Tracking Tourism: The Tourism Research Blog Archive for the ‘Search’ Category

Just when we were getting to grips with Web 2.0 and Travel 2.0 and Tourism 2.0 and Kitchen Sink 2.0, there has been looming on the horizon the possibility of Web/Travel/Tourism 3.0.

But what does this mean?

Have a bunch of under-employed bloggers just got a little over-excited and made up a term that has no relevance to the rest of us but makes them look clever?  Or does it actually signify something that will have an impact on the way we do business?

Well, I think it’s a little of both - certainly at this stage.  The ambitions stated for Web 3.0 projects will have an impact on day to day life once realised but I think we’re not close to mass deployment yet so there is no need to start panicking.  However, I thought I would dedicate this week’s post to looking at some of the basic questions surrounding this potential change, starting with the two most fundamental ones, “What is 3.0″ and “So what?”

What is 3.0?

As is often the case, it’s possible to start with a Wikipedia definition of 3.0 which states:

“Web 3.0 is one of the terms used to describe the evolutionary stage of the Web that follows Web 2.0. Given that technical and social possibilities identified in this latter term are yet to be fully realised the nature of defining Web 3.0 is highly speculative. In general it refers to aspects of the internet which, though potentially possible, are not technically or practically feasible at this time.”

Which isn’t really that helpful.

However, the rest of the article goes into some more detail and, overall, the impression is that the ambition of Web 3.0 is to create an internet that is simply with fewer boundaries than we (often unconsciously) experience at the moment.  And while these ideas are mainly being considered at a technical level that baffles the rest of us, there are indicators of what this might eventually mean for how we interact.

The semantic web

For example, commenting on a recent TrackingTourism post, Phil Caines of Tourism Tide said

“As far as where we can look for the next ‘wow’ change, I can only guess, but if you asked Joe Buhler, he would undoubtedly say “The semantic web of course!’, and I think he is right.”

The Semantic Web is a key part of 3.0 ambitions.  Put simply, it is a development that would enable web sites to be able to understand the relationship between things.

Let me unpack that last paragraph a little.  At the moment, web sites can be seen a bit like an encyclopaedia.  For example, there might have entries on separate sites with the following information:

• Boston is in Massachusetts
• MIT is in Cambridge, over the river from Boston
• MIT undertakes work in Biotechnology

As a human, you understand that there is something linking these statements but a computer doesn’t.  So the aim of the semantic web is to enable computers ‘intuitively’ to understand that these three statements are linked. Simple, eh?

So what?

Ignoring the technical practicalities of this, you’re probably asking the question, ’so what?’ by now.  To my mind, this kind of advance has the potential to make the internet ‘blend together’ in a far more efficient way than it does at present.

So, it could be used, for example,  to develop sites that are able to offer best travel packages based on the question, “I live in Boston but I want to watch Manchester United at home some time in October, staying in a budget hotel with easy access to public transport.  What are my best options and when is the best time for me to go?”   This is not an impossible question to answer at the moment but you will probably need to go to 3+ sites to even start to work out an answer.

On the other hand, the semantic web should make that question a lot easier to answer.  All the separate elements of the question (Manchester United playing times, flight times, lodging info etc) would be understood seamlessly and then used to deliver a swift, comprehensive answer.

Another example of how the Semantic Web could be used in marketing is contained in the following article: What the Semantic Web — or Web 3.0 — Can Do for Marketers.

Mobiles and ubiquitous connectivity

As I mentioned earlier, Web 3.0 also seems to imply an internet that is simply more ubiquitous and less bound than at present.  This means, for example,

• The continued march of the internet onto mobiles as well as the simultaneous blurring of the boundaries between those mobiles and computers;
• The rise of ubiquitous computing where connectivity is as common as the air you breathe (see this recent MIT article on the possibility of receiving wireless as you drive for example).

But what does this all mean to travel and tourism?

That’s a difficult question to answer (but one that will seem frustratingly easy in hindsight).  In some ways, the answer could be something as simple as , ‘what we’re doing now - but a lot better’ but that ignores the possibility of developments as revolutionary as Tripadvisor and Facebook have been in the last five years.

