Hit Riddle

Part of a series of How To articles on using online travel content for effective search engine marketing.

By now we have established the importance of social media interactions with your content for your website’s visibility in personalised social-search results, and covered the methods for developing and publishing content that is great enough to be shared.

Unfortunately simply publishing great material on your site and integrating it with social media platforms is not always enough for your visitors to consider sharing or interacting with it. Sometimes your readers will need a little more encouragement.

You can do this by using Calls To Action (CTAs) on or around your social media buttons and functions and making overt suggestions for why and how people can share or interact.

The trick is to tap in to the various motives and incentives that may encourage people to share your content using different social platforms. This isn’t easy, and it boils down to the nature of your own specific audience. You know best what makes your clients tick, what they are looking for and what might excite them.

You need to use this throughout your site to facilitate higher rates of social media interaction. You must also bear in mind the different nature of each social media platform, and what they are most commonly used for.

Some examples:

An OTA targeting younger travellers with adventure style, lower cost trips might place a CTA above the Like button on a tour page that says: “Excited? Share your travel plans with your friends!”

A provider of group tours with cheaper rates for larger groups might encourage people that “Larger groups = more fun and lower prices! Share this tour now!”

A flight or hotel price comparison and booking engine might encourage visitors: “Found a deal? Share the knowledge!”

A specialist in cultural experiences that has invested in insightful, detailed museum and gallery guides could suggest that their site visitors “Are these guides useful? Tweet them to your followers.”

If you’re publishing regular travel tips, deals or other insights that people might want to “subscribe” to, you should put a Google+ button next to your RSS and email icons and suggest that visitors “Add us to your Google+ circles to receive our latest updates.”

Whatever the precise wording you use, be mindful of the following key rules:

• Consider the nature of the social platform in question. Facebook, Twitter and Google+ audiences are not all necessarily the same.
• Customise your CTA according to the specific page and nature of each piece of content. Ask visitors to do different things with your content, depending on what it is.
• Make sure your pages are properly integrated with each search social media platform using their guidance.

Get in touch with us now if you need more help and assistance with your travel content strategy.

Part of a series of How To articles on using online travel content for effective search engine marketing.

While previous guides have concerned content development strategy, this article will explain best practices for integrating cutting-edge content on your site with your social media profiles.

This is extremely important to optimize in order to enjoy the full benefits from the interactions your site visitors make with your content and ensure they all contribute to improved visibility in personalised social-search results.

There are a number of implementation guidelines for the three major social platforms, Facebook, Google+ and Twitter.

Facebook: Facebook’s integration platform is called the Open Graph Protocol. This is a powerful tool that allows programmers and developers to integrate with Facebook’s data and user base in a vast number of ways. Long gone are the days of sticking a “Like” button on your home page. These days you must consider how to properly integrate your content within the Facebook ecosystem, using the Open Graph Protocol.

The starting point is to think of each page, or even elements within each page as potential objects within the Facebook world. The idea is to find ways of integrating those objects with your visitors’ Facebook profiles as effectively as possible.

Again, this goes way beyond collecting “Likes” on the page. Not all Facebook updates are displayed to all users. Facebook uses an algorithm called Edge Rank to decide which updates should be shown in each user’s News Feed, and which updates should be filtered out. The more interactions an update has, the more change it will be displayed to more users. Improving the number and quality of your interactions increases the Edge Rank of each object:

• Shares – Facebook shares carry more Edge Rank weight, and are more likely to appear in peoples’ News Feeds. Adding a Share button, (rather than a Like button) makes that interaction more likely.
• Comments – comments also carry more weight. Integrating Facebook comments onto your own site will allow people to comment on your content, both on your site and on Facebook.

Facebook offers a wealth of guidance and specific coding instructions on the countless ways you can integrate your site. This guide on Building Conversation gives a useful introduction to the possibilities. Once you’ve decided what routes you want to take, have your developer check this page for Facebook plugin code.

