You have an amazing haunt. You have an amazing website that’s all about your amazing haunt. So why aren’t you getting a flood of visitors to your haunted house?

The answer may be as simple as people searching for you can’t find you. Granted, the fever pitch for all things scary and haunted is in October, but all year long there are plenty of tourists looking for a good spook. The key is to make sure your website or haunt is easy for them to find.

With travels apps and smartphones being the main way visitors are searching for things to do, it’s becoming incredibly important to make sure you’re not only able to get found, but your haunt is showing up in the places potential visitors are visiting. How do you do that? By taking advantage of sites that help people find local attractions.

Use Google My Business — Immediately!

Start off by getting listed in Google My Business. Why? First off, it’s free. All you have to do is visit the site or give them a call at 1-844-491-9665 to get started. But make sure your business information is accurate, and then double check it. Then contact Google to have them send you a letter to verify that the business is truly yours. That’s it!

Secondly – it’s GOOGLE. According to NetMarketShare.com, Google’s global search engine market share is 71.11% on desktops and 95.06% on mobile and tablets. And this article on Inc.com reveals that half of the trillions of searches done on Google.com happen on smartphones, and location-related mobile is the fastest growing segment of mobile search. Plus, despite Bing’s rising popularity, Google still owns over 60% of searches in the US. Now that you’ve had your fill of search-marketing insider baseball, go get your haunted house listed in Google Business!

Get Listed on Travel Sites

Next, start looking at travel sites. We don’t recommend you spend too much time getting listed on every single travel site, but do look at TripAdvisor, Yelp, and FourSquare. These three sites are not only the most popular, they all have apps that have been downloaded millions of times on Android devices alone. When you consider just how prevalent mobile search is, not having your corn maze listed on these sites when Halloween rolls around means you’re missing a lot of eyeballs. If you have a haunt that’s open all year, that’s even more visitors you’re potentially missing out on.

TripAdvisor.com has the most app downloads by far. After you sign up for an account, go to the Add Listing page to add your haunt for free. Have a haunted hotel and a little money to spend on advertising? Even better — you can go to their Business Listings page and make it easy for visitors to book a night — or two if they’re brave!

Yelp.com is another great resource for listing your haunt. Though there are far fewer downloads of their app than with TravelAdvisor, you’ve likely seen Yelp stickers on the doors of your favorite restaurants or businesses — which is exactly why you should make sure your haunt is listed there. Again, if you don’t have an account, get one, then check biz.yelp.com to see if your haunt has been listed.

If it hasn’t, fill out all the pertinent information, upload a few photos and make sure you find the most relevant category for your haunt. They’ll send you a verification code to make sure all the business is yours, and then you’re set. If someone has already listed your site, then it gets more complicated and you might have to contact their Support team. But if you can track down who set up the listing, you can ask that person to transfer the profile to your account.

Have a haunted restaurant or pub? Definitely take advantage of Yelp’s free tool, Yelp Reservations.

Speaking of eateries, an overlooked online site for haunts is FourSquare. While most people think of FourSquare as only for finding good eats, it can also help visitors find good haunts. Like TripAdvisor and Yelp, you’ll have to get an account and check if your haunted attraction is listed. If not, fill out the information, add a few photos and you’re done.

Make Sure Your Info is Correct

When you add your haunt to these three sites, make sure everything is correct and accurate including the name, address, phone number, and website URL. Since these are focused on local search, having all of these important local details matter.

Where else should you get your haunted house featured? Try relevant websites about haunted houses and attractions. If people are looking for a haunt, chances are they’re already looking at websites about haunts — such as FrightFind.com where you can add your haunt for free, and it focuses on local attractions as well. When you add your haunt, make sure you add the correct information and add a few photos to entice scare-seekers. Have video proof of a ghost? FrightFind.com will let you add it when you add your scare!

Trying to get visitors to your haunt can be almost as frightening as the attraction itself. So don’t let a lack of customers haunt your business. Focusing on local search will help you attract visitors year round, and keep your parking lot from looking like a graveyard.