So, dipping our toe in the quagmire of prediction, our guess is that the web as an experience will become more of a hive than a collection of isolated websites.  What I mean by this is that one site will have the the potential to blur with another and so the web will be more of a collective than previously. If you cast your mind back to an interview we conducted with travel futurologist Ian Yeoman, one of the main points made was that:

“The traveller will want more in less time or with less effort – this has implications for everything from the format of events through to booking processes and the nature of breaks.”

And, in this context, consumer demand will dictate that they want more efficient access to information than they currently get. In other words, if there are still pain-points involved in reaching your data, then customers will be less inclined to pursue your offering to the point of booking when there are easier alternatives.

Another implication is that sites will need to ‘tagged’ effectively in terms that other sites and, more importantly, customers understand. Perhaps the implication is that we are moving from ’search engine optimisation’ to simple ’search optimisation.’

But the future is still hazy so I throw the floor open to the hive mind of our readers and conclude by asking, “What do YOU think 3.0 will mean and what might it look like for travel?”

Filed by Stephen (11/12/08)

Google’s business model is simple. It wants you to spend your money wisely on Google business products and, to help you achieve those ends, there are tools to make your spending decisions more informed.

Looked at from another angle, they offer a bunch of tools that you and I can use free of charge.

This post forms part of a series over the next few weeks that will show you how to make the most of tools like this - as well asking some more probing questions about how far they can really help you.

This post originated in a question I asked myself recently, “what exactly does the tool data in Google Trends and Google Insight show and what has this got to do with travel and tourism?”

At a top level, the answer is quite simple. Google Trends shows data relating to traffic to websites while Google Insight shows data related to search terms. However, what they have the potential to give you is considerable and so for this post, I’ll talk just about Google Trends, followed in the future by Google Insights and then finally a post dealing with some more ‘philosophical’ questions these tools have thrown up.

What is Google Trends showing and why is it useful?

OK, let’s start with Google Trends. If you click here, you’ll open up a new window with Google Trend data for visitscotland.com. At this point, you’ll see a graph showing daily unique visitors to the visitscotland.com site over a period of about 2 years. You’ll also see a bunch of data below it. Let’s look at those two elements in turn.

Before I get going though, I would like to stress that I’m using visitscotland.com here as an example only. The point of this is to look at data for your own site (assuming you have sufficient traffic) and to use the techniques contained in this post.

The graph shows a representation of the number of times visitscotland.com has been called up via Google. Note that this is not searches for visitscotland.com in a search box but rather the number of times someone has visited the site and Google has been in a position to capture that data (with some caveats).

Now, this graph can show a lot more but I want to mention the lower half of the screen before getting into that as it is where the data starts to get really interesting.

On the left, you get an indication of where the visitors to visitscotland.com and coming from. In other words, you can see by geography where the warmest prospects are.

In the middle, you can see which other sites were also visited alongside visitscotland.com. In our example, you can see sites ranked that you might expect to see - and depending on your perspective, this might be comforting or unsettling. For example, if you saw visitireland.com as the most visited other site, you would know that there was a real fight at this level to attract visitors who were torn between destinations.

And on the right hand side, you see the search terms that are most often associated with that site. Again, this might be revealing or comforting. For example, if you run a website for a DMO in a whisky distillery town and people find you only by the brandname of your whisky and not under something more generic like ‘whisky tourism scotland’, then this would be a sign that your site isn’t attracting as many visitors as it could.

But the fun really starts because you can start to compare sites.

Let’s demonstrate this by taking our example above and adding a few more sites - visitbritain.com and visitsweden.com. It should now look like this.

Let’s start with the graph. It shows that visitscotland.com attracts more visitors than visitbritain.com or visitsweden.com. It also shows that visitscotland has different peaks and troughs to the other sites at a global level (predominantly the effect of Hogmanay I would guess).

In the bottom half of the screen, you’ll see that you can segment this data by region and by website. You’ll notice that under the ‘ranked by’ tab, you’ll see how each geographic area performs for each of these sites. You’ll notice in our example how Scotland and Sweden are broadly similar in terms of interest in Germany. If, in the upper right of the screen, you use the drop-down box to change ‘all regions’ to ‘Germany’, you should see something like this.

