Mon, 3 Sep 2007 11:49:44 by Kerry Dye
When I look down the client list for Vertical Leap, there are a large number of travel related sites. Not all the same sort of company, it must be said, but sites offering hotel breaks, flights, holidays, information on cities, travel insurance, even airport portering services. So what is it that makes this such a dense arena for search engine optimisation?
First of all of course, there's the internet; it has truly revolutionised the way that people look for holidays and travel. Along with the growth of the internet there has been a diversion from package holidays to independent travel, with people often booking flights, hotels, insurance and excursions all from different sources. Whilst this is partly a way to save money, it is also a mindset change, as people turn away from what they see as more staid holiday options to richer experiences and adventure travel.
This explosion in the niche sectors has allowed smaller operators to operate effectively, and the internet allowed new names to become dominant in the sector. Lastminute.com and Expedia amongst others have ballooned to become high traffic websites, and the default destination for many. Ten years ago, most people would not have automatically been reaching for the keyboard to research a flight to Paris or the best places to visit in Belize. Now the internet is ubiquitous, and although the destinations are the same, the methods of finding them have changed. Search engines have come along to define the online landscape, and with ranking came the desire to be at the top of the natural listings. And the travel industry, whether they were originally early adopters or have played catch up, are now more and more reaching to search engine optimisation as a bigger part of their online marketing mix.
In the past few years, pay per click (PPC) spending has been the main expenditure for the online travel sector, and this has been a very successful marketing tactic. PPC is quick to set up and easy to measure the ROI, but with climbing click costs (30% on Yahoo and 33% on Google between 2005 and 2006 for products under $50 according to the MarketingSherpa Ecommerce Benchmark Guide), some parts of the travel industry are increasingly turning to organic results for additional traffic. The same marketing Sherpa report indicates a that of the marketers they questioned, 54% increased their focus on natural search engine optimisation in the last quarter of 2006.
This reflects data from the Search Engine Strategies recent Travel Conference, where they indicated that:
- More than 30% of the traffic to travel websites comes from search.
- 85% of the clicks are to natural listings.
- 72% of searchers click on the first link that interests them, while 25% look at the listings on the page before deciding which to click on.
In the online travel market, the UK is slightly behind the US; but over the other side of the Atlantic Search Marketing Expo (SMX) has an entire 2 day conference dedicated to search in the travel vertical. And that's not to say that the travel sector is not competitive over here - it certainly is! Top rankings in the search engines can make huge difference to the number of sales made on a travel focussed website. This is one of the reasons that Vertical Leap's managed search engine marketing process is popular with this particular sector - optimisation of a site is not a "set it and forget it" tactic - the results pages are in a continual state of flux and changes in position can directly affect the bottom line. This makes our proactive approach a good match to the needs of the market.
And for 2007 at least, things are combining to make a very good year for being in the travel industry: at least if you offer overseas destinations. The poor weather this year in the UK means searches for online travel related keywords in July were up on previous years, and as a recent press release from ComScore shows Lastminute.com, Cheapflights and First Choice were among the fastest gaining internet sites in the UK for July 2007. So that really goes to show that every cloud has a silver lining: for someone at least.
Kerry Dye
Campaign Delivery Manager |
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