Tagged individual car show events and surfaced them on the page, making it easy for visitors to find both specific event details and additional car show opportunities in the region.
Content Creation & Expansion: Identified the need for new content and later expanded the page with updated history, engaging copy, and multimedia assets to build authority and keep users engaged.
Results & Impact
“Organic visibility for search terms containing “Car Shows” skyrocketed by more than 2,350% in just one month. Other search terms containing “Cruise” increased by 296% and “Classic Car” increased by 825%.”
The comeback was nothing short of a win. Shortly after launching the new car shows page from scratch, it began to dominate the search results. Organic visibility for search terms containing "Car Shows" skyrocketed by more than 2,350% in just one month. Other search terms containing "Cruise" increased by 296% and "Classic Car" increased by 825%.
Local buzz followed—In tandum with many strategic content updates, Rooted Rock helped increase natural backlinks with a 14-fold increase, while engagement on the page soared as the Car Shows page saw an average engagement time for visitors that is more than 11.3% higher than the site average.
This renewed visibility translated directly into real-world impact: the Car Shows page became a key landing page during this event's timeframe and was also in the top 5% of all landing pages by traffic. The return of the Cruise the Couve Car Show was an overall success and is still something that locals pride as one of Vancouver’s signature events, roaring back to life.
Erica Lindemann
Director of Tourism, Visit Vancouver, WA
“As a growing and rapidly changing destination, we are constantly trying to figure out what stands out about Vancouver, Washington. Backed by data, Rooted Rock found a point of interest that we didn’t even know we had outside of the major car event. We’ve really been able to lean into the history behind car cruises in our city, and the success of the new landing page speaks for itself.”