Hotel Marketing 2009 2010

Hotel SEO

1000% better ROI than Adwords advertising. 275% increase in search engine referrals and exploding bookings and revenue. These numbers are real and should make you believe in what our SEO services can do for your hotel or travel marketing business. Explore beyond quick fixes and superficial approaches to new content and website approaches and you can dominate your local or national markets. We've already helped our Hotel SEO clients achieve that dominance. We can shape our strategy and processes to create the advantage and traffic you need. We adapt to and complement your website, resources, CMS, and staff.

Leading in a Flat Travel Market

While travel revenues and demand for travel and hotel services continue to decline, many Hoteliers are looking for improved ROI. Vendors are reducing their costs but that's not increasing ROI. To improve ROI, a hotel needs to investigate a multifaceted approach to online visibility and leverage search engine optimization as much as possible. Optimization goes well beyond Google, to optimizing hotel listings on expedia, hotels.com, Google local and even Google adwords where landing page quality affects per click pricing.

If you're tired of poor performing banner ad campaigns and email blasts then check out creative SEO for more cost effective reach to travel consumers. The creative possibilities are vast yet there are only a few strategies that generate high ROI and new business. If you're clinging to your loyal customers and finding that can't sustain your hotel, then you'll discover our SEO services generate leads to new customers - who have never heard of your hotel or who just didn't see it enough to get the clickthrough.

Travel Marketing via email and PPC Becoming Less Effective

For the past two years, many hotels have relied on email and ppc advertising and while they worked then, the stats show a decline in their effectiveness. email marketing is being used too frequently and customers are getting burned out by frequent "specials and discounts" from numerous hotels, and the emails tend to cannibalize sales of regular priced bookings along with actually diminishing the hotel brand. Adwords PPC was creating good results two years ago however consumer's mindset has changed. They're more hungry and price sensitive and once fixated on price, they're hard to please any other way.

Note: Adwords PPC can generate 50% more bookings per 10,000 visits compared to organic SEO. However organic SEO provides 30 times the traffic which translates to organic generating an overall comparative value of 15 times that of Adwords. Adwords campaigns often have to offer special price discounts and specials in order to compete with other PPC advertisers.

Social networking sites such as Twitter, Myspace, Facebook, and Stumbleupon have a lot of buzz, however they're not really reaching the best quality consumers since vacationers and business travelers don't normally use these sites for hotel deals. Social media is a difficult market to tap however there may be opportunities on a large scale to target travel consumers.

How Does SEO Generate Better ROI Than other Online Marketing Vehicles?

For hotels and other travel related businesses, organic SEO creates exceptionally good positioning on search results pages. For instance, these Google local search results below occupy the most viewed position on the site and they draw searchers eyes to them. This is Google's ten pack local business results and they generate a tremendous number of searches. Google local listings are free however optimization determines whether your hotel site will ranked at the top. As you can see here, our past client Delta Hotels is positioned at the top and for many of the top Canadian cities. Delta Hotels is Canada's leading hotel chain. They also have by far the best visibility of any Canadian hotel in the regular organic search results. For impulsive hotel room seeking searchers, Google local results gives them first exposure which means they can shape the searchers view with their unique value proposition.

By dominating Google local and Google organic search results on hotel-related phrases, our clients receive free, ongoing customer acquisition. Even a year later, clients enjoy outstanding visibility with almost no additional support --- during these competitive times. See their ranking visibility compared to competitors.

Purchasing these leads via Google Adwords or Yahoo Search marketing is very expensive. Even at a 3% conversion rate, it could cost $300 to create one booking. Lead conversion is no simple matter either. Without expert conversion strategies, a lot of waste can occur. Without traffic and revenue from free, organic listings, many hotels might not have sufficient funding for their PPC campaigns. If you look at the top Google Adwords advertisers on hotel phrases, you'll see they also rank high in the regular search results. Hilton, Marriott, and Expedia are well represented in both organic and PPC advertising and they spend millions of dollars for their campaigns yearly.

Where the best gains are made is on keyword tailings. A large hotel may see searchers arriving at their site using an incredible array of keyword phrases. Within one year, search engine referrals may come from 600,000 unique phrases. So much for optimizing for the top ten phrases! They comprise only 2% of all search traffic.

That's why getting creative in your search engine optimization program is so important. Maximizing traffic with different approaches helps to support your most important keywords and hotel websites. The big hotels know this and are not shy about creating new websites for the purpose of carving out more search traffic. More traffic and a richer variety of travel consumers gives the hotel a richer source of customers and referals. Brand visibility is one of those intangibles that gets little respect however if searchers keep seeing your hotel name and logo, it stands to reason they will try a booking at least once.

Is your hotel performing as well as it could? Why not call us for a free review of your competitiveness and visibility? We'll open your eyes to possibilities and improvements that might make a million dollar difference in your hotel revenues. SEO should be one of the main pillars of your hotel Internet marketing mix.