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

Thursday, 5th June, 2008

Don’t be ripped off by the search scoundrels - 5th June, 2008

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.

SEO rabbits in hats? 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: