The first book in the series Marketing Hotels and Tourism is the award-winning WEBSITE. It’s an illustrated guide to the WEBSITE process and marketing strategy. The book starts by evaluating the dramatic changes in hotel and tourism marketing in the digital age. Like everything in the digital age, The Keys to Travel (Chapter 3) are not immune to change. Keywords have been and still are a vital component of marketing.
Chapter 3 provides you with core technology, resources, tools and guides related to keywords for hotels and tourism travel marketing.
Keys to Travel – A How-To Guide
keyword research
Chapter 3: The Keys to Travel is about how to find the correct keywords for your niche market, how to do keyword research and how to optimize your page so that it can get listed in search results. It is on-site (Webpage) specific. Off-site marketing is covered in Book 2: Digital Media Marketing.
This article reviews what has changed in the past few years. Google has made several changes to the way it evaluates sites and content. Keywords are still the main criteria and all strategies of the book are as valid today as they were at the time of publishing.
The search engine changes have all been about understanding the implied meaning of users’ searches and displaying content that is the best match in terms of quality, meaning and comprehensiveness. Search has become more intelligent and now it looks for more that keywords alone. For example you have to show Expertise, Authority and Trust (EAT) or keywords will fail.
Matching Search with Artificial Intelligence
Today, Google rewards sites that display Expertise, Authority and Trust (EAT). It’s not new and all these are inherent in the Book WEBSITE. What is new is the degree to which EAT features and the level of intelligence now used in determining the match.
Google’s Semantic Search is now based on Artificial Intelligence that uses psychology to understand and interpret meaning from users’ searches and from internet content. It extracts meaningful information from the intent of the search and matches that with website content.
Google’s RankBrain, discussed in Book 2: Digital Media, was the first step in Artificial Intelligence-powered SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This has expanded the focus of Search to include keywords with a deeper understanding of meaning, expertise, authority and trust.
All this lends to creating credibility for today’s search. The final test of credibility and match is what travellers do when they are on your site. If they hit the Back button and go back to Search, it will indicate that it’s not a credible match. It does not fit the buyers’ intent.
Connecting Content with Intent
The importance of keywords is vital to today’s search results but many digital marketers fail to connect intent to their content. To do this, we need to understand our market. It is never the case that one single keyword will capture this. Your content should contain a comprehensive set of keywords that helps Search to understand the intent and clarity of your content.
This is why Long Tail Content has become more important today. Long Tail Content is very specific to your target market. Chapter 3 of WEBSITE does refer to this with specific examples.
Say, for example, ‘Family Holidays’ is a very common term. A lot of people may be searching for this term but it’s really not specific to a booking. By comparison, terms like “Adventure Family Holidays in the Caribbean” or “Luxury Family Holidays in the Caribbean” are more precise. Still
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, the wording is a good indication of booking intent.
Understanding Buyer Intent in Travel
A traveller who is ready to book may have already settled on an exact location and also have a few places at which to stay in mind. They will be looking for experiences that fill their needs for comfort, adventure, romance, budget, escape, privacy, safety, community and character. When you know who they are and what they really enjoy, you can craft a message that connects. This is discussed at length in Chapter 10 on Hot Buttons and Messaging.
2 A Website Has Many Functions
For the buyer, it needs to provide messaging that confirms that the offer fits the character. It should have a simple tool to get a quote and booking. Email is not going to get quick quotes and bookings so you need a booking engine. You can use your favorite OTA engine but it is not going to help you market your direct bookings. There are many 3rd-party engines that you can consider. Book 3: Technology will delve into this in detail. For starters, check out Triptease and SiteMinder.
Long before they are ready to book, travellers will start by looking to be inspired. They are not going to search for brand names at this stage and will likely check meta search engines and destination authority sites and directories. WEBSITE suggests that your Blogging (Chapter 7) can help you to reach out with helpful tips and user experiences that are destination-centered. Some websites go even further and offer alternative accommodation and comparisons. Travellers looking for inspiration will visit Social Media sites and see what other travellers recommend. Hotels and tourism destination sites need to sell the destination experience at this stage. The website messaging should be generic and wide enough to send them to pages that extol the destination experience and range of products.