5 Simple Ways to Help Your Haunt Get Found Online

You have an amazing old house, there’s a ghost that bumps around in the night and scares the hell out of your guests, and you have a website set up to attract people to your haunt. But for some reason, no one ever visits your website. Worse yet, when you try searching on Google, your haunt is nowhere to be found.

What do you do?

Without getting too deep into search engine optimization (SEO) or pay per click advertising, there are a few easy things you can do help your site get found. And while these don’t guarantee instant success, these five tips are easy to do, and will give you the most for your effort.

1. Look at your web page’s title tags.

One of the easiest improvements, but biggest rewards, to help your haunt’s website show up in search engines is by making sure you have a well-written title tag on each of your pages. The <title> tag is what Google is going to use as the blue link on its search results pages. It’s also one of the ways that search engines associate important search terms with your website. Having good title tags, that are relevant to your haunt, is still considered one of the biggest factors that search engines use to rank your website.

This is where a Title Tag shows up. It also is *usually* the blue link when you do a search on Google.

What makes a good page title? First, make sure it accurately describes what that page is about. If your page is about an old cemetery and you use a title such as “Free Weird Al Downloads!,” not only will you not get the traffic you’re looking for, you’ll likely get penalized for not having any content related to that page. So make sure the title is accurate. We see a lot of haunts with a title tag of “Home” because the web developer just didn’t know better.

Also, make sure the title tag has a relevant keyword phrase in it. What’s a keyword phrase? Simply put, it’s the phrase you want your haunt to rank for. If you want the page to rank for “haunted cemetery,” be sure that phrase is in the title. Remember, you’re trying to associate your pages with words people are already searching for.

Finally, make it interesting. While you could use “Old Cemetery” or, as some do, “Home,” neither are interesting and probably won’t get you any clicks. However, “Old Towne’s Most Haunted Cemetery” or “Old Towne’s Haunted Cemetery” or “Get Scared at Old Towne Haunted Cemetery” are going to be much more attractive to searchers.

A few example title tag formulas for haunt owners:

One proven formula to consider might be leading with “where” your haunt is (city and/or state) followed with a “what  it is” (haunted house, zombie hunt, corn maze) then the actual name of the haunt. We suggest the name at the end, because typically you will rank well for your name since nobody else around is relevant for your own haunt’s name. Examples below.

Formula: “Where What – Haunt Name.”

• Example title tag: “Vermont’s Largest Haunted Event – TerroRealm”
• Example title tag: “13th Floor Haunted House in Chicago Illinois”

Another thing you could do, is include your open dates in your title tag. You can cut right to the chase and tell someone that your haunt is open and ready to scare the #$@! out of them. Example below courtesy of Maris Farms.

The only thing this Title Tag is missing is the “what.” Is it a haunted house, corn maze, pumpkin patch or all of the above? Because it is “all of the above” I’d suggest “Halloween at Maris Farms: Open Oct 1-31, 2016!

2. Make sure your haunt’s address is clearly displayed on your site.

Where’s Sid? Don’t make finding your haunt’s address this hard!

This seems like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how many people don’t include their address on their web site. Worse yet, many addresses are often incorrect or out of date. It shouldn’t be as hard as finding Sid Haig at a Where’s Waldo Rally.

Since you’re going to be competing for local searches, it’s important to make sure your address and phone number are on every page. This is especially important for mobile search. That way people visiting from out of town will be able to find your haunted attraction on their mobile device.

Having your address on your site is a ranking factor in Google’s local algorithm. On top of that, being consistent across your website and other properties is another major local ranking factor. At the very least, have your address on every page of your site in the footer. On key pages (homepage, contact page, get directions/location page), put it right in front of a visitor.

Make sure you have an easy to find contact page with your haunt’s hours, contact information, and other basic details. If someone does a search specific to your haunted house, Google and the other search engines may display it in their results.

TIP: Don’t put the address in an image. Search engines don’t read images. Make it HTML text.