Google+: In many ways, Google’s social platform operates along similar lines to Facebook, in that users recommend and share your content via Google+, which then impacts your visibility in personalised search results. However, there is one key difference: clicking +1 on a piece of content does not automatically make you a follower of the site’s Google+ profile. Instead, users will have to actually visit your Google+ profile and choose to put you into one of their circles.

This places even more emphasis on the importance of publishing great travel content, as people will not choose to follow you unless you truly deserve it. You can only interact with people on Google+ if they have added you to one of their circles.

Aside from that, integrating with Google+ is relatively easy. Create a profile if you haven’t already, and then get the simple code you need to place a +1 button on whichever pages you choose. Remember, if you want people to add you to their circles, you will also need another badge linking them to your Google+ profile.

For more control over how your page is integrated with Google+ and how your pages are displayed to other Google+ users, use this advanced coding.

Twitter: Although the impact of Tweets on search rankings is less direct than Google+ and Facebook/Bing, there is absolutely no doubt that they help with faster indexing of content and as a major social signal to the search engines. For this reason you should make sure visitors can easily and effectively share your content to their Twitter followers.

Like the previous two platforms, Twitter offers a number of “out of the box” buttons that are easy to add to any webpage in order to a) share your content and b) amass more Twitter followers for your own profile.

However you can also use this advanced documentation to take more control over the way the buttons are displayed and the way your content appears when shared. As with all platforms, improving the presentation of your content is the second best way to encourage further sharing and interactions. Second to publishing extraordinary travel content in the first place, of course.

Get in touch for more details or assistance with your travel content development strategy.

Part of a series of How To articles on using online travel content for effective search engine marketing.

By now you should be familiar with the concept of content performance as a key ranking factor (and if you’re not, you should sign up for news of our upcoming ebook.) The idea is that the performance of your content will directly influence your rankings and exposure on social-search engines, and therefore your traffic, leads and business growth.

This is great because it makes your entire content development strategy 100% measurable, allowing you to determine the true Return On Investment for all the work that you put in. Here are some of the key metrics that you should be monitoring:

On-Site Visitor Behaviour: Track changes to your bounce rate, average time on site and the number of pages visited per session. Don’t just monitor your site average as this is only a very headline figure that doesn’t offer much use. Instead track the data for each section or category of your site, plus important individual pages.

Remember: search engines are using this data to determine the “worth” of your content. It is important you constantly strive to improve your content to improve these figures.

Social Media Interactions: Do not fall into the trap of considering social interactions as a goal or conversion in their own right, as a rule they are not. But they are an important metric that contributes to your overall content performance. Use these guidelines on tracking and monitoring social interactions with your content. Again, be sure to make a granular assessment of different categories and sections, so you can truly understand which parts of your site are underperforming.

Social Influences On Search: Personalised search results mean that different people see different results, depending on what sites their friends and networks have been sharing, recommending and interacting with. Fortunately Google Webmaster Tools offers a way of monitoring how Google +1’s influence your results on Google. As for Facebook Likes/Shares/Comments and their impact on Bing search results, it’s a trickier one to monitor as the two platforms are not formally integrated. But using the above guidelines will at least allow you to track Facebook interactions with your content, if not their direct impact on search results.

Traffic & Leads: This is a big one; the main factor that the above points all contribute towards. By accumulating enough of the positive content performance data outlined above, your site will earn extra exposure on social-search engines, generate more traffic and ultimately more leads. The different elements you should be monitoring are:

• Organic, non-branded traffic: i.e. all the people who arrive to your site via an organic search, excluding any keywords that reference your brand name.
• Leads generated by organic non-branded traffic.
• Referral traffic and leads sent from the main social platforms; Facebook, Google+ and Twitter.
• If you have an e-commerce site and can track revenue, then you should obviously do so, for all revenue generated by the above sources.