All other travellers are somewhere in between. Social Media is important as it is a place where they share. Here is where reviews take center stage. Be sure to promote your reviews across all Social Media Platforms. Chapter 8: Building and Marketing Reviews will be helpful.
Travel Sales Funnel
Google refers to the phase of the travel customers journey as moments. They count 5 moments: dreaming (1 above), Planning (3), Booking (2), and Post Booking journey- Experiencing and Sharing. All of these are part of the sales funnel which is discussed in book series 2 and 3. The sales funnel is as much about what you do off site (Digital Media Marketing Book 2 and 3) as on Site (Website Optimization Book 1).
It’s not all that new but today’s Voice Search is dominating Search. Over 1 billion voice searches are made monthly – that’s over 33 million voice searches every day. And it’s expected that 50% of all search queries will be by voice by 2020. It saves time, is mobile-friendly and much easier to use than typing in a long question. It’s also more versatile and will handle long complex questions far better that text search. It’s also more forgiving on bad grammar and spelling.
With new tools like Siri, Alexa, Google Assistantor Cortana, the traditional search methods are going to see a slide in their dominance.
To take full advantage of this trend, you can optimise your profiles and website so that Google finds you for voice searches. Check out this video for a better understanding of this at The Deep End. They recommend that you have all your Internet profiles optimised well. They suggest you claim and optimise your Google My Business page to start. All these profiles must be fully synced with your website. The video goes further and talks about getting your site listed in Position Zero. This is an off-site strategy that is featured in Book 2: Digital Media. See more about Position Zero with Google News.
Voice Recognition on Your Website
Voice Recognition and Response will not be limited to Internet Search Engines. The technology exists for you to add voice to your website. It is a bit technical and tricky to implement right now but that will change. To find out more about this, see How to add voice to your website by PAYMILL. Unless you are technically inclined, I don’t suggest you do this now. It will get better in the future.
In the future, websites may have voice search technology to help guests navigate the site. It may help in finding answers to “Frequently Asked Questions”, House Rules, etc. A bit further off, it may answer questions about packages and cost, as well as help with bookings. But that is for the future. It may be featured in Book 3: Technology.
How SEO Changes Affect Website Strategy
Chapter 3 in Book 1: WEBSITE gives you a firm grounding in the Keys to Travel. You will learn about keywords and get reviews and suggestion on tools and resources that will help you plan a keyword research and strategy. The lessons from this article are:
Add semantic words to your mix of keywords
Demonstrate Expertise, Authority and Trust (EAT). Do this by showing your expert knowledge of the destination. People will then consider you an Authority. Add to this with your credentials, awards and notations.
Demonstrate trust by being totally honest. Don’t oversell. Let people know your limitations and expertise. Let guests know what other guests liked and what sort of people were not the best fit. The Crane in Barbados says: “Don’t Come Here to be Seen, Come Here to Disappear.” It captures the spirit and respect of privacy and not being part of a crowd.
Create a Personal Website so that people know who you are – this is helpful in establishing your Authority and Trust. Also use it to show your area of expertise.
Understand your Guest Intent and focus on it with appropriate messaging.
Don’t overdo keyword optimisation – Focus on expert content that is helpful
Optimise your website and profiles for Voice Search.
Stay tuned – Coming soon how snippets and featured snippets and structured markup can help you rank on top of search.
Book Buyers’ Bonus
Book buyers are offered several bonuses that include access to membership, updates and newsworthy items related to technology change and trends in Hotel & Tourism Marketing.
This article is a complementary bonus for book buyers that is now shared in this public blog. See Book Series
The European Union’s GDPR legislation, has had major impact on business as usual in Europe: Many websites have just blocked users as the implication og GDPR could be critical. Instapaper refused to serve even existing users as the consequience of not complying with GDPR was to dire, and compliance too extreme. the latest Copyright Law will kill curation and content marketingand syndication as we know it.
The End of Curation & Syndication in Content Marketing
The new legislation is now targeting Google News and similar aggregator site. It an important part of the web that allows publishers ti share date to their own users. In Spain and Germany Google News shut down and local publisher lost huge traffic.
