Tracking your referral sources gives you a lot of insight into what is driving traffic and which of your marketing efforts are drawing visitors to the website.  I recently reviewed data for a hotel in San Diego that increased its marketing efforts on a local directory.  In the month of April, they had over 900 visitor referrals to the website and the directory was #3 in referrals to the site.  That is an average of 30 visitors per day, which seems like a great number.  In comparison, a directory geared towards the “pet friendly” niche drove fewer visitors to the site.

While the number of referred visitors is a great first step, it is important to review and determine how many of these referrals actually convert.  To get a more complete picture, you can cross referrence referral sources  with the visitors who actually went to the property’s booking engine to check rates.

The numbers were very interesting.  Google was the top referring source and had a 36% conversion rate.  Over one third of the visitors who came to the site from Google converted and checked rates.  SanDiego.com on the other hand, only had 20 visitors from the referring traffic funnel go to the booking engine… a mere 2.2% of total visitor traffic from that directory.  On the flip side, although dogfriendly.com had just 20 referrals that month, 9 people clicked through to the booking engine to check rates. That’s a 45% conversion rate!   This indicates that visitors from the niche site were more targeted to the site’s offerings.

Each hotel can use this data to match up average conversions and make some calculations of total revenue based on their ADR (average daily rate) and ALOS (average length of stay).  Even if one source has a lower conversion rate, it does not necessarily mean it is not the right strategy.  Having as many facts as possible will help the hotel make the best determination as to which of their efforts are working best.

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Contributed by: Tammie Carlisle, Regional Business Development Manager (West Coast), Milestone Internet Marketing, Inc.

• Purchase domain early and setup a one page website
• Create a handful of authoritative inbound local links
• Build original content to boost traffic when the site goes live

Once you’ve acquired the hotel or decided to develop an independent website, purchase a keyword-rich URL and publish a one or two page brochure on that domain. This page should include your address, general information about your hotel, booking engine widget, and local attractions in your market. Since only a few consumers will be able to find this page, and will eventually be replaced by a full-blown website, save time and effort by creating a simple html page. Furthermore, since search engines don’t immediately reward websites with front page placement until they trust your content, verify your referrals (inbound links), and your site becomes more mature, developing this temporary page will start the clock on your domain age and begin gaining relevancy for your soon-to-be full blown website.

After your page is live, begin socializing your domain via links with other local businesses and Internet directories. This will allow search engine robots to find your new site naturally through relevant inbound links. In the example above, the directory is confirming that the business is a hotel, offering accommodations in a specific region, and the directory has a cached image of the temporary webpage. New websites with no history can gain prime visibility within the first six months for long tail local and attraction-based searches and should optimize accordingly. The more sought after and highly competitive [City Hotel] and [Hotel City State] keyword results take longer to achieve visibility in competitive markets, so focusing your optimization on these competitive terms will generate less revenue in the first year as compared to the long tail searches.

Whether you’re a year from breaking ground on a new hotel, or simply want to get ahead during the typical 60-90 days of development on a full website, a new URL can benefit from a temporary webpage.  As you can see from the image below, the temporary page not only generated some traffic in January and February, but because the domain has gained relevancy, the full website very quickly started getting consistent, relevant traffic when it launched in March.

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Contributed by: Brad Brewer, Regional Business Development Manager (Central US), Milestone Internet Marketing

What this means for hotels: Let’s say you have ad copy A, but the user type in “geo-modifier + hotel room”. Your text ad, headline, and display URL should have relevant keywords. The destination URL should be relevant to rooms. However, the user may specifically be interested in room rates, room amenities, virtual room tour, etc. You can provide a high level of relevancy by providing links to the user to further enhance your text ad. By offering more options of links, you further entice the user to click.

I ran a test for a Seattle Hotel to measure the impact for site links.

Between 4/1/10 – 4/27/10, their search campaign achieved a 1.29% CTR. I enabled the following 4 site links on 4/27/10:

• Seattle WA Hotel – this link led the user to the website’s Location page
• Photos of Seattle Hotel – this link led the user to website’s Photo Gallery
• Seattle Hotel Discounts – this link led the user to one of the website’s Promotions page
• Seattle Hotel Video – this link led the user to the website’s video tour

For the same date range that followed, CTR almost doubled. And the site links contributed to 10% in incremental clicks.

If your PPC campaign qualifies for site links, take advantage of the tool immediately. It offers more options for the user to visit your website. It also enhances your text ad to make it stand out on the SERP. Lastly, it entices the user to click because you are now offering more options to see your website rather than through the hyperlinked headline and display URL. You are likely to see an increase in clicks.

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Contributed by: Nelson Toriano, Milestone Internet Marketing

For a two week period, their stats were as follows:

• CTR = 2.49%
• Impressions = 763
• Clicks = 19
• Average CPC = $1.50
• Quality Score = 4.48

Then, I added the “gay marriage” keywords on the landing page, and collected another data set over the next two weeks.