Sales: It goes without saying that the bottom line measurement of ROI is the impact that the social-search channel has on sales and revenue. Using Google Analytics, E-commerce travel businesses with booking and payment engines in their sites can effectively and cleanly measure complete ROI, right from traffic source to sale & revenue. This makes it very easy to calculate the final ROI:

ROI = [(Revenue - Investment)/Investment]*100

• Your investment would include everything you have spent on content development and publication across all your online platforms (your website, social media, etc).
• Your revenue would include all sales generated by the entire social-search channel (the search engines & social media sites).

Those without E-commerce functionality built in to their site will find it more difficult to track this data in a precise and scientific way, but there are a few work-arounds:

• Measure social-search traffic value as equivalent PPC spend: use your web analytics tools to determine how much your social-search traffic would have cost on Adwords or another PPC campaign.
• Take the average conversion rate and average sale value to (roughly) estimate the revenue generated by social-search.

From there you can apply the same ROI calculation to create a reasonable idea of how well your social-search channel is paying off.

Some Other Important Considerations:

• Take The Long View: Unlike PPC, the social-search channel is a long term investment and if you maintain your investment your return will begin to develop exponentially.
• Be Aware Of Seasonality: Don’t just measure traffic and leads on a month-to-month basis as this will not show you annual variations in demand for travel to your destinations. You should also look at the annual view to compare current performance to the same time last year.
• Something To NOT Bother Tracking: Keyword rankings, for so long the mainstay of SEO monitoring, are fast becoming out-dated and useful only as a rough indicator of progress. Personalised search means that everyone will start to see different results when they search for any given keyword. This means that the results your ranking software generates are simply one version of an almost infinite number of possibilities, and therefore not particularly useful for determining the impact of your content development & social media strategy. The previous metrics will all prove much more useful in assessing ROI.

Combine these factors into your regular reporting cycle and you will start to create a clear picture of the true Return On Investment for your content development work. Get in touch with us for more information or assistance.

Part of a series of How To articles on using online travel content for effective search engine marketing.

In previous guides we’ve looked at segmenting content according to audiences and channels, and how to create effective online content, i.e. content that performs highly by keeping visitors on your site and eliciting shares and interactions via social media tools. This article will explore some more specific ideas for travel content that may benefit your site visitors and therefore improve your site’s content performance signals.

Hotels, Itineraries And Other Descriptions: This is the section of your site that is the most commercially focused. Here you are describing your services in a way that is compelling enough for a prospect to become a lead or a customer. Many travel sites, especially smaller tour operators and OTAs, stumble even at this most obvious hurdle. Thin day-by-day itineraries, vague descriptions, bland lists of inclusions, scant detail on destinations and activities, are all hugely common throughout the industry.

This presents two obvious problems: firstly, this content is unlikely to convert many visitors into leads. Secondly visitors are much less likely to interact with this kind of content than they would with inspiring, enjoyable and interesting content.

A professionally written tour description, including rich, layered detail on destinations and experiences from a journalist who has actually been there is much more likely to convert visitors into leads. Furthermore, if the content is genuinely good enough, the visitors might even be moved to read more, remain on the site, visit other pages and possibly even share the page with their friends on social networks.

Travel is often an aspirational purchase; it carries a huge amount of emotional investment and forms a significant element of the consumer’s lifestyle choices and identity (this is the same reason people love to show all their holiday photos to their friends and family when they get home). Great content can engage with that, and give travellers a reason to be proud, excited or otherwise engaged. A stunningly attractive, richly detailed tour page is precisely the kind of thing many people would be willing to share on Facebook – think “Click Like now to share your vacation plans with your friends!” These are the interactions that your site needs to start accumulating for future success.

First-Person Dispatches & Trip Reports: First-person travel journalism forms the bedrock of the entire travel writing genre and it offers a huge opportunity for you to engage with site visitors, convert more leads and boost your site’s content performance.