The new laws now puts the onus on the publisher. Therefore publishers must assure there is no copyright infringement on any content that is shared on their sites. That liability is not limited to big brands and commercial enterprise. Community based services like Wikipedia and open source systems like GitHub will have to study what constitutes ‘copyright’ content and remove it from the site.
How it Might Backfire on Europe
For Europe’s entrepreneurs and founders, the new will have investors asking why should they start a new business there. Start-ups risk large fines if the don’t comply with what is punitive legislation. it will be hard to to raise capital, and deal with Europe’s overbearing red tape. They will most like want to start in a business friendly regime in US and Canada.
Europe’s copyright law will kill curation and content marketing as we know it!
Read this illuminating article on the consequences of Article 11 and 13 in the new copyright legislation.
This will seriously hinder Europe’s ability to compete as a destination for news technology. As Crunchbase says “the risks will simply be too high for even the safest of bets”.
BMW Website Focus On Content is a really interesting example of how Website Blogging and Content Marketing is becoming a key element for major brands.
Reaching New Customers with Special Interests
BMW has done that very well for a very long time. Now it is looking beyond the obvious to broaden its appeal. And it is doing that with broad-range content that will “widen its sales funnel”. The subjects mainly revolve around mobility and lifestyles. They include industry-related content on design, innovation and performance as you would expect but go far beyond the car. Travel, lifestyle and culture are just a few examples of the new content focus.
As BMW’s Global Head of Digital Marketing, Jorg Poggenpohl, says: “we wanted to create relevant and snackable content in helpful and entertaining ways,” which includes video, infographics and other easy-to-use and engaging multimedia.
The result to date is that site visits are up 49% through SEO and the average user is spending over 3 minutes on the site on mobile.
Blogging For Hospitality, Travel and Tourism
The wide content reaching out to a broader interest group is not in typical hotels and tourism marketing. Like it is for BMW, this Wide Range Website Focus on Content is a lesson for Tourism and Hotel Content Marketing. It may be as huge a marketing shift for hotel brands as it was for BMW.
But the rational applies perfectly to what is a major over-site for many tourism marketers. All too often, hotel owners concentrate on their own website. They build a solid digital footprint for their site on content related to their location, facilities, amenities, USP and distinct messaging. The focus is typically oriented to their niche market.
Even destination sites typically restrict their content to news, stories and events in the destination. Barbados does this well with informative content on news, personalities in the news, events, history, heritage and even industry and agriculture. But nothing on the scale, persistence and entertainment multi-media of BMW.
That approach leaves a lot of money on the table. Travel consumers have very variedpersonasand it’s not easy to pin them down to a single avatar. The wide funnel will appeal to interest groups that go beyond your average target market. Take art, for example. Let’s say you have an interest in art and you write about it and place it on your own website. Then you promote it, syndicate it, bookmark it and have other blogs link to it. Soon you may have many more travellers checking out your site and some of them will be your ideal clients.
You may never have had a chance to get to them by the conventional means of advertising and search engine marketing. By hitting on an interest that is real, what you are doing is reaching people based on an interest that transcends price, place and amenities to give them what they want: MORE RELEVANT CONTENT!
Marketing Shifts to Entertain
BMW did not just add a blog to its site and let users find articles. No; that is not what works. People want to be fed content that is of interest to them. The front page of the new content focus website says nothing about the cars. Yes, you can navigate to cars with the menus but the first image you are likely to see is something out of the box. Right now it is a full-page high-definition video of a shoot by Brooklyn Beckham with the Caption: “My Camera is My Travel Companion“. Could that work for your hotel? You bet it can!
But the shift in presentation is to move away from hard sell BOOK NOW and self serving messages. However well disguised the message is today’s travelers have strong attenas and pick up the intent with every message. Content must be encourage real engagement and interaction. Highly produced professional brand promos don’t work as the used to in the digital age. Travelers expect more. Today’s digital media and your social media accounts are more and more in the entertainment business.
A prime example of this is Booking Yeah fun Videos and Cayman Islands Disney like images.
Looking For a New Angle To Write About
Marketers have run out of ways to market hotels, travel, cars, finance services and just about every business and in every industry. It’s all about differentiation and thinking out of the box. Booking.com moved to take a light hearted, whimsical and funny look at the holiday experience with Booking yeah.
