Ten Hot Tips for Successful Online Travel Marketing - Part 1

February 11, 2008
by Latitude

Matt Brocklehurst and I organised a poll in-house among all Latitude search specialists to list the ten hottest tips for online travel marketing, ahead of a presentation that Matt did at the Travel Technology Show last week. Today I’ll reveal the 5 first tips travel marketers can’t afford to ignore.

These initial tips are about fine-tuning your search engine marketing, an indispensable step if you are to survive and prosper in the online travel jungle. And it is a busy jungle! In Q1 2007, 2 out of 3 of the UK online population used search engines for travel information, according to research by comScore, and travel-related searches continue to grow exponentially. The first five tips:

1. Opt for price/offer-led copies for your pay-per-click adverts. Travel customers are often after value-for-money deals, the destination / activity alone is not enough to convert them in this competitive environment.

2. Adapt your PPC keyword bidding strategy to what you can afford. Smaller travel specialists don’t generally have the budget to compete with bigger players on generic keywords (e.g. “Holidays”, “Spain”). They should focus on what constitutes their strength - their specialism (a very specific location, a certain age market, or a particular activity, e.g. “golfing in the Algarve”) - and bid on niche keywords that will show their expertise and attract a more qualified audience.

3. Make your landing pages as relevant as possible. People searching for holiday in Palma (Majorca) want to go through to a Palma Majorca page once they’ve clicked through, not your homepage, a Spain page, or even a Majorca page. They are more likely to bounce straight off if you don’t make the landing page as close to the query as possible. If the user lands on a page with a search form to fill in, ensure that as many boxes as possible auto-populate. For example “Spain” and “Palma” already appearing in the relevant country and destination boxes.

4. Make sure you realise the power of the brand name. Brand terms are traditionally the best converters for any campaign in any sector, but the chances are that when the user types your brand name on search engines your website will show along websites displaying comments about your offering, such as review site TripAdvisor. As many people only tend to leave a comment if they have a complaint, getting friendly websites to rank at the top in order to relegate negative comments to the second and third pages is essential. One way is to search-optimise micro-sites bearing your brand name, or the websites of sister companies, or even affiliates sites, to boost their rankings.

5. Get on the map. Don’t forget to include Local Search (e.g. Google Map) in your PPC and SEO strategy. Easy and free to do, appearing on the local map that often shows among the search results can have a really strong impact. All you have to do is register with the search engines and you hotel / restaurant / resort will pop up on the map!

To learn about the 5 other hot tips that will get your travel marketing flying, just click here (here’s a teaser: it includes social media, eBay and tracking…).