Data set for the next two weeks are as follows:

• CTR = 5.08%
• Impressions = 1458
• Clicks = 83
• Average CPC = $.80
• Quality Score = 5.54

From this test, I gathered the following conclusions how continuity of the keyword on the landing page can impacted the campaign

• CTR more than doubled
• Impressions more than doubled
• Clicks increased by 400%
• CPC was cut in half
• Quality Score increased by a whole point

For literature on this test, please visit ClickZ at http://www.clickz.com/3640001

Conclusion: Maintaining continuity of keywords from the user’s search, ad copy, keyword in the ad group, and finally the landing page all contribute to the overall performance of the campaign. It increases CTR, impressions, clicks and Quality Score. Meanwhile, it decreases the average cost-per-click. Therefore, much strategy must be placed on ensuring the right keywords are in the right locations and at the right times.

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Contributed by: Nelson Toriano, Milestone Internet Marketing

For marketers and businesses today, real-time search offers a plethora of opportunities to enhance online visibility. Here are three steps on how to use real time search to help in your online marketing efforts.

• What’s Hot Right Now: Find out what users are searching for online and which latest topics and trends are being discussed at this very minute. Here are a few tools which will help find out the latest, hot topics:
  • Google Trends is a free tool which is very useful in finding out the hottest topics and hottest searches on Google.
  • Site Volume is a free tool which allows you to compare the buzz around keyword phrases on various social media channels.
  • Delicious lets you check out the kind of content which is generating a great deal of buzz across the social web.

• Create content which is compatible with Real-Time search: Timing is key to for getting the most mileage out of the real time search results. Create content which is relevant to the top searches, topics and trends, and is optimized for the latest search terms.

  For the hospitality industry, a good strategy would be to center content around Hot topics and/or Hot searches via:

  • Events: local events/seasonal events
  • Seasonal Offers and Promotions
  • News in the area
  • New attractions in the area

• Post content on the right Real-Time channels
  • Tweets and Facebook fan page updates: Content from social sites appears fastest in search results. It’s very easy to post Tweets and Facebook updates, so both must be a big part of the real time SEO strategy.
  • Blog posts: Blogging offers an avenue to help content rank well because there is an opportunity to write meatier content on the Hot Topics or Hot Searches.
  • Optimized Press Releases: By optimizing press releases and through the right submissions,  a marketer can ensure that their content pulls up high on the search engine rankings.
  • Website: Use your website to post fresh content which speaks to the latest topics and addresses the latest searches.

A screen shot of Google trends: a very useful tool in determining the Hot Topics and Hot Searches of the day.

Real-time search results has huge impact on search engine results. Savvy marketers should leverage real-time search and should include time sensitive content on social channels.

Screen capture of hotel listing and room rates on Google Maps

This beta feature could potentially alter the way we shop for hotels today and have a huge impact on the hotel industry.

This new addition will influence businesses like Travelocity, Expedia and the hotels themselves.  Any advertiser with the lower price offering is likely to get the most click through’s. Many of us use Google Maps extensively to find and compare hotels in a location. If we are served with the option to compare rates, and to book directly from Google Maps, there probably would be a sizeable number of folks who would be willing to do that, especially given the Search Engine’s brand value.

Google has stressed that the new feature will not affect the way hotels are ranked in Google Maps. Google Maps ranks business listings based on their relevance to the search terms entered, along with geographic distance and other factors.

In conclusion, Google is poised to change the way people shop for hotels. Google is currently testing this feature and analyzing feedback and other data. If and when they are ready to roll the feature out of beta, it will be create a huge impact on the travel industry and will also pave the way for Google Maps’ monetization. Let us all wait and watch with bated breath.

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Contributed by: Manisha Kumar, Milestone Internet Marketing

Since this filter decreases the number of available websites advertisers can show their ads, bids can consequently be higher than average. Therefore, when using this filter, it is advisable to raise bids.

Follow these steps to exclude below-the-fold placements for your AdWords campaign:^*

• Click the Campaigns tab.
• Select a campaign.
• Click the Networks tab and scroll down to the bottom of the page.
• Click the Exclusions link. You’ll see an "Ad group level" table and a "Campaign level" table.
• Within the Campaign level, click the Add exclusions drop-down menu, and select Exclude category.

Select the "Below the fold" checkbox, and click Save.

For full article, please visit Inside AdWords at http://adwords.blogspot.com/2010/03/new-tool-for-brand-advertisers-on.html

*Detailed instructions provided by Google AdWords Help (http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=173715)

Conclusion: By allowing the advertisers more control over where their ads appear, they can increase the chances of their ads being views. Ultimately, it can result in a conversion. With Google’s recent functionality in which advertisers can opt out of below-the-fold placement, advertisers are now provided with another way to maximize their exposure on the content network.

Site Performance
Under google webmaster there is site performance page which shows what is the download speed of website and how its faster or lower as compare to other sites. Site speed varies and depends on content and website structure.

How to speed up page?
Site performance tool also list out some website pages which are not performing well. This tool also shows how to make it better in performance, which settings need to change or apply to speed up page.

For more detail, install Page Speed and YSlow on firefox and read documentation. Both tools are enough to analyze a website performance.