So what’s this saying? It’s saying that, in this instance, people in Germany have show a greater propensity to visit the visitscotland.com site at a different time to the visitsweden site. That might be on account of a campaign by visitscotland in Germany…or it might just show a different ‘natural’ search pattern (and I’ll show you in a coming post how you can go about finding that out). If we assume on this occasion that German’s simply are more interested in visitscotland.com at the periods suggested, wouldn’t it make sense to have the website ready to react to this niche interest at the time? The data suggests that it might be wrong to assume that people think of destinations in a uniform way and that you need to be ready to respond to the customer when they actually come calling, not when you think they ought to be calling.

Conversely, if the spike was the result of an advertising campaign, this gives an indication of how long its effect lasted and how big it was in comparison to the spike caused by possible competitor marketing.

(I’ll hasten to add, I’m not passing judgment on visitscotland.com but just using them as an example - for all I know they might well be doing all this already!)

What I’ve described rather quickly in this post is one, powerful view that the travel and tourism industry can use to get a deeper understanding of how it sits in the online world. But, as is often the case, you need to look at other areas in order to build upper a more mature understanding and so this represents just one part of the picture. In the coming weeks, we’ll develop this theme further with more tips on these free tools.

See post 2 in this series - Warning bells you can’t afford to ignore: courtesy of Google Insights

Further reading:

Competitive Intelligence Analysis: Google Trends for Websites

But burying your head in the sand is not an option either…

Yesterday I met with a tourism business that has been spending a considerable part of its precious marketing budget with a search engine optimisation consultant. Results had been slow, but their consultant had said it would take at least 6 months and they thought things might now be starting to pick up, just as predicted.

Still, they had asked if I would take a look at their web analytics data and see if I could shed some light on how their 6 month SEO investment was going and whether I had any tips based on that data for further improvements they could make.

What I found, to mutual distress, was yet another tourism business who had been ripped off - either through ignorance on the part of the consultant, or quite possibly through deliberate greed and laziness.

I do not profess to be an SEO expert (though happily I know a few). But I am a web analytics and customer insight professional. I can recognise how people arrive at a site and the behaviour they undertake when they get there. I can also recognise when marketing expenditure has had no discernible effect in relation to its conversion objectives.

So, with those provisos in mind, I thought I would share these tips with you.

1. The search charlatans are still out there

There is no “no work” option when it comes to SEO. It is your page content, architecture, headers, titles, linking, images, videos, key phrases, relevancy etc etc etc that a good SEO company will work on.

When people promise no effort, no site alteration results, be suspicious.

Here’s some alarm bell generators:

Keyword meta-tags - “armed only with some keywords in the meta tag, we will magically search optimise your site, propelling it to the top of the search engine rankings.”

If you’ve heard this one, you’re not alone, for this is the one I come across the most amongst small businesses and was the issue yesterday.

There is much debate about what (if any) value the keyword meta tag has. It has been declared completely dead by many in the SEO field, while others make perfectly valid demonstrations that it is still a factor for some search engines in some cases.The point is that is just one of hundreds of factors that may or may not influence rankings and never the only one.

If keyword tags are the only thing your SEO consultant is proposing, get more proposals or save your money and tinker yourself. This SEOmoz post gives you hints on choosing a good SEO vendor and this post by Eric Enge has tips on how to spot the bad ones.

Tricks and naughty stuff that will make search engines frown

Keywords stuffing, whited out text, junk links, cloaking, nonsense content that clearly isn’t written for people - this is the world of bad SEO and your business will most likely suffer as a result.

This article has Top 10 Google Dont’s - things you (or for that matter your paid supplier) should never do for search engine optimisation, while this post from the Tri-city commerce group Web Development blog is a good round up on Avoiding common SEO rip offs.

It may sound tedious, but I think the most useful thing you can do is try and educate yourself just a little on SEO (a resource list is at the end of the post). If people are trying to exploit your lack of awareness, a little bit of knowledge will help protect you from the bulk of the ignorant and ignoble!

2. You cannot ignore search engine optimisation

Just because “there be dragons”, that doesn’t mean hiding is an option that will help your long term business survival. As I mentioned in the last post, just 25% of traffic typically arrives at your website through the home page - the rest come deep in, via search. Google alone drives nearly 40% of all UK Internet traffic.