3. Set up a blog.

If you already have a blog, make sure you’re updating it regularly (at least once a week is suggested). If you don’t have a blog, now is the time to start one. Why? Because by adding more content to your site, you’re giving the search engines a reason to keep visiting it and finding all your amazing content. The more content you have, the more opportunities you have to attract visitors with other keyword phrases that are related to your haunt, but not on any of your pages.

Blogging also gives you another avenue to tell the story of your haunt. Visitors want to read about your haunt’s history or read reviews of what people have seen there. This is a great marketing tool for you and it will build excitement and interest in your haunt. Do people stay at a haunted bed-and-breakfast for the delicious eggs Benedict? Probably not. Instead, they want to hear stories about recent sightings and guest experiences. This makes your haunt seem more active and interesting, and a blog is the best way to do that online.

I know it takes a lot of time. But as a haunt you have a TON of easy material. Take a picture of a prop or an actor and throw together a quick post. Throw in-production haunt pictures as you prep for the season. Before/after pics of a scare actor getting ready. Haunters have it easy when it comes to content.

4. Get listed in directories.

In the old days of SEO, directories were an easy way to get links for your site. For those who don’t know, links were a get rich quick SEO tactic back in the day. That’s long gone.  While getting links pointing at your website is still important, directory listings are not the way to build links.

Then why recommend this?

Because you don’t do it for the links, you do it for the audience. Take FrightFind.com for example. People visit this site every day looking for haunted attractions, real haunted houses and other places for paranormal experiences or just a good scare. They’re looking for places near them, or places they’re visiting.

This is the perfect audience for your haunt! They’ve already been qualified by their interest, so all you need to do is make sure the visitors to FrightFind and sites like it have your haunt on their site. Getting listed on FrightFind is free, but our state sponsorship program exposes your haunt to even more local signals and traffic. Find out more by adding your haunt here.

TIP: FrightFind’s state sponsorship program is designed to get your haunt in front of more local searches. Limited to only 3 haunts per state, it’s a great way to gain more exposure. Yes, a shameless plug!

5. Local business listings.

Your haunt is a local business. Google, Bing, Facebook, Yelp, and several other local search networks cater completely to local businesses. Setting up your site in each of these takes a lot of time and energy, but for each one you do, you open your business up to a new audience and improve your chances of showing up when customers are searching for “haunts nearby” or “haunts in Chicago.”

Example from Google Local Business Listings.

TIP: Keeping your haunt, patch, or maze info up to date in these can be a major time suck. There are tools out there that help you manage all of your local listings in once console. We recommend Moz Local.

Bonus! Advertise.

Sure, opening your wallet may not be an SEO recommendation, but it’s an easy one to take advantage of because it’s a proven way to drive people to your website.

And the targeting can be very effective. The biggest mistake we often see is haunts spending money to advertise to an audience 2 states away. That’s a major mistake and waste of money. The great thing about advertising on a service like Google’s Adwords or Facebook is that you can target an audience accurately by geography. You can also accurately measure how effectively your dollars are spent. It can be daunting, but we’d be happy to help if you have any questions.

Happy Haunting!

There are a lot of things you can – and should – do to help your website get found. But remember, just like it took a psychopath and an ax to make the Borden House haunted, it’ll take more than one tactic to get your haunt’s website found. Starting with these five tactics is a great place to begin.

Need help or have a question? Contact us here.

Contributed by Ken Webster of Sinful Audio

Let’s be honest. For most haunts and escape rooms, the exhilaration of introducing new props, puzzles, animatronics and lighting effects has traditionally far outweighed the excitement of implementing new sound effects and audio reinforcement. It’s a well-established pattern that also includes film and stage productions. The reasons, which we won’t go into here, are various and often based on budget and what is perceived as the greatest value or “wow” factor in a production.

