Travel Sites – Car Rental Agencies

The battle for visibility on search engines is fairly intense yet many car rental agencies don’t do all they can to capture mindshare and the available rental prospects. Mindshare is tough to capture since studies show most travelers start their travel searches on Expedia, Orbitz or Travelocity. So you’d wonder where the opportunity is then in gaining visibility on search engines, if the market has all headed to those travel portals.

Travel consumers may start at those locations but travelers do jump from one site to another, and yet between their visits many do a search on Google just to reassure themselves that there’s no better deals available. If you’re a travel portal or top car rental company, there’s nothing you’d like better than to see the searcher be unsuccessful then return to your site to make a booking. What if the searcher was successful and found not the cheap car rental they started out looking for, but the type of car they really wanted? Not only did you capture the prospect and take them away from the top car rental companies and travel portals, you also eliminated price consciousness. This is all achievable.

Big Companies Lack Interest in Search Engine Optimization

Many companies shy away from competing with the big players in the market, but you should realize that big companies are often sloppy and inefficient in how they use their Web sites. That inefficiency stems from competing uses for the site and competing corporate marketing goals, and unwise restrictions on Web site structure. Sometimes it's just a lack of creativity. These habits and conventions, often dictated by developers who don't care about marketing success, cripple their site's overall power leaving them operating at perhaps 60% of their ranking power over a limited range of keywords. The end result is a devastating loss of sales and leaving the market to their competitors.

What many have done is to create new web sites, a sort of corporate network of sites and then link them together to gain an advantage. With this, they can capture rankings on additional keyword phrases. More keyword phrases equals more visitors equals more revenue and brand exposure. It has worked for many of these companies, however the waste in ranking resources is astounding. By not knowing how ranking resources such as Pagerank and link reputation flow through links between pages and sites, they get a fraction of the results they could have.

Search engines don’t favor companies because they’re big and have spent millions on advertising in all media. With an SEO Company specializing in Travel SEO, a company can rank right up there with the big players. Many notable underdogs are gaining exposure that other big travel providers have paid millions for. They have creative content optimized the right way and are enjoying great revenue generating possibilities because of it.

The big portals get good rankings because they have a lot of marketing partners and online agencies promoting their services. Web sites owners, often place a link to sites such as: http://www.google.ca/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GWYA,GWYA:2006-14,GWYA:en&q=link:http%3a%2f%2fwww%2etravelocity%2ecom%2f (at least 14,000 pages in Google’s index link to Travelocity) have a link to or one of the big airlines because they believe it enhances the credibility of their site. The link is usually not done with any forethought. It is the shear number of these links that give the big players their good rankings. The fact that they aren’t done with search engine algorithms in mind, that creates an opportunity for an underdog travel site, or specifically in this case car rental agencies.

For a car rental agency that doesn’t rank in the top ten for hundreds of keyword phrases, the potential is vast. Moving from number 11 to number three on a hundred keyword phrases can generate incredible exposure. The high ranking companies have gained significant business by the fact that search engine generated visits accumulate. Each month, more people visit and return. Companies such as Travelocity started very humbly a few years ago, but they were aggressive with online advertising and search engine optimization.

There is an excellent opportunity to improve sales performance via search engines. Consumers use many different keyword searches so there’s plenty of opportunity to capture high volumes of great prospects via Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Expedia, Orbitz or Travelocity have tremendous brand power however the biggest issue for other travel companies is that travel consumers don’t believe they have the lowest prices or access to a sufficient volume of deals. Yes, consumers are looking for car rental deals too.

Google and Yahoo still draw a tremendous volume of travel consumers so there is a good opportunity to capture traveller needing a car rental.

Car Rental Agency Marketshare

According to Consumer Webwatch, the car rental agencies stack up as follows:

As you can see, there is a correlation between overall marketshare and Google ranking. This is mostly due to the fact that these companies have extensive offline and online marketing programs that produce assets that create high rankings. The problem is that they’ve spent too much to generate their high search engine rankings. If it takes $100,000 worth of advertising promotion to generate a few accidental links to their Web site, that isn’t very efficient. Is offline and banner advertising more effective that search engine exposure in creating customers? Search engine users are looking for car rentals at the very time they’re making a purchase decision. They don’t spend much time making that car rental decision. They may look at a few providers and then commit to the one with the best deal.

Search Demand for Car Rental

Search volume for car rentals is very strong. A well optimized Web site has the opportunity to rank for numerous phrases. People search relative to the city they wish to travel in and relative to price and category of automobile. Given the price of paid clicks to be 50 cents and up on average, the capture of 300,000 visits per year via search engines shouldn't be underestimated.

Alamo Car Rental

Alamo.com appears in the top ten for many searches, so they've been very active in search engine optimization. Despite that, their overall success appears to be waning:

Enterprise Car Rental

Consumer Web Watches' report is very interesting stating Enterprise' growth was the best with the most significant volume of visits at 2.4 million. Enterprise states that it is the largest car rental company. It notes on a press release that the rental market is moving away from airport locations to neighborhood locations. This would mean searches relative to cities car rental + [city name] would be increasing.