Although there are a vast number of wannabe travel writers who assume otherwise, first-person travel writing is a difficult thing to get right. Bad travel writing simply recalls places and things in a chronological list of experiences. Great travel writing puts the reader in the journalist’s boots, sharing the author’s senses and emotions and giving a feel for what it was actually like to be there.

Unfortunately the web is full of staid first-person stories that simply recall “first we did X, then we did Y” and rely on old clichés (“breath taking scenery” “rich cultural heritage” and all the rest, with thanks to this great list from the Grumpy Traveller).

Instead you must begin to publish great, professional-standard travel journalism on your site. The ideal place for it is on a blog. If you’re going to publish enough of it you should create an individual blog just for this purpose. Use it for trip reports and dispatches from professional, in-country writers to help inspire travel planners and give them something engaging and entertaining to read and share while on your site.

You can also use the same space for trip reports from your own clients, as a form of enhanced testimonial. This works wonders with reassuring new potential clients and converting traffic into leads.

Guide-Style Destination Info: Remembering the main point of the previous guide on creating effective online travel content, the trick is to provide purposeful content that people will find genuinely useful. Nowhere is this more appropriate than with travel guide information.

The size of the travel guide market gives an indication of the demand for reliable travel information from experts who truly know their stuff. You should find opportunities to fill that demand on your website. One suitable channel would be in short, blog-style articles from in-country writers: restaurant recommendations, new museum openings, how-to guides, hotel reviews, and so on.

Another option is to commission detailed, high quality guides that your site visitors can read for inspiration and travel planning, as well as to download and take with them when they travel.

In both instances, if your content is sufficiently purposeful and useful, it will generate the positive content performance signals your site needs.

Special Interest Writing: You know your clients better than anyone else. What kind of interests are you catering for? Budget travel, family-friendly trips, high-end experiential travel? Culture and art, food and drink, archaeology and history, architecture, photography, the list goes on. In each instance you can find opportunities to fill an information gap that your site visitors will find useful.

Images & Video: Although slightly more difficult and expensive (when done correctly) video is a hugely powerful content tool that should be integrated into your site where possible. The same principles apply: create video that is purposeful and useful. Offer guidance, expertise, knowledge or entertainment – don’t simply self promote. If used properly you can generate huge amounts of traffic from YouTube and other video sharing platforms.

Likewise with images. Great pictures are widely shared on Flickr and Pintrest, and if you release your photos with a creative commons attribute that specifies your site as the source, each time the picture is re-used it will include a reference and link back to your site.

In each case, it is crucial to follow the golden rule: invest in creative and innovative content that serves a specific purpose, and it will reward your site by contributing to positive content performance. For help with sourcing the content you need, get in touch with us now.

Part of a series of How To articles on using online travel content for effective search engine marketing.

The new paradigm of search engine marketing is focused around social-search engines and the importance of high performance content. For the first time, “any old” content will not do; in order to succeed in search, the material you publish on your site must be effective in engaging and inspiring readers, encouraging them to stay on your site and interact with your content via social media tools.

Creating content that actually achieves these things is no easy task but approaching your content development strategy from the following perspectives may help. Alternatively, get in touch with us to talk about our professional online travel content services.

Create Content With A Purpose: The web is awash with low grade travel content that serves no purpose other than to fill up space, manipulate search rankings and give websites the pretence of being useful. (Do this Travel Content Health Check to ensure your site is junk free.)

All those “Top Ten” list articles you see online, those vague and unhelpful destination descriptions and the blog articles that read as though they were written by a computer programme, were all written without any purpose. Your job is to create content that does the exact opposite.

Aim to fill gaps in knowledge, answer the questions that are most commonly asked about your destinations (and then answer the questions that are almost never asked too). Think about what people want and need to know, and then give them exactly that.

Does anyone really care about the Top Ten Family Travel Accessories? Probably not. But they might be very interested to hear a few good family-friendly hotel and restaurant recommendations in Paris, from an expert who actually knows what they’re talking about. (You can Google that article title if you don’t believe me – there are thousands of them, and they’re probably all instantly forgettable space-filler.)

