Category Archives: Google

As a tourism operator, you may have been advised that in addition to giving the best possible service to your customers and ensuring that you love up your agents, you also need to ensure your online presence is attractive to both your clientele and Google. Just how important Google is to most businesses is interesting, a bit scary and is about to get even greater.

An accommodation provider has a long 'to-do' list to promote themselves online:

1. Get an attractive website that guests like and ensure it is properly built to please Google.
2. Add an online booking engine and integrated channel management to ensure that you are listed on major OTAs.
3. Spend time on your website each month to optimise it so Google ranks you well.
4. Set up a blog on your...

Curious about how many people are viewing your site on a mobile phone? You can easily find out using Google Analytics.

You'll need to have analytics installed on your website first, which is totally free and just requires a Google email address for you to create the account.

If you've got Google running, log in and head to "Audience" and then select the "Mobile" option. The "Overview" and "Devices" dropdowns will appear.

On "Overview" you'll be able to see the number of people viewing on a mobile device vs. a desktop, find out how many pages they look at and how many of those visits "Bounce" which means they look at one page, and then exit the site:

This is the second question in our blog series from the TourWriter Assemblage.

First time reader? Check out the first google question here or watch the full video on youtube.

Question 2: I'm told I am getting a lot of traffic to my site, but I'm not getting many enquiries. What's going on?

This question is all about converting the eye-balls on the page into actions, and often happens when there are barriers which are preventing someone moving from a passive viewer, to being inspired by your product, and placing a booking.

Google's website analytics and webmaster tools are two useful and totally FREE programs which you can use to answer some of the following questions, make adjustments and measure the impact and results.

1. Are my visitors qualified before arriving?

To...

Would you ever plan a grand and glorious wedding and then not send wedding invitations?

Or perhaps organise the perfect birthday for your five year old son and then not invite any of his friends?

It sounds silly, but many new tourism businesses do just that.

Planning, time and loads of money is spent building a stunning accommodation, going through all the resource consents and even sign-writing the car but then when it comes time to open, no one shows up and the owners wonder why people don't want to enjoy their amazing properly. Simple answer; No budget was allocated for marketing; you forgot you have to invite people to your place.

A successful marketing strategy for a tourism business can be built on five easy steps. It will provide the foundations for marketing your...