This week’s post is going to delve into the specifics of what it takes to market a tour business online. You may have read our last post “Getting online with an online marketing strategy: a case study”, which provided a simple, 3-tiered high level online marketing plan. Well today we will focus on Step 1 of the plan only and give you a real-life example of how search engine optimisation can make or break a business (we had to change names for obvious reasons)!

Before we get started… let’s see how your tour business compares to other Australian competitors…

Benchmarking your tour business against Australian competitors

Step 1: Attracting visitors to your website

Situation

It isn’t a secret anymore: if you have a website but aren’t optimising its content for search you missing out on a really cost effective marketing tactic which leaves you relying on costly marketing channels such as AdWords.

Your website is like a newly-opened shop. Unless there is signage and advertising it will remain the best kept secret. Only 50% of tour businesses in Australia invest in optimising their website for search which provides the other 50% a big competitive advantage!

Solution

One of the most cost-effective ways to ensure travellers find you on Google is to research the keywords your target market is likely to use and optimse your website for those keywords. This is the first step to showing on Google and attracting the type of visitors that are most likely to book your product. This is one of the first steps of the discipline is called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). You can either:

• do this yourself (ATDW’s tourism ekit is a great place to start www.atdw.com.au/tourism_e_kit.asp)
• or engage the services of SEO professionals (starting at approximately $300 per month). Such services include Keyword Research and Link Building.

See it in action

This quick exercise will show you how it all works:

John’s bike tours

Let’s pretend that your business is called John’s bike tours and that you are selling bike tours in Airlie beach. You want to find out what keywords you should optimise your website for. Let’s say that your Search engine optimiser recommended the below keywords:

• bike tours airlie beach
• airlie beach bike tours
• airlie beach tours

Do you think they are accurate? How many people are searching on these keyword per month?

If you are not sure how people are finding your website take a look at the keywords in Google Analytics to see exactly what keywords people use. If the top 10 contain lots of brand related keywords it’s a signal you have an SEO problem because you want to attract more new customers not people that already know about your business.

How to get some visibility of what is happening to your business?

To assess if your SEO strategy is working you need to have visibility on at least 3 metrics:

1. Your real time rankings on Google for those keywords
2. How many visitors are you getting from each and every one of these keywords?
3. Last but not least – how many people are actually searching for these on a monthly basis?

The Digital Dashboard picks up where Google Analytics leaves off by providing visibility on all of these metrics. Here is a screenshot.

• The first column shows the keywords
• the next one (green) shows your rankings in Google for this keyword
• the next column  (purple) shows the number of visits to the website
• finally, the local searches column (yellow) shows how many people search for these keywords, in Australia, on a monthly basis. This is the opportunity.

So what’s the verdict?

• The keyword to go for is “airlie beach bike tours” as there are over 5,000 people actively searching for it per month.
• How are you ranking for it? Well, you are in position 15, that means on page 2 of Google and you only received 15 out of 5,400 potential visits. Not good
•  If you were the owner of John’s bike tours would you be happy with this ranking? Most definitely not.

Finally, I haven’t mentioned the competition column. There is no point optimising for keywords which are too competitive, for example if each of the top 3 spots in Google have hundreds of links pointing to their website and you only have a few then you may need to reconsider which keyword to target. Our keyword research identifies the no-go keywords before you waste time trying to optimise for them…

Next week we will look into enticing your visitors to buy on their first visit of your website…

For any business that is wanting to market themselves in the current social and online environment, communication and content creation is inevitable and becoming a close to daily task as there are so many different actions that need to be taken. Each week you will be (if not yet you definitely should be) completing some of the following:

• Updating your website
• Writing posts and responding to comments on Facebook or Twitter
• Sending an email newsletter
• Creating a listing on ATDW and other distribution sites
• Creating a media release
• Collecting and publishing testimonials
• Advertising upcoming and existing promotions
• Updating and managing a blogging or content marketing strategy

Each of the above tactics aren’t simple one step processes, you need to plan, schedule, create, publish, monitor and update each of them and that takes a lot of work and leaves you asking questions about when you are possibly going to get enough time in your already too busy day to do these things. This is where your communication calendar comes in.

What is a communication calendar?

A communication calendar is a very simple to use tool that will take the stress and panic out of completing the relatively new tasks that come along with running a business.

In its simplest form a communication calendar can be a section within your daily diary, an appointment in your online calendar, a purposely created excel spreadsheet or even a timeline list of points on a page. No matter which structure your communication calendar takes you need to:

1. Brainstorm topics that you could speak about
2. Determine what type of lead in and follow up can be formed around the topic/ publishing time
3. Find creative/ out of the ordinary ways to use publishing tools and your audience to fill any gaps or low traffic time you experience
4. Consider online, offline and traditional media. i.e. If you have an upcoming event do you need to create media releases, posts on social media accounts, a blog post, website updates and pamplets and signage
5. Determine the best publish time and how this fits in with your internal strategies
6. Determine the best tool to publish your content i.e. Is the topic best suited to social media or your blog
7. Determine who will be creating and publishing the content

The main aims of a communication calendar are to take the time sucking element out of content creation by doing your planning up front and to ensure that your strategy does not go by the wayside as you get busy. By taking the time to answer the 7 questions above at the beginning when the time comes you will already have a structure, action plan and the ability to get the most value from your effort.