Example: Google the phrase “How to get to Machu Picchu”. The page you see in the first result was created as a direct response to one of the most frequently asked questions asked in the Peru tourism business. The page was designed as an information page to answer a specific question and captured a huge amount of search traffic in the process. It also helped harvest a large number of leads, as well as contributed to the site’s overall content performance and rankings. This is successful, purpose-driven content development.

Rock The Boat: When was the last time you read a bland, uninteresting article in a newspaper, saved it, and later recommended it to a friend? Never? So why expect people to do the same with bland, uninteresting articles online? If you want people to interact and recommend your content via social media you’re going to have to rock some boats and push some boundaries. In my previous incarnation as a digital marketing manager at a major travel agency the most successful blog article we ever wrote was on our tips for using travel to avoid killing yourself during the recession.

It sounds a bit out of place, perhaps even utterly tasteless, but it worked and the article generated more comments, shares and likes than anything else we’d written all year. These are the kind of interactions social-search engines are looking for, and by being slightly controversial you can create content that people will love and that search engines will reward.

Be Witty: Likewise, don’t shy away from injecting some humour into your content. Funny and entertaining quotes and images are among the most shared items on social media, especially Facebook and Twitter. Pictures are especially shareable, and carry extra weight on Facebook. Publishing amusing and entertaining content on your site will help you generate more much-needed social media shares and interactions.

Content that is genuinely useful, purposeful, controversial and entertaining will all help your site generate the positive content performance signals it needs to succeed into the future. Read the following guide on Different Types Of Travel Content for some specific content ideas, otherwise get in touch to discuss our online travel content solutions.

Part of a series of How To articles on using online travel content for effective search engine marketing.

Taking a strategic approach to travel content development is important. If you are going to make the effort and investment in high quality content you must keep your eye on both the final goals and the audience at all times, or otherwise risk wasting your investment by simply throwing expensive and professionally-crafted content at the wall and hoping that some of it sticks.

This is especially important in the travel industry, as things like seasonality, events, festivals, holidays, and other factors can all make important contributions to what you publish and when, which in turn will impact how your visitors interact with your content.

The following should help you develop a consistent strategy to your content development efforts:

Consider The Entire Buying Cycle: Travel is often a big-hit, infrequent purchase that involves a lot of emotional and financial investment from the consumer. It’s important to recognise the various stages that people may be on within the travel buying cycle and develop content that helps with each:

• Inspiration (offering ideas for future holiday plans)
• Research (giving more practical advice on destinations and activities, time of year to visit, etc)
• Location Decisions (engaging and helping travellers choose the right place to visit)
• Comparisons & pre-purchase (prices, hotels, operators and other options)
• Purchase (content that reassures, offers guarantees and other encouragement)
• Post-Sales (pre-trip planning, travel advice & guides, post-trip gathering of testimonials and positive reviews)
• Repeat Clients (maintaining contact, sharing new travel ideas and going back to step one)

It is important to make sure that your content development hits all these bases and displays an awareness of what people are looking for at each stage. See below for tips on how best to segment each group and comunicate with people in different stages.

Figure Out What Your Audience Wants/Needs: No one knows your clients better than your own people. Talk to your sales team and figure out what kind of information requests come up most frequently by your clients when they are planning their trip. What are the common uncertainties? Where are the frequent knowledge gaps? If you can fill these gaps with your content you will be able to engage and inspire travellers more easily.

Segment Your Channels: Once you’ve got into the habit of treating audiences individually and are thinking about the different types of information they want and need, you must then consider the best ways of reaching and communicating with them (also known as channels). For example, a lively and engaging first-person travel blog might be the best way to inspire someone at the very beginning of the buying cycle, detailed destination information would be more useful for the research stage, travel guides are ideal for the post-sales phase, and email newsletters and Facebook pages are great for maintaining contact with satisfied customers. The way you present these different types of content will have a huge impact on their success and contribution to your wider marketing goals.