Moderator: Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land
Q&A Moderator: Michael Martin, SEO Director, Resource Nation
Speakers:
Patrick Bennett, Co-Founder, BLVD Status

Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer, Google Inc.
Ralf Schwoebel, CEO, Tradebit, Inc.
Brian Ussery, Director of SEO Technology, Search Discovery Inc.

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Contributed by: Jaydev Mandaliya, Milestone Internet Marketing

It is common knowledge that getting other relevant websites to link to your website is one way to improve your search engine ranking. One of the biggest challenges we often hear from hoteliers is “I don’t know how to do that” and I am frequently asked to share the things that I did as a hotelier to be successful with my internet marketing strategies. The following are three easy steps to help get more local links to your website and enhance your search engine optimization.

Step 1 – It’s All About the Niche

Think about the niche markets that you currently target. For example, if my hotel is near a University. In the offline world, I would saturate as many departments as I could, from athletics to law to the business school, in an effort to find new business, take that same strategy online. While most of my competitors might have a listing to a brand site on the school’s ‘general hotels in the area’ page, by asking a few well-placed questions on my calls, I may not only get a listing to my independent website, but also listings from a few other departments as well. Search engines give more weight to .edu and .gov sites, and by taking a few extra minutes as part of a normal sales call, you can secure more links and greatly compliment your search engine optimization efforts.

Step 2 – Every Sales Call

Many of the large corporations have travel departments through which they book. However, many of the smaller guys still book direct. Use this to your advantage. One of my favorite questions to ask as part of a sales call is: “Do you publish information on your website for your travelers?” If they do, provide them with your site information and if they don’t, explain why it is a great tool to allow their travelers to “inspect” your property and see the value they can get before they stay with you. While this strategy probably won’t work with a Microsoft or Intel, it works more often than not for small to midsized companies. You can then use your analytics tools to track which companies are referring more business to you through their website.

Step 3 – Enhance with More Research

If you have exhausted all of your normal resources and you are still looking for more, one simple tool to find more potential links can be found at freekeywords.wordtracker.com. Type in your city and/or state in the tool, and it will give you an idea of what consumers are searching for. In the example below, Stamford Connecticut led to several results including several searches for the phrase “Stamford Connecticut balloon parade”. By doing a quick search, I found information regarding the parade online as well as a website and phone number for more information. The next step would be to call the organization and see about partnering and/or getting that link back to my website.
These steps will help you learn to overcome the “I don’t know how to do it” syndrome and go out there and generate more links for your website.

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Contributed by: Tammie Carlisle, Milestone Internet Marketing

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Google’s New Ranking Factor
A new ranking factor will be added to Google’s Algorithm in 2010 – SPEED – and the download time of a website. Google’s innovative Webmaster Tool will help webmasters assess and improve their website’s speed and performance. This unique new feature will help you assess how your website is performing in terms of speed.

According to Matt Cutts from Google, “If you have two sites that are equally relevant, same backlinks, everything else is the same, you’d probably prefer the one that’s a little bit faster, so page speed can in theory be an interesting idea to try out for a factor in scoring different websites. But, absolutely, relevance is the primary component, and we have over 200 signals in our scoring to try to return the most relevant, the most useful, the most accurate search result that we can find. So, that’s not going to change…But, if you can speed your site up, it’s really good for users, as well as, potentially down the road, being good for search engines. So it’s something that people within Google have thought about.”

With that said, Matt also made it clear that the speed of your site is an element of user experience that should not be overlooked.

Google’s Page Speed Tool
Google’s Page Speed Tool is a firefox plugin that enables you to see what areas of your website need to improve in terms of speed. The Site Performance feature looks at the aggregated speed for your site based on the pages most frequently accessed by visitors who use the Google Toolbar and have the PageRank feature activated. The following is an example of what this will look like:

By using data from the Google Toolbar users, you don’t have to worry about Google testing your site from a location that your users do not use. For example, if your site is in Germany and all of your users are in Germany, the chart will reflect the load time as seen in Germany. Similarly, if your users mostly use dial-up connections (or high-speed broadband), that would be reflected in these numbers as well. If only a few visitors to your site use the Google Toolbar, Google may not be able to show this data in Webmaster Tools.

Page Speed Suggestions

There is also a section that gives you Page Speed Suggestions. This feature shares example pages from your site and suggestions on how to optimize these specific pages. The suggestions are based on Google’s Page Speed Firefox/Firebug plug-in. This allows you to better recognize blocking issues and makes it easy to see how modifications on the server affect the total load time.

To summarize, search engines are rewarding sites that download fast and have cleaner codes. With the new Google Page Speed Tool, you can analyze your website’s speed, make it faster, keep users engaged with your site, reduce bandwidth and hosting costs, and ultimately rank higher on Google SERPs. If you want to rank higher on Google, feel the need for speed!

To check out this new Google tool, go to: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/your-sites-performance-in-webmaster.html. [ back to top ]

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Contributed by: Aditi Karandikar, Milestone Internet Marketing