Whilst running online marketing campaigns for our clients in the travel sector over the last couple of years, I’ve noticed that long tail keyphrases are becoming much less important sources of both traffic and conversions than they used to be.  What once used to be an essential part of our initial keyword research is now often not researched at all or the long tail Ad Groups are allowed to run for a few months before being unceremoniously dumped for simply not converting. At the same time, we have been bidding on our client’s Brand name (and other competitors’ brand names) and found this to be a much more effective means of generating conversions.

Read more about >>> Long Tail Search: RIP?

Just when you think you’ve mastered the basic principles of an SEO campaign and online marketing in general, something comes along that seemingly turns the game on its head (thanks Google caffeine!) and sends you on a tyre-screeching ride back to the proverbial drawing board! Basically, if you’re going to commit to a career in online marketing (especially SEO) you also need to commit to the idea that you’ll NEVER know it all, you can’t win ALL your battles ALL of the time, and you’ll never, ever outsmart Google! Complacency can be dangerous in any industry, but when it comes to tackling online marketing solutions I’ve begun to realise that you ignore changing trends and new technologies at your peril. I am fortunate to work in an office where the Managing Director is not only an SEO/Online Marketing whiz himself, but he believes in educating other people on the importance of online marketing solutions for their businesses. As many of our clients are in the travel industry, he has a long affiliation with bodies such as ITT (Institute of Travel & Tourism), AITO (Assoc. of Independent Tour Operators), and ABTOF (Assoc. British Tour Operators to France), founded TheTravelTank (a think tank for strategic marketing in travel) and other travel associations. It means we, here at the office, get to go to all sorts of seminars and sit back, relax and watch our boss hard at work! Well, it looks like April is shaping up to be a busy month for Frank! He has been asked by the ITT to join forces and conduct a series of specialist one-day seminars around the country titled ‘Online Marketing for the Travel Industry’. I’ve been to one of Frank’s seminars on this before and it’s a great way to demystify the minefield of online marketing solutions and adapt them to your own business. The seminars basically explain in simple terms the, sometimes confusing, principles of online marketing, keyword research and selection, PPC, SEO campaigns, site conversion strategies, social media programs and email marketing campaigns. I found that, once I had sat through a day of all this stuff, it really was a case of ‘monkey see monkey do’, and so much fell into place. It is easy to get baffled and slightly overwhelmed by the whole world of online marketing solutions and when I first became involved I remember feeling like I was sitting in the middle of a big spider’s web trying to navigate my way out! So much is affected by so much else and you really need to be on your toes because, one thing you can take as read, your most successful competitors are! So, whether you’re just breaking into online marketing, (even if you’re only interested in your own little niche of the bigger picture), or if you’re an old dog who just wants to learn a few new tricks, have a think about attending one of Frank’s ITT seminars. He’ll be the guy in the big white hat! (With apologies for the SEO in-joke!)

As I browsed the Internet the other day, something interesting caught my eye.  My first thought on the matter was that I quite fancied a tuna sandwich for lunch.  My second thought was, that this was a very strange context in which to be discussing tuna sandwiches.  Who would have thought you could write an article about online marketing solutions entitled ‘Tuna Salad SEO?’ This article by James Burns discusses the ways in which those of us working in Search Engine Optimisation need not only to keep up which the changing trends of SEO, but also with the constantly changing cultural, regional and generational trends.  Using an example of the tuna (salad) sandwich, he highlights the fact that there are many guises in which to dress something.  Or in our case, many different key phrases that can relate to the same thing. This is the first time I’ve seen online marketing solutions compared to food, but in this case it is certainly an analogy that works.

As part of my PPC work for our clients I’ve been researching new online marketing solutions. Over the last few months Google has introduced some new features into its Adwords Advertising platform. I’ve begun experimenting with one of these features, Sitelinks, on some of our clients and so far have received some positive results. Google Sitelinks allows PPC Ads in position 1 to include up to 4 additional links to different parts of your site underneath your main advert (in the set up you can submit 10 links that can be rotated, although the ones in the top 4 do tend to be shown more). This not only means you can show off your best products or pages but you also have 4 more lines of Ad copy (something that can be very useful when trying to squeeze your whole message into under 100 characters!) If you look at the example below for Hoseasons Holidays you can see that they have taken full advantage of their Sitelinks and have 4 lines of targeted and compelling Ad Copy to some of their key products. To view this advert I searched for “hoseasons” in Google, rather than say holiday cottages or UK holidays. This is one of the limitations of Google Sitelinks, as to get your 4 additional links your Advert needs to be at position 1 and the easiest way to get to the top of Google in PPC is to bid on your brand name.