Jupiter Research and iProspect’s Blended search results study shows that appearing on page one of the search engine results is now more important than ever:

“The data indicates that more search engine users click the first page in 2008 (68%) as compared to than in 2006 (62%), 2004 (60%) and 2002 (48%). Inversely, fewer search engine users are willing to click results past the third page in 2008 (8%) as compared to 2006 (10%), 2004 (13%) and 2002 (19%).

So more than ever, it is vital for search marketers to ensure that their digital assets appear within the first three pages of search results, and especially on page one.”

I’m actually surprised their data finds that many people making it past page one. I saw usability expert Jakob Nielsen presenting a few week back and his eye tracking data was showing that only a tiny fraction of people even made it below the fold of the first page (people basically do not bother, or do know know how to scroll). He also found that if they don’t get the results they need on the first page above the fold (that could only be 3 organic results in a highly competitive paid earch environment) they simply refine their search and try again, rather than bother to scroll or go to page 2 or 3 of the results.

You are only going to appear on those search terms for which your page or site is the most relevant. How do you get onto that front page? Well you either pay your way there through paid search marketing, or you optimise your way there to pull in “free” traffic. Your budget will determine whether you outsource that optimisation process, or whether it is another of your critical DIY web tasks.

3. Universal and blended search is changing the playing field

Google has designed Universal Search to present search engine results in all forms of media including video, photos, PDF files, maps, and news items, all in one result page. “Blended search” is what they call Universal Search when it’s by anyone but Google.

I saw search guru Mike Grehan speaking at the London eMetrics Summit last week and he was talking about vertical creep - essentially how Google’s univeral search results are pushing the organic results down below the fold of page 1 (into nowheresville).

As you can see in the image below, on my laptop, if I search for Edinburgh hotels on Google, there is now only one old style organic result above the fold - the organic hotspot to be for tourism businesses now is beside the map that dominates the page (and the eyeballs)!

The impact is that there is even tighter competition for the organic search spots on page 1 and tools like videos, images and map placement have a roll in that.

Add if you’re not on the map you can add your business free over at the Google business center - its simple and worth the effort.

4. Relevance, relevance, relevance

Ultimately a search engine’s ongoing success is dependent on it delivering to its users the best, most relevant results for the terms they are searching on. The search engine is looking for pages that are relevant to the searcher.

If your pages are well tailored to your specific customers’ needs, using the vocabulary they use and answering the specific problems they are facing, better search results will be a side effect.

Optimising for your customers (ie real human beings) mustn’t be swept away in the quest for search rankings - because once you win a visitor from a search engine, you next need to ensure that person can do what they came for (and what your site exists for).

5. Paying for a click is not the same as paying for a customer

If you pay £1 per click for paid search advertising, and 99 out of 100 people immediately turn around and leave your site without doing anything else, you are paying £100 not £1 for a potential customer. If only 1 person in 1000 actually does want you want them to - say buy a ticket - then that customer is costing you £1000.

Whether you are working on paid search marketing or organic search engine optimisation, judge your success not in terms of how many people click into your site, but by how many people come and then do what you want them to.

It is a waste of money if you use paid search adverts to drive people to pages that are not relevant to their needs, because they will turn around and leave again. Likewise, with organic search, you can have highly attractive content that pulls many people into your site (a game or giveaway for example) - but if none of those people actually convert into doing what your site exists for, is that really a success?

Importance of measuring your website

There is no need to only take someone else’s word for what is working and what isn’t - the web analytics tools are there that will let you see end results in terms of uplifted sales (or other conversions) for yourself.

Some elements of search are shrouded in mystery (the mythical components of Google’s algorithm for one!) However, “is this working for my business?” does not need to be one of those mysteries. I will follow up with a specific post on how web analytics can help you understand how your web visitor’s search.

In the meantime, here are some resources to help:

• A detailed beginner’s guide to search engine optimisation from SEOmoz
• Wikipedia on the subject
• A Plea to Stop Treating SEO as an Afterthought
• Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine
• How Search Engines Work
• How Search Engines Rank Web Pages
• Why the Vast Majority of SEOs No Longer Target Individual Search Engines