Long Tail Search: RIP?
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.
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Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks?
Posted by Julietta February 25, 2010
Categories: Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Travel Marketing | No Comments
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!)
Comparing SEO to Sandwiches
Google’s New Sitelinks

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?
Travel, Cat Litter and Infidelity
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.
UK/USA – LeadGenerators Can Do It All
SEO:There’s An App For That
Posted by emily.collins February 22, 2010
Categories: Search Engine Optimization, Travel Marketing | No Comments
The Lengths People Go For A Link….
Is Google Getting into Bed with the Social Graph?
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.