 

I’ve run Google Sitelinks on 2 of our clients for around a fortnight. As you would expect Click Through Rates have increased (for one client by over 10% in 2 weeks), whilst conversions for both clients have also increased during the same period. Although it’s too soon to say whether these improvements are down to Sitelinks or other campaign changes, it’s hard to imagine that this feature wouldn’t have a positive effect on your campaigns results. And as Sitelinks new (your competition might not be using them yet), free and take only a few minutes to activate why not get 4 free adverts from Google?

Whilst carrying out our January monthly reports, we spotted something strange in assessing the number of visitors to our clients’ websites. All of our travel clients, without exception, had doubled the number of visitors to their website from last month. When discussing the anomaly in our reporting meeting, at the end of the month, we all had different reasons for what we believed the cause to be. Someone mentioned that it could be a result of the new Google Caffeine update, while another person pondered whether it could be down to our HubPages account suddenly producing follow links.       I had a different theory; December’s traditionally been a slow month for the travel industry, with Christmas taking up most people’s surplus cash and, therefore, most travel agents report on a decline in sales during this period. However, whilst this theory answered the question on why the December visitor numbers were significantly lower, it didn’t really explain why the visitor numbers in January were so high - they’d certainly been much higher than anything that we’d reported on for a while at our travel marketing agency.    I decided to carry out some research and see if there was any reason why more people had visited travel websites in January. Looking back over the past month, one thing that struck me as slightly out of the ordinary was the level of snow. People up and down the country were unable to reach their place of employment because of this snow and this resulted in a large number of people working from home, or simply taking days off work. It even affected a few of the staff here at our travel marketing agency, who were unable to come in due to the severe delays in public transport.  I wondered whether the bout of cold weather could have affected the travel industry. With more people away from their desks and Christmas finally over and done with, it certainly seemed as good a time as any to start researching that foreign holiday. In fact, ABTA, the governing body of British Travel Agents, welcomed the cold weather with open arms, telling readers of Travel Weekly that the reason the British are such a nation of travellers is because of the appalling weather in our own country. So, was it last month’s snowfall that increased the number of visitors to our client’s websites? Trevor Davis from Co-Operative Travel certainly seems to think so. During the snow days in January his company saw a 20% rise in online sales, and the seven days following the big freeze were the company’s most successful yet. So it seems that whilst the snow was bad for businesses, it was nothing but good news for those in travel industry. Although it also seems that the tourism sector wasn’t alone in benefiting from snap of cold weather. Sales of cat litter went up by 55%, as consumers struggled to de-ice their own driveways and extra-marital dating site, Illicit Encounters, saw a huge surge in memberships from some of Britain’s worst hit areas.

