Will Google's new Hotel Finder or TripAdvisor's recently upgraded rate comparison metasearch be the ultimate travel search and book website?
In my humble opinion, TripAdvisor's is certainly the current winner. Their new functionality is just damn sexy and makes the customer experience enjoyable while giving the confidence to book appropriately.
Why I love it
TripAdvisor offers superior functionality that allows you to search not only on existing customer reviews but also on price and type of travel, for example business travel, family or romance.
And then it gets even better and makes the experience personal with their integrated TripAdvisor Friends functionality. Throughout your search it allows you to see if any of your Facebook friends have...
It all begins with understanding Google's purpose.
Google's Purpose: To make the web a better place for the user
The team at Tomahawk want to help you get on Google's good side. If you impress Google, your business's website can be on page one when someone searches for your relevant keywords.
There's no such thing as a free lunch though! Your website won't receive love from Google simply by virtue of existing.
Optimising your website for search engines (also known as SEO) involves a number of tasks and processes. The best thing is you can do SEO yourself, it just takes a little bit of understanding and your time.
Here are the 5 ways you can DIY SEO!
#1: Impress Google with Keywords - Choosing and Using Them.
Facebook Offers highly recommended tourism businesses - not only does it present a fantastic opportunity for you to spotlight your business, it also has simple-to-use yet powerful targeting features. Through Facebook Offers, you can build brand awareness amongst new visitors (through existing fans 'sharing' the post), and entice dormant fans to return for your products and/or services.
Ooh, I'm listening - I want to learn more about Facebook Offers!
Facebook Offers are a fairly new feature on Facebook. These work in a similar way to voucher sites like Groupon, Groupy, TreatMe, and others, except Facebook Offers are only available within Facebook. Facebook Offers require a budget to go live. The extent of reach (how many people see the offer) is based on how much you...
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 become even more significant.
An accommodation provider has a long to-do list to promote themselves online.
Get an attractive website that guests like and ensure it is properly built to please Google.
Add an online booking engine and integrated channel management to ensure that you are listed on major OTAs.
Spend time on your website each month to optimise it so Google ranks you well.
Finally, businesses are catered for on the popular image-based social media site, Pinterest!
Pinterest's premise is to provide an online space where users can curate their own pin boards of things they love, places that inspire, destinations they want to go, anything that's important to them that they want to share.
For the tourism business, this is great news. As a tourism product is experiential, images and video are what inspire and resonate with potential guests.
Some of the specific features for businesses which have been released previously include 'pin it' buttons, which you can add to your website allowing people to 'pin' their favourite content from your site. Awesome tours, stunning destinations and beautiful accommodations can all be pinned from your site to...