Today marketers are using AI, behaviors science and colour theory to make things more personalized. Barbados Tourism Encyclopedia used the Tag line Discover, Dream, Enjoy because travel is a something people dream about and let their imagines take them to places of fancy. More and more advertisers are using creative new ways to excite and entertain.
The Cayman Islands is using Disney like imagination to animate ads that are part of their “Dream in Cayman” campaign. The Cayman Isles Department of Tourism explains “the aim is to move beyond the sea of sameness that characterizes the ad campaigns of many sun, sea and sand destinations.
Creative director for the the Ads, Ron Henderson, says that the ads are whisical and more like a fashion brand which creates a new vogue for the destination. “The ‘Dream in Cayman’ campaign was designed to create a place full of whimsy and charm and mystique that feels less like destination advertising and more like a luxury fashion brand.”
Find Your Blogging/Content Angle
Travel is a very personal experience and people who travel love stories. Their is no limit to the stories you can tell about your your place, your destination, the people and places, history and culture. Just speak to your marketing team and see what they can come up with that could be special to your hotel and be sure you get the message right. See more about messaging in my Books Website and Digital Media.
Website Blogging VS External Blogging
Learn why you need to blog on your website and what to blog about
You need to blog on your own website (internal Blogging) as well as get others to blog about you or guest post on other site (External blogging).
Internal blogging adds content to your website that will increase your sites value. It is helpful to guests and provides current information, reviews, guests experience and local events. Useful local content about your destination, will help your site rank in search. Valuable informative will get listed and drive more travelers to your site. This is exactly what BMW is doing with the content strategy noted here. The other travel examples show how personalities in the news, entertainment events and local awards etc are news that your guest will appreciate.
It does not matter that it may already be on the internet; the point is that it is summaries on your website and easily accessible. As noted above always try to put your onw interpretation and your angle. If it is a local event give direction and show how to get there. It may be an opportunity to show how central you are to everything in the destination and of course it give another reason to consider the destination and your property.
Buy Website Now
External blogging is also vital. This is covered in Digital Media which looks at external blogging under the topic Conteant marketing. You cant get great credit by writing about yourself and that is where external content marketing comes in. Read all about this in Digital Media Chapter 3 Review.
We just added a page to the Chapter 3 on Contact Marketing. The new page provides tactical information on how to optimize content to get featured.
Content must be presented, formatted and organized in a specific way so that it can get indexed, ranked, found and featured. If you do it right you may also get your content published on the news category of search. This will have a major impact on your visibility. It is something every travel marketer should aim to for.
The new page explains exactly how to optimize content to get featured. The 9 most essential criteria are identified and ranked in order of importance. Normally 4 or 5 tactics are all you need and these cannot be be omitted. More can be added if the keyword is very competitive.
Also considered are off-site strategies including bookmarking and link-building. The page links to information on how to tweak your content so that it can get featured in Google news.
Getting your blog featured on Google News makes a difference in many ways. Not the least is that it automatically notches up your Authority and puts the article in an expert and trusted class. This will improve trust and set you apart from others.
Not all posts will get into news however, as both the quality of the post and the author can have an affect on this. Google will not approve rubbish authors who are known for spam or affiliate marketing and that are not going to make the grade. Your article also has to follow basic standards of journalism.
Major Traffic Boost with Google News
Neil Patel says you can get thousands of clicks to your site from Google News. In fact, he say your visits can jump by over 300%.
“Smart bloggers, news publishers, and digital content marketers are already tapping into this huge resource for targeted traffic and better search engine visibility. As an example, Search Engine Watch increased its average monthly visits from the Google News sitemap by 329%.”
Well, we can’t all be like Search Engine Watch and it’s not likely that a small hotel or your average blogging site will see this kind of return. Being in Google News is certainly going to increase your visibility and traffic. Google News drives 6 billion clicks per month to publishers all over the world. That’s a lot of traffic.
How to Get your Blogs on Google News
You best bet is to work with an author who can do the work for you. You don’t have to be an accredited author to get on the news. As Google says, news is “newly received or noteworthy information, especially about recent or important events.”