So as I’m flying to Alaska to capture field audio and wild sound (makes us audio people sound like exciting individuals doesn’t it?) I have the opportunity to write to you and reveal a few aspects of audio, as well as some key insights into the human senses, that I hope has the effect of invigorating excitement for sound design and its role within your attraction.

Scary Growl

Making Magic Happen

Most everyone who has seen a magic show knows, it’s all about illusion. The sleight of hand, the deception, the smoke and mirrors that ultimately lead us to believe that what we are seeing is indeed magic and the magician is imbued with gifts of the supernatural. The real trick here is to draw you in, to keep your focus, and to leave you guessing how it was done. Ultimately, magic becomes an escape from reality and a chance to indulge and stimulate our senses beyond our every day.

You, the haunt or escape room owner, designer, enthusiast know this first hand. You are constantly thinking of new and creative ways to transport your customers to a world of make believe. You set out to deceive them, to distract them from reality. Your goal is to invoke feelings of excitement, fear and envelope them in mystery; ultimately to resolution and a feeling of accomplishment. You design your props to appear as real as possible and your theme to visually stimulate and enforce what you wish your customers to believe is real.

Sound as a Piece of the Magical Puzzle

A lot of people smarter than me (often referred to as cognitive psychologists, physicists, audiologists, anyone over the age of 5, and so on) have spent their lives investigating the impact of sound on our environment and how it affects us both physically and mentally. I like to break it down by thinking of a jigsaw puzzle.

The Butcher

When putting a puzzle together, you are engaging and exercising your brain, stimulating short and long term memory. The key to success is to be able to vividly imagine the picture you are trying to put together, while keeping track of minute detail as you select pieces that have no real context until they are placed together and made part of the whole image. Now think of the entire puzzle as your brain attempting to piece together all it can about the world. As we know, it takes multiple senses to engage us and help us understand the world around us. Sight, Sound, Taste and Touch all combine to give us a perception of what is around us at any given time AND to help us remember key details as we interact with them in life. Like a puzzle, each piece (or sense) contributes to the whole image. Without the ability to sense our surroundings, we are limited to how we complete the puzzle or, engage and retain memory of the vast world around us.

Putting The Puzzle Together

Now let’s apply this concept directly to our haunt and escape room endeavors. There are two primary things we are trying to do when we design and build our attraction.

1. Provoke emotional responses
2. Stimulate short and long term memory

Saw Room

It is obvious that as a haunt owner, you are doing everything you can to get an emotional response from your audience. The primary responses, of course, are fear and excitement. The brain is an easily manipulated thing, and through the use of life-like props and pneumatics, actors, sets and room design, you can create a believable theme that takes a person from the “real” world and immerses them in one of your own creation. Having something jump out at you around that corner, or an image of impending doom will frighten your guests as well as increase their adrenaline which generates the fight or flight response (hopefully more flight than fight here.). But to really enhance the reaction and the realism, it is necessary to stimulate all the senses possible. The two most common ways are through sight and sound. We will focus on touch here in a bit, but of the senses, the two I mentioned are the most easily designed and implemented.

Invoking fear

Sight and Sound go hand in hand and are often the most crucial to a cognitive response and long term memory. Sound has an added benefit of being Omni-directional, meaning, the sound you hear can be coming from in front of you, behind, above or below. Basically from any direction possible. And that, I must say, is probably the most manipulative sense of all. You may not be able to see that “thing” lurking above you, but you certainly can hear its raspy breathing. I have to imagine that before we had electricity or the control of fire, our ability to hear kept us alive as early humans crawling around in the dark. Interesting… not much electricity or light in those haunted houses now are there?

My point? With our ability to use sound directionally, omni-directionally, in surround sound and to pan or move the sound however we wish, we have one of the most versatile ways of invoking emotional response in our customers. We can deceive, distract and enhance our props and give life and atmosphere to a room. We can fit the pieces together and make an image more lifelike and complete the puzzle by combining both sight and sound. But wait…. It gets better.