At LeadGenerators, we’ve spent many years building up reserves of specialist knowledge in online marketing solutions for the Travel Industry.  If we may say so ourselves, this knowledge has been the foundation for some fantastic results.  However, as times change, we find ourselves changing with them and branching out into pastures new.  After all, if we can do it for some of the largest players in the Travel Industry, we can do it for everyone else. As 2010 began, we thought it was time to take stock of our rankings situation and see just how our online marketing solutions were doing for our clients.  Of the 25 most crucial phrases we were fighting for on behalf of travel clients at the time, a grand total of 68% were in the top two positions in Google’s ranking.  Furthermore, 88% were in the top three, and in fact only one key phrase for which we were fighting lay outside of the top five (sitting comfortably at number 6). Feeling pretty pleased with ourselves as you can imagine, we decided to double check the results of the small number of non-travel clients we serve, and were thrilled to find that they were enjoying similar successes.  A whopping 75% of our important key phrases for non-travel clients could be found in Google’s top 3, with again, only one key phrase not featuring in the top 5. As you can imagine, this was a fantastic way to welcome the New Year, and 2010 also saw us starting work in a whole new area. As we’ve already mentioned, we can do it for Travel, and we can do it for other industries too.  Now, it was time to see if we could make our online marketing solutions work in an American market.  Our acquisition of an American client in the medical sector has opened a whole collection of doors to us, and so far we’re thoroughly enjoying the experience. Our writing team faced the challenge of ditching all the regular rules, and writing using American spellings and colloquialisms.  For example, the toilet became the washroom, colours became colors, pavements became sidewalks and trousers became pants.  It didn’t take long to alter the way we write both the site and the viral copy, however there was a bigger challenge to come; how to get around Google’s normally ever so useful local search in order to report our successes? Fortunately, this problem could be solved with a simple proxy that provided us with an American IP address – just like that, we had instant access to American Google and ranking results straight from the USA.  It’s only the end of February but through a combination of SEO, PPC and Social Media strategies we’ve already propelled one key phrase into Position 1 and Position 2 in Google, another in the Top Ten, and two others are slowly but surely climbing their way up, currently sitting comfortably well within the top thirty. So it looks as though our online marketing solutions can travel across the waters just as well as we can.  At LeadGenerators we’re constantly trying to expand our knowledge, and so far we’ve learnt a hell of a lot about online marketing for the American market – and winning!

I’ve recently acquired a new iPhone and was astonished to see so many applications relating to SEO and online marketing. The prices range from free to £14.99 and they all differ in what they offer iPhone users. Mani Karthik, from Daily Bloggr, has written a blog post on what he considers to be the top five iPhone applications. PokeSEO was the only one on his list that really stood out for me, but using my phone I was able to find some applications that I considered to be more relevant to the type of work that we carry out in our travel marketing agency. PokeSEO PokeSEO allows you to check SEO statistics from your iPhone. This is one of just a few applications that have the ability to check the page-rank of a website on the move. A handy backlink checker also reports on backlinks from four of the world’s most important search engines, including Google. This is the perfect tool to quickly check up on your online optimization campaigns and therefore would be ideal to use en-route to a client meeting. ProSEO         ProSEO is an SEO content analyzer. In order to get it working simply browse to the page that you wish to analyze and press the analyze button. The application then prepares 14 different analyses of the source code. This includes a look at the title tag, the meta-tags and the keyphrase repetition on a website. Whilst, at our travel marketing agency, we provide a more in-depth site analysis to determine ways in which our client’s websites could be improved, this application would be useful in determining whether or not a website needed SEO or how competitive their competition’s website was in terms of SEO. SEO It! SEO It is a comprehensive application that includes elements of both ProSEO and PokeSEO. It quickly allows you to ascertain which keywords a website has been optimised for and so works better with websites that have been optimised. Unlike both ProSEO and PokeSEO it also provides analyses on alt tags and inbound links. In fact, the application covers everything that PokeSEO offers with the exception of the Google page-rank checker. There are hundreds more SEO applications available through the Apple AppStore and these are available for a range of different languages and user capabilities. We haven’t had time to try them all out at our travel marketing agency, so any further recommendations would be very well received.