Take Advantage Of Seasons And Events: Make sure the nature of your content reflects the seasonal trends of your destinations as well as any major events, holidays or festivals. For example, promoting Argentinean Patagonia in the months before winter makes little sense, as most of the region shuts down to tourism. On the other hand, this is the period immediately prior to peak booking season in Peru, so it would make sense to focus attention there. Events that are important enough to attract international visitors in their own right (Carnival in Rio for example) should definitely feature in your editorial plan, but be sure to cover them several months ahead of time in order to allow plenty of time for readers to plan and book a trip. (Of course, you should also cover them when they actually take place too!)

Create A Schedule: Once you’ve got a clear picture of your audience segments, channels and seasons, you should develop a content schedule that ties them all in together to create a firm plan for all the content you intend to develop and publish over the year. Depending on the size of your content development strategy, you can itemise your schedule down to the individual day, or even the time of day, to determine what you will publish, on which channels, who it is aimed at and what it is intended to achieve.

Grounding your content development strategy in an editorial plan will help you and your readers get the best return from your investment in great travel content. For more information on setting up your content development plan, contact us now.

Part of a series of How To articles on using online travel content for effective search engine marketing.

Before starting any search marketing campaign you should always be sure that your site and content are properly prepared and optimized in order to take full advantage of the investment you are about to make. If you begin a marketing campaign using sub-optimal content, you will inevitably waste a part of your investment. Get 100% value by implementing the following Content Performance Health Check.

Check For Webmaster Notifications: Both Google and Bing offer a suite of webmaster tools which provide various types of data on your site performance. The most important thing to check is whether you have received an official notification of problems with your site or content. If the search engines detect problems with your content and impose a penalty, they will usually inform you of that decision here.

Actions:

• If you haven’t already, consider registering for Google and Bing webmaster tools. Once your site is verified, check the messages section to see if there are any problems. If there are, you should address them immediately, or contact us for assistance.
• Check your content relevance, under the keywords section. This will show you what the search engines consider to be your site’s most relevant themes. Does it match up with your audience and services? If not, consider investing in more targeted and relevant content.
• While you’re here you can use the tools to identify other con-content related issues that may be affecting your site performance, such as crawl errors, HTML errors and internal links.

Identify Duplicate Content: Many online travel agencies, cruise retailers and other travel sites are built upon content provided by third party operators. Even if the content provided is of excellent standard, there is no guarantee that it hasn’t been shared with several other sites. If it has you are at risk of being penalised or filtered out of the search results for using duplicate content.

Actions:

• Run a quick Google search on several sentences from the suspect content. Search with and without “” marks on either side of the sentence to target precise matches and similar matches. Alternatively use CopyScape or similar to run a comprehensive search on your site content.
• If there are no matches move on to the next section. If there are matches consider re-writing your content or contact us to talk about our travel content services.

Check Content Performance Signals: Log in to your site analytics tools (usually Google Analytics) and check your site’s bounce rate, average time on site and number of pages visited per session. Note that overall site average figures are only useful as a very generic indicator. You will need to drill down into each section of your site to work out what parts are performing better than others.

Actions:

• Identify the main sections of your site, for example for an Online Travel Agency (OTA) they may be; home, tours, destinations, and hotels. Check the content performance for each to see if any particular section is doing significantly worse than the others. There are no standards for acceptable bounce rate or other metrics as they will vary according to your business type, audience, the nature of each page and how people are arriving and interacting with the pages. Take a benchmark of current performance and consider how you can use content development strategies to improve your metrics.
• These factors may also be influenced by other non-content related issues, such as the design or layout of your pages. Consider using Google Website Optimizer to improve the performance of specific page designs.

Identify “Un-Sharable” Content: If you already have social media buttons integrated with your content (check Integrating Content With Social Platforms for more info) you should benchmark your current performance in shares, Likes, +1′s and other social interactions. Note: this is not about measuring social media ROI, that comes later. At this stage we’re simply concerned with the frequency of interactions made with your content.

