People search, nothing shows up
Anyone typing "what to see in Seminara" or "Costa Viola beaches" found generic pages written by people who had never set foot in Calabria. The place was there, the story of it online was not.
A travel portal for 18 towns.
Ci vediamo in Calabria is the digital shop window of the Costa Viola and the Piana di Gioia Tauro: business listings, events, holiday homes and booking requests that land straight with the people who work there. I came up with it, designed it and built it from scratch, and I keep growing it.
The problem
An area nobody could find
The businesses stay invisible
Restaurants, beach clubs and holiday homes relied on a social page and word of mouth. No indexed listing, no way to be found by someone planning a holiday three months ahead.
Eighteen towns, no critical mass
On its own, each town is far too small to count on Google. Put together, the Piana and the Costa Viola are an area with real demand and nobody covering it.
The answer
One portal, eighteen towns
Instead of eighteen websites each starting from zero authority, a single portal where every town that joins makes all the others stronger.
1
Real listings for real businesses
Restaurants, beach clubs, experiences and holiday homes each get their own page, with photos, a map and structured data. Every listing is a page Google can index, not a line in a directory.
2
Nine languages, properly translated
Italian, English, German, Spanish, French, Hungarian, Polish, Dutch and Swedish. Content that is translated and indexed with hreflang, not a widget that translates on the fly and that Google ignores.
3
Enquiries go to them
Whoever finds a business writes to the business, not to a middleman who then takes a cut. The portal brings the contact, the relationship stays with the owner.
Businesses→ Events→ Holiday homes→ Itineraries→ Town guides
Under the hood
The part you cannot see is the part that works
A travel portal lives or dies on technical SEO. It is where the difference between a site built properly and one built in a hurry gets measured in visits.
Prerendered for the crawlers
The application is React, but every page is generated as complete HTML at build time: Google reads the content without having to run JavaScript, and it reads it straight away.
React · Vite · prerender
Structured data everywhere
Every content type emits its own JSON‑LD: businesses, events, accommodation, routes, FAQs. That is what puts opening hours, prices and stars straight into the search results.
schema.org · rich results
Nine languages under control
Per‑language routes, consistent hreflang, a multilingual sitemap and redirects generated from a single map. Languages are not added by hand: they are declared once and everything else falls into line.
i18n · hreflang · sitemap
Indexing, pushed
The sitemap is regenerated on every publish and the search engines are notified directly when new content goes out, instead of waiting for them to come and check.
IndexNow · Search Console
Where we are
Google has started to understand the area
The portal is young, and the organic growth of an editorial site is measured in months, not weeks. The signal that counts, for now, is which kind of searches it has started to intercept: they are local queries, the ones where the portal gets recognised as the source on the ground.
lungomare di Gioia Tauro/ cala Janculla/ cosa vedere a Seminara/ Scilla mitologia/ Piana di Gioia Tauro/ Tonnara di Palmi/ Favazzina
That is the right direction: first they recognise you as the one who tells the story of the place, then come the searches from people who need to book it. The editorial pages pull the commercial ones, not the other way round.
What this means for you
The same setup, on your scale
If you run a business
A site that brings you enquiries directly, with no commission to a foreign portal and no dependence on a social profile you do not control. Bookings, payments and availability are the part I build most often: I have done it for sports clubs, beach clubs and places to stay.
Bookings · Payments · Apps
If you represent a public body
The platform is already multi‑town: a new area does not need a new portal, it joins the one that exists and inherits its authority. It costs less than a dedicated site and, unlike a dedicated site, it does not start from zero on Google.
Multi‑town · 9 languages · Support