Catholics Against Kerry, Spray Tan Booth and Perfect Parenting are just some of the more obscure websites that our travel articles end up on. However, it isn’t just the obscure sites that provide amusement during our monthly reporting sessions, but also the lengths that some people will go to, to get a fresh, unique content on their website. A new technique seems to be taking one of our travel articles and using a language translation tool, such as Babelfish, to translate the article from English to German and then back to English again, so that it reads quite differently. However, the end result is often bizarre to say the very least. The original paragraph below is from one of our travel articles on Cuba:   “With its sandy beaches, clear waters and beautiful sunshine, Cuba is not so very different from what many people envisage paradise to look like. But with so much to explore, it’s important to make the most of your Cuba holiday – don’t just stay in Havana but make your way out to the surrounding islands and explore the other resorts to be found in the Cuban archipelago.“    Now let’s see what happens when we translate it into Chinese and then back into English: “Its sand beach, clear Shui He the happy sunlight, Cuba is not that imagines the heaven with any different many people seems an elephant. But by explores, maximum limit uses your Cuban holiday - is important do not can only pause in Havana, but makes your export periphery island and explores other methods which will find in the Cuban archipelago.“ The article not only doesn’t make sense but also brings a random elephant and happy sunlight into the equation. When translated from English into Russian the article takes on a different tone and warns people away from the historical capital of Havana, stating “do not remain in Havana”, whereas the German translation warns travellers not to remain simple in Havana. Sadly the article doesn’t tell visitors what may happen to those who do decide to remain simple, but instead goes on to talk about free water in the country.    As we write articles enriched for specific keywords these translated travel articles are often of very little use to us. One of our clients specialises in holidays to Everest Base Camp and we noticed that when translated from English into Chinese and back again, the word for Mount Everest had a very different meaning. Here’s a passage from the original article: “….They convened at Kala Pattar, the top of which is a good vantage point to look down upon the neighbouring Everest Base Camp (5,360 metres), and a great spot to view Mount Everest (8,848m).“ Now see what happened when it was translated into Chinese and then back again: “They convene in Kala Pattar, above are the good vantage point which looked get down in neighbor bead Mu Langma the basic camp (5,360 meters) and a great spot watch the Egyptian Buddha Luss peak (8,848m).“ Suddenly we are no longer talking about holidays in Everest Base Camp but talking about a mythical peak in Egypt, known as the Buddha Luss, which can be seen from the basic camp Mu Langma, which again can be seen from a neighbour’s bead. However, as much as we poke fun of some of the more blatant attempts at changing our article content online, we can’t really complain as at least we are still gaining valuable links from these articles, although a link about an Egyptian mountain can’t be that useful when linking to an article on Mount Everest!  But one wayward link is a lot less trouble than some larger corporations have had, after falling foul to rogue language translators online. When KFC translated their slogan “finger-lickin’ good” into Chinese it read “eat your fingers off”. American company, Hunt-Wesson introduced its Big John products in French Canada as Gros Jos before discovering that the phrase, in slang, means “big breasts”. Strangely, the name did not have a noticeable effect on sales In Italy, a campaign for Schweppes Tonic Water translated the name into Schweppes Toilet Water. Panasonic developed a complete Japanese Web browser, and to make the system user-friendly, licensed the cartoon character Woody Woodpecker as the “Internet guide.” They planned to create a world version of the product. However, the day before the ads were to be released, Panasonic decided to delay the product launch indefinitely. The reason: an American staff member at the internal product launch explained to the stunned and embarrassed Japanese what the ad’s slogan, “Touch Woody - The Internet Pecker”, might mean to English speakers. As we are always on the look out for online marketing solutions, we know that some people will go to any lengths to get fresh online content on their websites; but when a Cuba blog starts telling its readers to avoid Havana and a Mount Everest website talks more of mythical peaks in Egypt than the world’s largest mountain, then it’s time to exercise more in terms of common-sense than poorly translated nonsense.

Looking back at the history of search, we can see a very clear evolutionary path where online marketing solutions are concerned. As Rand Fishkin points out in this video, SEO strategies have evolved from focusing purely on a link graph, to a point where search and social media come together to make the social graph just as important. Interestingly, so far it seems that Google is actively encouraging this idea, with projects such as Wikisearch, Real-time Twitter, and more recently Google Buzz all contributing to the rise of the social graph.

 

Take a look at this video from Whiteboard Fridays, explaining both the evolution and the future of search, and see how your online marketing solutions should also evolve to concentrate on a combination of link and social graphs.

As a travel marketing agency, we’re constantly having conservations about keyword research. It’s crucial that we know just what people are typing into search engines, so that we can match the marketing objectives of our clients to the key phrases that are most appropriate to them.  But what kind of a travel marketing agency would we be, if we were only interested in keyword research?  Another of our biggest preoccupations is of course the phenomenon that is Social Media.  With this in mind, Google’s revelations regarding the most searched for words of 2009 have made us think that perhaps it’s not just the key phrases that relate to our clients that we should be researching… Have a look here to see the most searched words of 2009 -

http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/press/zeitgeist2009/index.html Google Zeitgeist’s research shows that Facebook has overtaken Twitter (which lies in 4th place) to become the second fastest rising search term used in 2009, though even the enormously popular social networking site could not topple Michael Jackson from first place. Does this mean that Facebook will become more important than Twitter in terms of a travel marketing agency deciding its social media strategies for 2010?  Watch this space.