Actions:

• An easy, if rudimentary, way of gauging your social interactions is to just count the number of +1′s or Likes shown on each page. This will give you a baseline idea of curent performance which will suffice if you already know that your performance is very low/non existent.
• Or, if you have a large site with social buttons integrated onto many pages, or a high number of interactions across your site you will need to take a more scientific approach. Fortunately Google Analytics offers a way of tracking +1′s, as well as Facebook Likes and Twitter Tweets which will display performance data in the Analytics dashboard. It is worth setting this up before any large scale investment in content-social marketing in order to properly track these interactions.

Check Your Content “Quality”: This is less of an analytical judgement and more of a subjective assessment of your site content. Chances are, if the above factors are all negative, the reason will be something to do with the “quality” of your content. Quality is a subjective concept but there are at least some guidelines for the kind of thing the search engines are looking for:

Actions:

• Check Google’s content quality guidelines and understand the path that the world’s biggest search engine is taking. Although Google cannot (yet) directly measure your adherence to all of these guidelines, the fact is they are placing a massive emphasis on detailed, well-written, well-researched content that contributes something of value and interest to the web. Ask yourself honestly, does your content make the cut? If not, it’s time to start thinking about re-writing, or talk to us about our online travel content services.

Doing the groundwork and implementing these points will help ensure you have the solid foundations on which a successful content development strategy can be built.

Get in touch with us to talk about any of the above, or how we can help.

By Matthew Barker 

Google has recently announced a major new change in the way it organises its search results, bringing us one step closer to the future of “social search”, where search results are heavily influenced by the behaviour and interactions of your friends and networks on social media tools and platforms.

The social signals in question are shares and +1′s made on Google+, the search giant’s own social media tool and potential Facebook rival. In a nutshell, webpages or content that have been “plus-one’d” by your own friends and connections are now being highlighted within the normal search results pages.

It is all part of Google’s long-running mission of showing each user the most relevant and useful results possible. The thinking goes that if your friends and family like something, the chances are you will like it too. Or, in Google’s own words:

We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships.

This is one of many steps in the long walk towards truly social search. As search engine technology becomes ever more advanced, they will be using signals like these to determine the popularity and usefulness of each website. After all, if hundreds or thousands of individuals recommend a certain page using Facebook, Google+, Twitter, etc, the page must be doing something right, and therefore deserves to be more prominent in search results pages.

Social signals like these will become one of the most important ranking signals of the very near future, and to achieve success in this new landscape means taking a very different view of our websites and the kind of content we put on them.

Think of a social interaction (be it a “Like, “Tweet, “+1″ or any other form of interaction) as a real-world recommendation. Users are reading your content and are recommending it to their friends. To elicit this kind of reaction, your content must be truly top-notch. It’s not often people go out of their way to recommend newspaper or magazine articles to their friends – it has to be extraordinarily interesting first. The same now applies to website content. Your site must be filled with extraordinarily interesting/useful/amusing content in order to elicit the social signals that will lead to search engine success.

So, what does this mean for web marketers and travel businesses? Get ready for the change. The future of search is very different to what we are used to, and only those who invest now in great and creative content will reap all the rewards of the coming era of social search.

Talk to us about accessing our unique network of professional travel writers and how our Travel Content Network can help you take advantage of the changing search landscape.

By Matthew Barker

Given the massive importance of search & online marketing to business and the entire economy, it’s strange that changes and developments in the world’s biggest search engines don’t break out of industry news websites and into the mainstream press more often.

But Google’s Panda Updates (more info on what these were and how they affect Travel here) were of sufficient importance and caused enough ripples in the “real” world that even non-SEO types have started to take notice. In particular, a team of computer scientists at the University of Glasgow who have just published research on the outcomes of Google’s war on low quality websites, which was covered in this article in the New Scientist.

