Enquiry forms are often forgotten about in the full time quest to continuously refresh content and ensure functionality on travel websites. Yet they have such an impact on the user experience and should be one of the most strategic pages on your website. Your enquiry page and process is the last opportunity you have to ensure that potential clients take cognisance of their interaction with your website (assuming that most potential clients have been shopping at your competitors’ site too!) and await your response with confidence. Continue reading this post…

 Thou shalt blog or be left behind. Just start blogging and your strategy will evolve and become clear as you go along. It was not so long ago that companies that were fully functional in the offline world were faced with the dilemma of whether to build a website or not. Hard to imagine now in a climate where a company without a website ceases to exist!

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And all of a sudden Video was indexed! Ok, it has been a fair while now but I remain surprised at how few local South African travel companies are making use of video. It might be something that remains out of our local internet experience because our bandwidth is slow and expensive but in the developed world - internet is fast and media rich. Considering that a great deal of our country’s sought after travellers reside in the developed world, its strange to me that so few people have made video work to their advantage.

The great thing about video besides the fact that your site will look hip and happening is that Google likes to show at least a couple of relevant videos within its search results. And you don’t have to be a search marketing whiz to work this one out…
20 travel companies offering South African safaris. 2 have video for just about all of the packages, properties or products that they offer on their website. Suddenly these 2 quick-to-act companies are showing up on the first page for just about all their pages that contain video.

As with all things Google…there will be always be changes to their search tactics and algorithms but while they are favouring video in their search results, you’d be doing yourself an injustice by not investigating where you can incorporate video into your website.

There is a general misunderstanding amongst online travel companies and across all industries, that Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) doesn’t cost anything, doesn’t cost a lot or that it is cheaper than paid search. This is truly a myth. SEO if applied properly can massively influence the success of your business but it doesn’t come cheap or at least it shouldn’t if you are getting a good service. Continue reading this post…

Blogging should be part of the more light-hearted approach to your brand or product/service offering.  Personally, I detest those company blogs that shamelessly pose marketing speak and excessive use of keywords for blog entries. But there is certainly no harm in making a few considered choices in your use of words to make sure that you help your blog become more highly ranked in the search engines.

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On May 26, 2008, regulations restricting solicited “word-of-mouth” marketing online became effective in the UK. The regulations stipulate that companies or organisations that hire people to market their services must always be clear that they are being paid to promote a service or product. This means that marketers and bloggers can no longer pose as consumers and offer biased opinions to would be fellow consumers.

The parameters of marketing ethics can be discussed ad nauseam and the implications of such regulations would make for an interesting debate. Continue reading this post…

I recently stayed at a little place in the Western Cape Winelands whose name included the word “Toy”. It was a lovely, friendly place but did get me to thinking about how difficult it would be to market their name online. Due to the fact that their name includes the word “toy” using their name as a keyword in a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign would yield many untargeted results mostly to do with actual toys. Continue reading this post…

Do political crises affect PPC traffic (or any online traffic that matter)? I would say they definitely do. Despite the access to data we receive from running online campaigns, I am even guilty sometimes of assuming that the online world exits outside of the usual factors that effect markets.

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While it might seem like a terribly obvious statement the simplest logic is often overlooked in the quest to have the most flashy (excuse the pun) website in the industry or because of a fear of technology and lack of research.

I keep reminding people that offline logic still applies online! Don’t suddenly think you should leave everything up to your web developer or agency because you are not a technical person. Take as active a role in your website functionality. After all, you understand your product and target audience far more intimately than a technically minded web team. Continue reading this post…

After wandering the endless array of travel related stands at the Tourism Indaba in Durban this weekend, it was very interesting to get a feel for the varied levels of understanding of online marketing.

Those who were new to the concept of marketing their properties or services online had heard of “optimisation” and had a vague idea that it meant being found higher up on the search engines. What was intriguing was that very few (of course I do not refer to the obviously web savvy companies of the tourism industry!) marketing managers had heard of PPC and even more intriguing was that Google has so cleverly designed their search pages that a large percentage of people don’t even know that the “sponsored links” are indeed “paid for advertising”. Continue reading this post…