When you look at Google News, you will see that Google is not totally focused on news-related “current events” content. There is now a level playing field for bloggers and all digital media publishers who have quality content and good insights. Style, substance and good journalism still matter. Honesty and objectivity are essential to making it to the newsstand.
It’s vital that your articles are properly structured with links to other quality sites using anchor texts and meta tags that are descriptive and not promotional. It helps to be an expert and write with an authoritative voice. Good journalists research the subject deeply and do not write for search engine optimization. You will still need to Optimize Your Content for SEO.
You must not however write for the news editors as they will decide if the blog is newsworthy. Editors like information to be in order, by the level of importance. So put your best insights and most interesting points first. It must be original and accurate. Be sure that your sources are impeccable and that you credit all original work.
Use Natural Links & Anchor-text
Linking back to your site from a GNA site must be natural. Keywords inAnchor-Textare often a flag to Google that it is promotional. Many GNA site are using only generic text like: read more, view more, check this, visit here, sitename, site name, sitename.com, www.site.com, this, website, web site, here, this website, click here, BrandName
Promoting Your Blogs and News
You can’t just get in the news and forget it. Like everything else on the Internet, you need to have people looking at it and other sites linking to it.
Blog About Your Featured News
Add an announcement about this to your website blog. Also add it to other sites via Guest Blog and link to it from relevant pages where it will make sense.
As an Example: In the image above, you will see one of our articles on “7 tips on how to plan a smooth vacation“. The image above links to the Google News search page that currently displays the blog. We also linked the actual blog with anchor text that simply says Plan A Smooth Vacation. That gives a valid link that will be tracked by the Google Algorithm and added to its rating.
This is the sort of syndication you need to do to keep your news alive for as long as possible. It will not stay on the news site forever, as news is supposed to be current. However, if it’s a popular article and has good quality links to it, it will get to the top of the list and stay there longer.
Bookmark It
Social Bookmarks are not the highest quality authority links but, done right, they will help. A good strategy is to post an announcement of being featured on your top social sites – LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest and Scoop.it. Do more 3rd party bookmarks to the blogs and guest posts you created above. This will create a good chain link structure and boost the ranking for your featured news content.
Get Your Website Google News Approved
Getting Your Site Ready
If your content isn’t news, it will not get approved. Google is looking for content that might appear in Media sites like the NYT and it will not accept content that is for promotional. It will not accept product reviews, hotel promotions, island wedding, tour descriptions, tutorials, job postings, and other non-journalistic informational articles.
According to Google “News content should be timely, authoritative, focus on current events, and attempt to adhere to journalistic standards”
Google News also require compliance with its formatting and technical requirements that are listed at Google News technical requirements
Here a quick summary of several important requirements.
Permanent section headers — No Dynamic organization. Must be permanent and accessible. News should be organization into sections if they cover many topics.
Permanent URLs — For a “news of the day,” page which changes regularly will not be eligible.
HTML format — It must be HTML formatted to best practices. Define the content type, name of your publication, language, access (subscription or registration), genre, publication date (W3C format)
Site Structure- Use a Magazine Style theme with sections for each type of news: Education, Entertainment, Politics, Technology, Tourism and so on.
About Us – Contact Us – Authors – Media Kit Pages
Meta Tags and SEO Optimize. This goes without saying, You have to optimize your page with titles, heading, image-altags, keyword focus and meta-tags.
Site Map -A Google News Sitemap is a great way to further segment your news content.
Navigation and Naming
Don’t call you news site a BLOG. the address you want is NEWS – so for example https://barbados.org/blog is a great site for stroies about island news, activities, tours, visitors stories, reviews and product descriptions. It is not appropriate to just add a NEWS section as it will be diluted with what is essentially not news.
The URL should be Yourbrand.com/News
A distinct Navigation might be
Barbados | Business | Technology | Tourism | Lifestyles | Entertainment | Education
Submitting Your Website to Google News
You need to apply at Google Publishing Center. Google will check that your site qualifies and follows their guidelines. Choose your News Page/Blog to submit and make sure it is newsworthy. Edit out any articles that are not high quality. Google will not accept all self-serving content or anything that is too promotional.