By combining just those two senses, we have effectively increased the minds awareness, belief and memory of the experience. Why is this important? Well, we know that we are more capable of scaring the hell out of our guests at a haunt by leveraging what they see and hear. Now we have solidified the experience in their minds and embedded it in their memory. And a customer that remembers an experience is going to tell others. And they are likely to come back again. And again. Sounds good right?

We Have Feelings Too

Ok, if you are still with me, let’s take this a step further. Remember how I said that the more senses you can engage, like a puzzle, the more likely a customer will react and remember the moment? We know that using sound effectively will definitely do the job, but what about another sense such as touch or feeling?

It Cries

Unless you are running a haunt or escape room that has an incredible amount of liability insurance and security, your actors are probably not going to be touching the patrons nor be willing to be touched themselves. Customers may casually touch a prop or object as they move through a haunt, or manipulate objects as they solve a puzzle in an escape room, but this isn’t the same as actively engaging and touching them. So is it possible? Let’s take the fact that the largest organ the human body has is its skin, with millions of pressure sensing nerve endings waiting to be stimulated (easy now, this is science). How can we take advantage of this? If sight and sound can induce our intended response and create lasting memories, just imagine if we added touch and feeling!

How can you stimulate all these senses at once?

Transducer for Haunt Audio Effects

So imagine if you will your haunt with a room that has lighting. A flash of light, followed by the roll of thunder to engage sight and sound. Now what about that feeling? For anyone who has been caught in a thunderstorm, you know first-hand that the ground will shake when in close proximity to a lighting strike. How did you feel? Exhilarated? Scared? All of the above? Well that’s three senses that just made you feel that way. And there is no reason we can’t simulate this in our haunt or escape room. The most effective way is to use what is called a transducer. A transducer is effectively a piston within a casing that is driven by lower frequencies and creates a strong vibrating action. These are often placed in specialized movie theatres, home theatres and used for flight simulations and other situations that lend themselves to an immersive experience.

Now imagine that same room, but now you have connected a couple of these transducers to a floor, desk or wall. The lighting strikes, the thunder rolls and your customers are shaking not just from the vibration of the floor they are standing on, but from absolute fear! As an aside, you take the one thing that keeps us grounded and feeling safe… ummmm… the GROUND and you start shaking it? You may need to hire someone with a mop to clean up every now and then. The same goes for an Escape Room. You’re not necessarily trying to induce fear here, but you are certainly wanting guests to respond to the success of solving a puzzle or opening a hidden passage or secret compartment. The moving of stone, perhaps, and simulating that with sound and vibration. Certainly an added effect that will get your customers talking and returning with their friends and families!

Now of course I really didn’t “touch” on the sense of smell or taste. There are a number of products out there that will induce smell, if that is your thing, especially through the use of fog. Again, one more sense that will certainly leave a lasting impression! (good or bad). As for taste; not even going to go there. I’ll leave that one up to you!

Sounding Off

But as I summarize what we talked about, I wanted to interject another often overlooked aspect of keying in on the human senses. Not everyone has the benefit of being able to utilize all of their senses. And I think this is something that needs to be considered when we design our haunts and escape rooms. Our friends or family members who may not be able to see or hear can often find that their options are limited in the world of entertainment. We have come a long way, but I think for the haunted attraction and escape room community, it gives us an opportunity to think and design differently. Sound and Touch become extremely important to someone who can’t see. Sight and Touch to someone who can’t hear. Incorporating these thoughts into design decisions benefits not only customers who may have impairments, but creates an exceptional experience for everyone. And I think that’s what we are all about when it comes to entertaining, engaging and making sure our customers have a fantastic time!

So as we put the puzzle together for our attraction, and think of all the innovative ways we can make magic happen, we now have a lot more in our toolbox to work with and consider. It’s truly a great time to be a haunt or escape room owner with all the innovative and technical ways we have at our disposal to make our themes come to life. And if we continue to tap into the primal complexities and opportunities of the human mind and senses in concert with all these innovations, we will surely succeed in puzzling, terrifying and exciting our customers each and every year.

Creature Bellows