How we utilise our communication calendar

A sample from the Untanglemyweb communication calendar

Our internal communication calendar is created on an excel spreadsheet, on this sheet we have a calendar view set out with each week containing a row for our main publishing channels: Facebook, Blog, Twitter, Linked In, Flickr, Newsletter, PR and Tutorials, we also have a row for the related product/ service/ topic we are focussing on.

Once we make the decisions of what we would like to publish we add the planning, creation, publishing and monitoring into the applicable row at the time we plan on completing it, this is how we build out our communication calendar to ensure we get the most from our content strategies.

No matter which form you follow to create your communication calendar it is a matter of sitting down (by yourself or with a group if you are a team) and discussing topics, initiatives and upcoming events that you would like to speak about.

When we do this we work through our shortlist and decide when would be most suitable for each item; if we have a workshop coming up we schedule posts to go out a number of weeks and days before as well as after to follow up how the attendees went. We schedule in time to create and send Media Releases and we schedule in time to publish the workshop presentation and resources for download after the event. This fully populated communication calendar then becomes our go to resource to schedule in task outside of our daily operational and client support duties.

Deciding what needs to go into your communication calendar

When planning your posts try asking some of the following questions:

• What local and regional events are coming up?
• Are we fully booked for certain periods but empty for others? Can we offer a special deal for these periods?
• Are we planning offers/ packages with other businesses? When will we be telling people about this? When will we update the website to match? Should we notify the media of this?
• Do we have existing content on our website that we want people to visit?
• What are we currently planning that we could ask for feedback on? i.e. Are we planning acts for next years event?
• What expertise do we have that we can share with our readers?
• What are the niche elements of our target market that our existing content doesn’t cater for

Acting on your communication calendar

Once you have planned what you are going to publish and when, you need to make it common practice to review your communication calendar and complete the items you have written in your new ‘to do list’.

If your calendar isn’t too busy make a set time every Monday to review what needs to be done this week and plan that into your normal activities, if your calendar is a bit busier schedule a review a few times a week so you don’t forget what you have planned. Once you have completed something cross it off or highlight it, this will be your way of monitoring your plans as opposed to what actually gets completed and may be your proof of requiring an additional resource to help you.

If you are looking to take your time saving and planning to another level you can use a tool such as Hootsuite, Social Oomph or other social media scheduling tools to not only plan in advance but write and schedule your posts to automatically publish at a time specified by you.

Don’t think though that just because you have a communication calendar you have to stop spontaneous posting, if something pops up that you think would be a great opportunity for your business still publish it as you usually would.

During the workshop Adam and Moe (Mohammed) covered the essentials of content marketing including the main workshop topics of:

1. What is content marketing
2. How does content marketing impact my business
3. What is a content marketing strategy
4. How to create a content marketing strategy for my business
5. What is successful content
6. How to create successful content

As part of our commitment to workshop attendees the presentation was formatted to answer a number of questions that workshop attendees submitted to us prior to the event. These questions, along with a variety of on the spot questions were answered and explained to ensure attendees walked away with a solid understanding of content marketing and a framework that they can use to implement one in their own business.
Discussions with attendees of the workshop highlighted the main takeout points of the workshop to be:

• content marketing is beneficial for your business in more ways than one, done correctly content marketing can reduce other marketing costs
• content marketing doesn’t have to be a complex process, simple planning and a well structured content marketing strategy can make it a simple task
• content shouldn’t be written once and ‘thrown away’, it should be re-used, submitted to a variety of sites and shared for maximum exposure
• content marketing should have an aim and clearly defined desired outcomes
• content marketing is a great way to boost your website’s SEO. It is a great way to rank for new and extended keywords and rank better for existing keywords
• a good website with an easy to use CMS will help make writing content easier
• there are great tools available for people who want to optimise their content themselves
• people who don’t have the time or resources to write content can use copywriting services from a professional
• using a guest writer is a great way to source content from other experts in the field
• you can use creative commons images to support your content as long as it allows and you attribute the image to the owner
• measuring the success and impacts of your content is just as important as creating it
• you need to write content for different stages of the purchasing process

It’s one thing to say you want to be at the top of Google, increase website traffic and blow away the competition, but when it comes down to it, you will never know just how well you are doing, if what you are doing is worthwhile and if your money is well spent unless you are tracking your actual website traffic compared to your potential website traffic.

