Natural Search &
Online Tourism Consultant

Citys.info switched its servers on for business on Friday with a launch expected to challenge the best of the local guide platforms. The platform says it can be launched on any town or city (currently only in the UK) in a matter of hours. The internet franchise can be applied to your local town or city providing hotel bookings, event information, restaurant guides and reviews amongst a whole host of other information on a domain name of your choice said company owner Lee Woodman. To see a live working example visit Swansea.info which has been running for just over a year whilst the platform was developed in a live environment.

When asked how the platform would fair against its competitors Lee said “It’s simple; not only visually do our sites stand out but the engineering that has gone into the design of the management system is second to none. We hope to sit above our competitors such as TheBestOf and CityLocal. The way we have engineered the platform and structured our information architecture will give our franchise owners the edge when it comes to search engine placement. A lot of time has been spent making sure the platform has been optimised for natural search.”

The first Franchises are due to launch their new platforms early in 2009 with the likes of Portsmouth, Plymouth and London already snapped up.

Traditional marketing streams like TV and print is one of the most difficult elements of a business to measure, in the online world this is one of the easiest, we show you how to get the most out of your online marketing spend!

If you have recently acquired a new business whether thats in the online tourism sector or any other there’s always going to be some surprise invoices coming through the door for services and business listings that you may never of heard of let alone know how well they are performing.

So how do you measure these different sources of marketing spend?

If it’s offline it’s notoriously difficult to measure how effective one stream of spend has been over another. Maybe you took out a full page spread with a local magazine or have invested heavily in a TV advertising campaign, both are nearly impossible to measure. Unless you ask each person who walks into your hotel or buys your latest music CD where they heard of you, you’re not going to be able to offset that person against your marketing spend.

In the online world we have the ability to trace that individual user to see where exactly they came from and we can attribute a value to that sources overall cost. Tools such as Google Analytics or Omniture can accomplish this task well. If you’re able to get a trial period with a particular advertiser you’ll be able to see very quickly through your stats how well an advert is performing by looking in the referral sources.

Its all well and good driving traffic to your site but you then need to look deeper and see how those users behave and how well they convert whether thats page views per visit (usually for display advertising) or the value of their transaction (shopping cart).

Being able to effectively measure your online marketing spend will save you money and free tools like Google analytics make sure you only target those businesses that will work hard for you and the ones that don’t…well you’ll be able to see that far sooner rather than later.

Being a tourist information webmaster I’ve visited hundreds of hotel and guest house websites, seeing everything from professionally designed sites right through to Microsoft Word creations. Considering the levels of revenue achievable through their websites I wonder how many accommodation providers could improve their results by looking at their sites from the users perspective to help their hotel internet marketing perform better. I’ve come up with 11 steps that you can do to improve your conversion rates you get through your site.

• Good quality high resolution photos are my number one, not only will other tourist portal sites use them to showcase your property, but users will enjoy browsing through to see what you have to offer. Don’t be afraid to pay for a good photographer you’ll reap the rewards very quickly.

• Stick with a simple email address for booking enquiries like book@yourhotel.com or stay@yourhotel.com using an email address like enquiries@ or reservations@ is asking for trouble, the frequency with which these two terms are misspelt is very high.

• During the users enquiry process around 5% will enter their own email address wrongly so you won’t be able to respond by email. An easy solution to this problem is to ask for the users email address twice similar to a password validation. If you do manage to contact them by phone or fax ask them again for their email address so you can add them to your mailing list for future offers and events, you’ll be impressed at the levels of repeat visitors this can generate.

• Don’t try and rank for terms that are very generic to your city like “hotel accommodation in Swansea” your very unlikely to achieve it, better still look at your unique selling point as a hotel. Maybe you are located on the sea front, next to a museum or a sporting venue. Go with those terms instead and you’re far more likely to be successful.

• Make sure you’re listed in the Google Local Business directory, it offers an excellent way for you to be found when people use it to browse results. If you’re fortunate to be located in or in close proximity to a city centre your listing will appear at the top as a natural listing. This position is absolutely priceless! So with zero marketing spend you could be ranking for the keyword “hotels in {your city}”. Ive seen this feature work with 2 of my hotels and its incredible the amount of traffic that it drives to their websites.

• In your copy talk about the things that are in close proximity to the hotel but be wary of linking out to other sites at this stage, this is after all a site that you want to result in conversions so keep it simple with the end goal always to try and sell. Once you have your conversion why not generate an email to the user with a local guide attached or on a subsequent thank you page once you have a confirmed booking.

• Try and embed a Google map of where your property is located and a text box so users can enter their postcode and get directions. All this can be embedded in your website free with Google Maps

• Keep a call to action in plain site all the time like Book or an Enquire button on every page of your website.

• When your asking for the users details keep the enquiry form short, you don want to overwhelm the user at this stage, let’s keep pushing hard for the conversion.

• If you have a restaurant provide a menu, this saves them phoning you and asking you to send one. It also saves you postage costs.

• Find free tourism portals to list your site; you’d be amazed how many free high quality ones are out there.

• Have a late deals section where you can showcase offers that you might have and keep it updated. One of the most proactive hotels I have come across is Fairyhill in South Wales. They stay in tune with all the local tourism sites and always have their late deals updated. In a future article i’d like to talk about how you can maximise the return from your reception/front of house staff.

This isn’t a definitive list and i’d love to hear what experiences you have had with achieving those high conversion rates.