Bookmarks are links from social media accounts like scoop.it and instapaper. The problem is that many don’t get indexed at all and will not help a bit. In this article we will discuss what you need to know about bookmarks. You will learn howto fix the problem to get your bookmarks and promote your pages
What You Need to Know About Bookmarks
If you are bookmarking (social linking to) a low quality page with content that is not relevant to the pages it links to; chances are your bookmarks will not get indexed. In addition if your social site has a pile of unrelated bookmarks (ie unrelated to the niche you want to link to) it will have little value. This a big problem when you outsource marketing and search engine optimisation and your outsourcer places your bookmark links on sites that have a mixed bad of content. Your hotel and tourism business links may end up in a site with teeth whitener and plumbing supplies. It will be deemed to be of low value.
This video shows a bookmark campaign that failed: Google did not index many posts. As a side note, this happened at a time when search was undergoing testing and change. That has settled down to some extent but it is still worrying and we analyze why this can happen and how to fix it below .
Why Google Devalues Bookmarks
In 2016, Gary Illyes from Google even said they were just going to devalue (or not count) lower quality links. That trend has continues and in addition Google now favors quality over quantity for links. As bookmarks are just snippets their quality is by nature low and as a result they don’t get huge traffic. But it’s not just bookmarks. Ahrefs estimates that over 91% of websites get ZERO traffic from Google.
There are 3 main reasons that sites are failing:
1) They Don’t Have Relevant Links
Optimally, you want to get links to and from a page / that is relevant to your business.
2) Your Backlinks are not In-Content and Not Contextual
Getting links to your pages from inside an article (in-content) are better, They are contextually relevant and natural. Links that stand alone are not contextual and will have less value.
3) The Site you Bookmark has Marginal Traffic
If you link to or from a site that has no traffic your bookmark will have low value.
How to Fix Bad Bookmarks
First and formost make sure that your bookmark links are valuable on their own and that they link to quality pages.
Any site that Google ranks, and is getting organic traffic, is a site that Google likes – links from it and to it would be valuable. Links for sites that Google has approved as Newsworth and appear in their News listing are high value, so long as they are relevant.
You need to Build your own social network (see page 61 0f my book).
Your social network should include Facebook, Instagram, Blogger, YouTube and Video Sites. Post content and links (bookmarks) on these sites that are highly related to your niche. Only create bookmarks that link to high value information.
Get Google News Approved
Post high quality blogs on relevant authority sites that are Google News approved. Once your content is solid you can promote it with links from relevant social bookmark sites. Quality Social bookmark sites include Scoot-it, LinkedIn, Twitter and Pinterest with content that is relevant to your niche and the articles you are linking to.
Bookmarks and Content Marketing
Based on what we just covered here and in the preceding lessons on Content Marketing you can see how bookmarking can help promote your content. The best promotion of blogs are actually other blogs linking to it. That actually a hierarchy of blogs which are call tiers. Always make sure that the most valued links point to you own site. Use Bookmarks to promote the second tier.
Example –
1. Write a blog about travelling as a life changing experience – this links to a relevant page on your website.
2. Another blog “Journey to discover” links to this (tier 2)
3. Bookmark tier 2 with a few links from your own network
4. You can extend this with another blog maybe about Tips for planning the perfect holiday
– Put this on a high authority guest blogging site like TheFritz
– You can link this to 2 and to another authority site. Bookmark this with another related network.
Strategic Link Structure
If you plan to do much blogging you will need to vary how you link you content. Linking is referred to in my book DIGITAL MEDIA in several chapters.
Backlinks and What You Need to Know About Bookmarks:
Building Your Social Media (Page 61)Digital Media Strategies for Hotels and Tourism
Available from Amazon in eBook and paperback
Technology
Structured linking is an advanced concept that is fairly new but will soon be mainstream. It is a subject of my next book on TECHNOLOGY. It’s not trivial: Strategic link structure creates highly effective bookmarking that extends beyond social media.
In this hybrid content networks, social media bookmarks take a secondary role to in-depth articles. They are part of a holistic linking structure that builds authority leading back to your website and sales partners. Don’t miss this
Twitter
Today, Google rewards sites that display Expertise, Authority and Trust (EAT). It’s not new and all these are inherent in the Book WEBSITE. What is new is the degree to which EAT features and the level of intelligence now used in determining the match.
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