Finding your potential website traffic from Google’s organic results

I am sure many of you have already seen this, but for those who haven’t the data is staggering. Using trend analysis, Optify has found the following usage statistics for Google and the web traffic received from each level of the page:

CTR = Click Through Rate, the amount of times the website in each position was clicked on directing the viewer to the linked page

Yes you saw right, the number 1 position on Google receives 36.4% of the web traffic for the searched term, and the further down you get the less and less traffic you are receiving, while we all covet the number one page on Google the true way to increase website traffic is to climb higher up the page towards the number 1 and 2 spots .

Applying Google’s Organic CTR to your business

Lets picture the following scenario: You manage holiday apartments on the Gold Coast and you want to increase website traffic from Google. You have had an seo analysis report and keyword research completed and from this you have found that your number one term to optimise your site for is Gold Coast Holiday Apartments. According to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool the term has 720 monthly searches (using the exact match traffic), so in the grand scheme of things you assume landing anywhere on the first page in Google for this term will land you visitors and the phone will be ringing go off the hook (that’s what you may have thought before seeing the above statistics).

Now consider this, you find your website is currently ranking on page 3 so your SEO agency uses an SEO tool to increase your position and you land on the first page in Google, your ranking at position 8! – you are ecstatic only you still aren’t getting as much traffic as you had first thought.

Let’s calculate what has just happened; you have moved from page 3 (i.e no-wheres-ville) receiving less than 1% of searchers (7.2 people per month) and now you are at position 8 on the first page – you are now getting 3.5% (25.2 visitors per month), it’s a nice little jump of an extra 18 people. Unfortunately though, this is as far as it often goes, you don’t keep climbing the page because that is all your contract committed too (i.e. 15 keywords on page 1 for $500 a month), or as far as your SEO agency tells you they can go with your current website.

Knowing the statistics we’ve provided above, you now know that based on the term Gold Coast holiday apartments, you could increase your web traffic by up to 30.9%, that’s 222.48 website visitors per month, from one keyword term alone! Don’t forget though that once you get them to the site you need to battle the silent rejection – you can read that one next

Now, without knowing your current position, how much web traffic it’s generating, the best position you could be in (#1) and the potential web traffic you could receive, it would be forgivable for you to think that once you have landed on page 1 your job is done, but alas..

Using a Digital Dashboard to manage your SEO strategy

You need to keep reaching for the number one position and that takes a lot of effort: keyword research, link building, potentially using an SEO copywriter to include your keywords throughout your site content (or our awesome SEO wizard that is integrated in the Smart Tourism Website), an ongoing content strategy, social media marketing to increase the credibility of your business and most of all, tracking to ensure that all of the effort and money you are spending is actually working.

It’s a lot of work to do, and to really maximise your website you should be using a powerful SEO tool and doing this for each and every one of your keywords, or paying an SEO agency a sum of money to do this for you, either way you go, you need an easy to use digital dashboard to ensure that your positions are climbing for all of your keywords (or that you are very much aware if your positions are going down and why this may be).

Over the last few months we have been working with an SEO analysis and social media monitoring tool to track the rankings of some of our clients, this tool is separate from any SEO agency and is available to everyone. The digital dashboard takes into consideration:

• your keywords
• where you are ranking for Google, Bing and Google Places (yes they do impact click through rates)
• how much traffic is actually coming to your site (using your Google Analytics data)
• the bounce rate of the page that searchers are landing on
• your inbound links to that page (and dropped links)
• your potential traffic
• your page optimisation score
• and what you need to put in place to optimise your pages.

Take a look at the above screen shot of an account we are tracking, this business has just started with another SEO agency and wanted to track the success of the optimisation via our digital dashboard. As you can see they are gaining very little traffic from their top keywords and at the moment are struggling online, as the keyword optimisation and SEO strategy for this business kicks in, we will be monitoring to ensure that all of the top keywords are improving in current rankings and traffic, and as part of our fortnightly review sessions with them we will be giving recommendations on how they can work to improve terms themselves and other online marketing strategies they should be implementing – all of which we can tell from reading their digital dashboard results.

Without going into too much details on how the digital dashboard also takes into consideration social media and dropped or picked up backlinks, I really wanted to show the importance of such a tool for your business; it is quite literally the best tool that you can have to make decisions about your website, marketing and online business practices. Make sure you measure your efforts in regards to not only what has been done so far but what else is available for your business and don’t stop until you reach the top or are so busy you are booked out for the next 12 months!

If you would like more information on the SEO dashboard that we use, or would like to discuss how such a dashboard can work for your business, simply enter your details below and we will be more than happy to book in a time and discuss it with you.

You could also check out this video (it’s 13 mins but very comprehensive and you get to see all of the ins and outs of the dashboard).

In summary: don’t just start an SEO strategy and let it run on it’s own, back up all of your money and effort with a comprehensive digital dashboard so you can keep track of your results and make educated business decisions.