The research demonstrated that Google has been largely successful in its aggressive push against derivative, uninformative and thin content (typically found on the web’s infamous “Content Farms”). In one example given, the researchers tested results for the phrase “How to train for a Marathon” before and after Google’s updates. Where the results were previously stuffed with low grade, barely useful tips such as “buy a good pair of running shoes”, the  new results were dominated by high quality, well researched content provided by authoritative sources such as Runner’s World magazine.

So there we have it: the academic research has proven what we already knew: Successful websites must invest in high quality, authoritative and creative content.

By Matthew Barker

The much anticipated and entirely inevitable has happened: Google+ profiles are now available for businesses. I’ll give some instructions on how to set up your profile here, followed by some wider thoughts on the implications & opportunities.

Creating a Google+ Profile 

Setting up the profie is a simple process, and is very similar to creating a Facebook business page. Start with the Create A Page tool. There are two main options for travel businesses: online agencies will want to place themselves into the “Company” category. Hotels, shop-front agencies, tour operators and anyone else with a physical location will want to choose “Local business”. (Local businesses will be given additional options such as maps, hours of operation, phone numbers etc. For now this is entirely separate to any Google Places profiles you may have.)

From there it’s a simple process of completing the forms, adding your tag line and logo (have some fun with the “Creative Kit”), announcing your new profile with Circles from your own personal profile, and hitting Finish. Hey presto, welcome to Google+.

OK, Now What?

Good question. Creating the profile is the easy bit; what you should do with it is a trickier question.

At the most basic level, using your profile will be very similar to Facebook. You can post photos, video, comments etc, with the aim of increasing the number of people in your business’ Circle. Circles are the Google+ equivalent to Facebook fans. You can only communicate with people who have chosen to add your page to their Circles. To do this you need to be creating interesting, valuable and useful content and sharing it via your Google+ profile, much in the same way as you would on Facebook.

The kind of thing you can be posting includes:

• New blog articles
• Cool travel photos
• Destination restaurant recommendations
• Museum guides
• … and any other kind of travel guide or resource that relates to your services

Remember, the key is quality. You will only be accepted into people’s online social life if you offer something they’re interested in. Also be sure to avoid the hard sell: use this tool to build your brand, your expertise and your reputation. Don’t use it to promote your latest tour package.

You can encourage people to visit your new profile by linking to it, or by creating a Google+ logo. This tool gives you the code you need to create your own logo.

As with Facebook and Twitter, don’t just stick the logo on your site and expect people to click it. You need to give people a reason or incentive to click. Include a Call To Action with your logos, such as “Follow Us For Our Latest Travel Advice” or “Follow Us For Exclusive Deals And Offers”.

An important point to bear in mind: if you already have the +1 button on your pages (and if you don’t you can get it here), people who click +1 on one of your pages will not automatically add your business profile to their Circles. They will still need to visit your profile and click the “Add To Circles” button.

This is a major difference to Facebook, where clicking the “Like” button on your site means they start to follow your Facebook page. My guess is that this will make accruing followers on Google+ more difficult than accruing followers on Facebook. Which makes generating and promoting excellent content all the more important.

Some interesting features

One of the things Google+ has that Facebook doesn’t is the group chat feature, known as a Hangout. This is an exciting new way of communicating with existing and potential customers. Be creative in the way you use it – you could use it as a live chat assistance tool, for holding Q&A sessions on your destination, or whatever else you come up with.

Circles are basically a way of segmenting your connections. The default groups for business profiles are “Following,” “Customers,” “VIPs,” and “Team members” but you can add as many groups as you like. This gives you the ability to customize your messages for different groups, much in the same way as you would segment an email promotion to different client groups. Every time you make a post, you can determine which Circle should see it. Think creatively about how you will use your content to communicate with different groups, based on what they want or need to know.

In summary, Google+ should form part of your wider content & social strategy. For advice with creating that strategy or with generating the quality of content that you need to succeed, just get in touch.