In 2005, category visitation from May to June increased 9 percent to 7.1 million visitors, placing it among the top gaining categories for the month. Enterprise led the category with 2.4 million visitors, marking an 8-percent gain versus June, while traffic to Budget.com rose 32 percent to 2.3 million visitors.  Hertz and Avis also experienced gains, up 9 percent to 1.9 million visitors and 1 percent to 1.7 million visitors, respectively.

Enterprise growth is not coming from organic search engine referrals but rather from Google adwords advertising where they are placed at the top Google adwords spots. These listings typically cost 50 cents to $1.50 per click. If these are converting well enough at that price, then organic rankings would produce 4 times the referrals at zero cost, other than the price of search engine optimization services.

Who's Doing SEO Well?

Notables are www.carrentalexpress.com who have a booking engine for use by their affiliates. Each affiliate places a static link on their web site that reads: Car Rentals Technology provided by Car Rental Express.com Inc. or Cheap Car Rentals Technology provided by Car Rental Express.com Inc. or, Car Rental Express.com offers the webs best deals on car rentals on other sites. This isn't an extraordinary number of Web sites that they've placed links on.

Alamo.com has an excellent variety of links that point to their site. Despite this and the fact that they rank for great phrases such as car rental orlando, car rental new york and car rental los angeles, they haven't come close to tapping the potential of search engines. This site would perform phenomenally if it was optimized. Optimization could easily triple this site's search engine referrals and as we well know, search engine referrals convert at a high rate.

More Online Travel Info:

Travellers Map Use in 2005: http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/5988.asp

US Business Travel Survey: http://www.accenture.com/Global/Services/By_Industry/Travel/R_and_I/USTravelSurvey2006.htm

http://www.consumerwebwatch.org/dynamic/travel-report-renting-cars-online.cfm

Travel Industry 2006

The travel industry experienced a tough year in 2006. Travelocity, Expedia, and Orbitz.com all showed dramatic declines. Hilton, Marriott, and Hotels.com also suffered huge drops in Web visits. United Airlines, American Airlines, and Southwest Airlines all saw Web visits drop significantly.

Despite this, eMarketer is reporting that online travel sales will experience significant growth in the next 3 years, starting with 2007 at 91 Billion, 2008 at 106 Billion, and 2009 at 126 Billion dollars.

By 2010, nearly half of all travel purchases will be booked online. With the market online, it stands to reason that search engines such as Google will become a key resource for travel consumers. If the car rental market in the US is worth 16 billion dollars, then top search engine visibility would create a tremendous amount of business.

According to Adage.com, the online car rental market is expected to grow from 2.7 in 2005 to 5.8 billion in 2010. Most companies then could double their business. Those who are proactive with SEO will do much better than that. http://adage.com/images/random/Interactivefactpack06.pdf

Competing in the Search Engine Space

Some marketing managers see search engine marketing as eroding brand and eroding higher priced sales via other channels.

Travel consumers may go online with price in mind, but that doesn't mean they can't be dissuaded from price only decisions or that they can't be upsold to higher priced services and products.

Many searchers look piecemeal fashion for specific services such as cheap car rentals, yet when introduced to a range of possibilities, they may often choose the higher priced car rental. If sufficient reason is presented to them for renting the more expensive purchase, and their price points are blurred by presenting information the right way, they can easily be upsold.

Car rental consumers always want comfort and the cheapest rentals never provide that comfort. So although the visitor starts out searching based on price, that need is quickly obscured by the desire for comfort, a nice stereo system, and perhaps a GPS system among other things.

The demand for luxury and exotic cars in search engines really demonstrates that the car rental market is more dynamic than anyone would expect.

Car rental agencies are experts at dangling a certain type or model of car as a carrot to get renters to book a rental. However, as we all know, the type of car we thought we would get is not what waits for us at the lot. A fair amount of ill will is created when a renter receives a car they don't like. This increases post purchase dissonance and the likelihood of another rental is reduced.

Dissatisfaction with car rental agencies could be one of the major reason why so much searching for cars happens on Web search engines.

On the other hand, plenty of car renters are satisfied with the car they rented and the service provided, and they return again and again to book a car rental. This demonstrates the importance of ranking high and capturing those consumers using Web search engines.

As Google's search engine is placed on more travel web sites, the search giant is sure to see a growth in travel related searches.

If your search engine marketing campaign is not producing the results you need, then call Bay Street SEO and discover how your site can be upgraded to a search engine powerhouse.

With so many searches being conducted today, it won't take much to show a strong return on your SEO investment.

We have the experience and techniques that have generated amazing return on investment for other travel sites, and yours will be just as successful. You may already have a powerful Web site that just needs its potential brought out.

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