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If there is one company that is synonymous with the web, it’s Google. So popular has the search engine become that the word has entered common English parlance and, according to market research company Hitwise, seven out of 10 people searching for something online now ‘Google it’.
Google’s rise has gone hand in hand with the expansion of the web, demonstrating how important accurate and quick searches have become as the amount of information out there in cyberspace seems to mutiply daily.
It also underlines how essential it is to make sure your company appears high up on the search results if you are selling a product online, such as travel.
In fact, Hitwise has found that one in three visits to travel sites come from a search engine – making search the most important source of visits for travel websites.
Companies serious about appearing at the top of searches via Google and other leading search engines, such as Yahoo, MSN and Ask Jeeves, spend a lot of time and money honing their websites so they get picked when someone punches the right phrase or word in the box or, as they say in the trade, performs a ‘natural search’.
According to Rowan Wilkinson, technical marketing analyst at travel website consultancy Netizen, this practice, which is known technically as search engine optimisation, works by having relevant content on your website and creating links between your website and other relevant websites, bringing a new meaning to the phrase well-connected.
The other way to get noticed on searches is to pay to have your website put in a prominent position when a certain phrase or word is searched for. How much you pay depends on the popularity of the search term you want to be identified with.
For example, the search term ‘cheap hotels in Paris’ will be far more expensive to buy than ‘Buddhist retreats in Estonia’ because the former is much more popular.
Sites that have paid for a prominent position are displayed on a separate area of the results page. In the case of Google they appear on the right-hand side under the heading Sponsored Links.
Every time someone clicks on your link you must pay Google your agreed fee, which is usually anything between 1p and £1. This business model is known as pay-per-click.
The relative merits of each approach were the topic of conversation at a Travel Technology Initiative event called Search – the New Travel Distribution Channel last month. First to speak was Google UK head of travel Daniel Robb, who produced research from US financial consultancy Piper Jaffrey that showed pay-per-click generates sales leads at a cost of $0.45 a lead compared with direct mail that costs $9.95 for every interested customer unearthed. “Search is 22 times more efficient than direct mail,” he said.
However, pay-per-click can get pricey, according to Len Wright, managing director of online hotel website Openroads.com
He said: “Pay-per-click gives me maximum control over the position of my site on search engines. I can decide where I want to be day-to-day but it can get expensive.”
Wright advises companies to use a mixture of both natural search and pay-per-click.
Pay-per-click can be used when, for example, a company is running a promotion and wants as many people as possible to know about it in a short time. Tweaking your site for success from natural search will ensure a steady wave of customers.
However, Wright is keen to stress that a natural search strategy can also be costly if a company decides to put a lot of time and resources behind it.
But, said Peter Gould, chief executive officer of Great Hotels Organisation, which offers more than 3,000 hotels on its various sites, customers trust the results thrown up by natural search much more than they do the paid-for results. Gould said 95% of his search budget goes into developing natural search results.
He is also concerned that if companies rely too much on pay-per-click they will find themselves held hostage by the search engines who could raise their prices at any time.
Gould is adamant developing a search engine optimisation strategy based predominantly on natural searches is the only sensible long-term plan.
“But don’t expect quick results. It is a slow process and getting slower,” he said.
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Expert advice
Netizen’s technical marketing analyst Rowan Wilkinson explains how natural search works:
“To achieve a reasonable search engine ranking today, particularly in a competitive industry like travel, you need a site that has both enough popularity to get itself noticed, while also maintaining relevance to the searcher’s query.
“The major search engines judge a site’s popularity by the quantity and quality of other sites that link to it. A link from a site that is popular in its own right carries more weight than a link from a less popular site.
“Incoming links can also have an impact on a site’s relevance. For instance, a link from another travel site will increase relevancy for travel searches. The clickable ‘anchor text’ of the link carries weight too, so if you can make it ‘holiday villas in Turkey’ instead of ‘click here’ then do so.
“However, unlike popularity, relevancy can be significantly affected by on-site factors such as quality, topical content with your targeted keywords sprinkled throughout and keyword-rich anchor text for internal links.”
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The lowdown on natural search
Great Hotels Organisation CEO Peter Gould gives his do’s and don’ts of natural search
DO:
- Use a specialist search agency to advise you
- Build your site with search as the first priority. What it looks like should be second
- Be content-rich with loads of good, original copy
- Look to include lots of relevant quality links
- Know that 80% of your successful searches will come from 20% of phrases
DON’T:
- Be half-hearted about it. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing properly
- Think it’s a cheap option – it’s the good value option
- Expect quick results – it’s slow and getting slower
- Stop working at it – it’s a critical job and will pay dividends
