Tryon Resort and International Equestrian Center Open and Expanding in Polk County, WNC
UPDATE: The Tryon Resort and Equestrian Center is now open, with exhibitions and showcases beginning in April. We’ve attached the 2015 Spring Schedule for your convenience. If you’ve visited the resort or live in the area, we’d love to hear what you think about it in the comments below!
Tryon Resort and International Equestrian Center, located in Polk County, Western North Carolina, is looking to expand with plans to create an equestrian paradise, complete with a Salamander Hotels & Resorts 150-room hotel, as well as extensive equestrian facilities. The scheduled date of completion is set for 2017.
With phase one of construction nearing an end, the center currently boasts five horse rings, five hundred permanent stalls, four grass arenas, and miles of bridle paths for working horses or for trail riding.
The center has been holding regular events, shows, and hosting tournaments and games since July 2014. Coming up October 5, the official dedication of the Tryon Resort is scheduled to include family friendly activities and a Grand Prix competition where the winner will walk away with $100,000.
However, the sprawling equestrian paradise is far from complete. Expansion plans include the addition of two all-weather horse rings, a 6,000 seat outdoor stadium with floodlights, covered arenas, elevated viewing decks, and five hundred additional permanent stables, among other features.
Mark Bellisimo, managing partner of Tryon Equestrian Partners, told reporters in June that since breaking ground in January 2014, the resort has already brought more than 500 jobs to Polk County, which boasts a 4% unemployment rate.
“It’s rare in your life that you get an opportunity to truly change a community…Our vision is to create one of the most significant equestrian lifestyle destinations in the world, while maintaining the rural character in the area [and] the historical and traditional side of this community,” Bellisimo said.
Partnering with Salamander Resort & Hotels is expected to bring even more construction and management jobs to the area. Nearby towns include Tryon, NC, Landrum, SC, Columbus, NC, and Rutherfordton, NC, which should also see economic boosts thanks to the resort’s presence in the Blue Ridge community. The Tryon Resort is just located about thirty minutes from both of the area’s regional airports in Asheville, NC and Greenville, SC, as well as just over an hour from Charlotte Douglas International Airport.
Completion of the hotel is slated for Summer 2016. Plans for the sprawling, 150-room building include spa facilities, a tennis center, basketball court, gym, indoor and outdoor heated pools, in-house restaurant and bar, as well as banquet rooms, ballroom space, and event spaces with panoramic views of the equestrian center.
Salamander Hotels is also overseeing the construction of a luxury home development on the 1,400 acre property, in addition to the completion of an Arnold Palmer designed golf course.
Salamander architects will design and create luxury cabins available for purchase or for short and long-term rental through the resort. The three bed, three bathroom cabins of the Log Cabin Village will come completely furnished with a king size bed, two two full beds, a daybed, a queen sleeper sofa, multiple flat panel TVs, Wi-Fi access, and a washer and dryer. Additional multi-story, multi-bedroom luxury rental properties will be located minutes from the equestrian center in a gated community, where lots are also available for purchase.
Log Cabin Village Home Model
Photo Credit
Luxury Home Gated Community Model
Photo Credit
Development for the Tryon RV Park is also underway and is scheduled to cater to all motorhome needs. The grounds will include hook ups for water, sewer, electric and cable TV, 30/50 amp service, Wi-Fi access, a reception cabin with private bathrooms and shower facilities, grills and
picnic tables. The RV Park is pet friendly.
The Arnold Palmer designed course, which previously broke ground under the White Oak Developer group in 2007 but was never finished, is scheduled to feature a par-72 golf course designed around its namesake, White Oak Creek, which comes into play on 15 of the 18 holes, according to original development plans. No further information on the development of the course has been released to this date.
On Tryon Resort’s Social Media Presence and SEO Report Card
Early digital success of the Tryon Resort is undeniable, which is definitely due in part to the great marketing and PR team hired to do the job. As a way to network within the community, the resort has established several interactive social media outlets that are updated frequently with event information, pictures, and news. Utilizing Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Google+, the resort has garnered an impressive following, considering operation began only four months ago.
By communicating with visitors and potential customers via social media, the resort is setting itself up nicely for a loyal following and a space with which to expand their brand. Interacting and posting regularly to each outlet is key, which Tryon Resorts has managed to do so far. Regular updates across the board contribute to a knowledgeable, engaged following, and results in relatively low- to no-cost advertising for the brand, thanks to the socio-technological world that we live in today.
Tryon International Equestrian Center also boasts an impressive website, with widgets linking back to their social media pages. Though I’ve yet to find a blog, a way to move forward and advance their web presence even further would be to hire a content writer who would update an equestrian blog with new articles (500-1000 words) no less than three times a week. Though the posts wouldn’t necessarily have to do with the operation of the Tryon Equestrian Center exclusively, a mix between general equine-interest posts and specific brand related posts (Tryon Resort events, news updates) would be the best way to create a strong web presence.
As we’ve talked about before, quality, frequent content is king! And though Tryon Resorts is currently ranked #1 for their own brand name keywords (“Tryon Resort” “Tryon Equestrian Center”), it is not ranked for “Tryon horses,” “WNC horse riding,” “equestrian center WNC,” or “vacation in Tryon.” Focusing efforts on an equestrian blog will naturally build these key words into articles written by an SEO-knowledgeable content writer, which will help rank the site higher thanks to a broader range of keywords, eventually bring in more web traffic, and hopefully by attracting more customers, will translate into revenue.
Another way to improve Tryon Resort’s rank in terms of SEO would be to create a deeper sitemap, meaning transforming PDF-linked pages like this one into interactive and Google-bot crawlable webpages. Since the Google-bot is unable to read PDF pages, the content on these uncrawlable/unindexed pages is relatively useless. If the bot can’t index the content, this information is virtually invisible on the internet. Unless a user clicks on Tryon Resort’s homepage, where a categories page “Show Info” is found, organically searching these keywords won’t produce the PDF’d information for the user. Seeing as Tryon Resorts prides itself as a center for hosting grand prix, tournaments, and show cases, “Tryon Equestrian Center Show Info” should definitely, definitely be organically searchable.
Adding more depth to categories pages via content is another way to improve rank, as well as cleaning up pages that pop up with our good-old friend, “404 Error.”
An “About Us” page is an easy way to add lots of content, lots of resources, and lots of information about a website. It is consistently one of the most visited pages on a website, especially for first time visitors. Though Tryon Resort’s has a good start, a few things could be done to make their “About Us” better. The page offers a lot of information about Tryon’s deep history with horses, but does little to talk about what the Tryon Equestrian Center actually is. Including the history is great, don’t get me wrong (the more content the better), but adding even more info specifically about their brand and services would be the way to go. Also adding internal links on the “About Us” page is a great way to direct users to other parts of your website and increase the time on site.
404 Errors are going to happen. I had to search a while before I came across one for this website (congratulations, Tryon International Equestrian Center!). 404’s happen when a link has been moved or is broken, and so fixing these is a good way to increase user experience. Though it isn’t directly detrimental to SEO ranking, bounce-rate will be much higher if user’s continually encounter these errors. Also, the content intended for these pages isn’t going to be indexed or found by Google, and we can’t have that!
Overall, I give Tryon Resort’s website a B+. The user experience is great, but adding a little more content by way of a blog or beefing up the landing pages, would help the brand rank higher (thanks to keywords/Google’s assessment of how “valuable” your information be), and thereby bring in more web traffic. I give Tryon Resort’s social media presence an A-. Publishing more of their very high quality video content via YouTube would be great, especially considering YouTube and Google are very close friends. Making sure to provide information packed descriptions or captions on these types of posts is imperative. On other outlets, such as Instagram and Twitter, Tryon Resorts is doing just fine.