In: Marketing Strategies, SEO

What is one of the most inspiring pieces of media for our visitors? Photos! We have hundreds, sometimes thousands of photos on our sites to help visitors understand everything we have. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but a picture that is poorly named and alt-tagged is worth exactly zero words to a search engine. I can go to almost any travel site, view the name of their hero image, and practically guarantee it will be named something that has nothing to do with the picture and is not SEO friendly. Let’s look at a couple of example of the homepage hero  Read More…

In: Analytics, Program Evaluation

I touched a little bit on this point in our Google Analytics: The One Sided Story Trap but it is conference season and we are starting to be flooded with panicked calls about website under performance. Which is good! We like when our clients challenge the norm, start thinking outside of the box and want to demand more from their website. Everyone should do that everyday! However we always want to remember that presenters at conferences have a limited time to talk about their topic. They generally focus on the big WOWS and often forget to mention some of the drag backs to their new  Read More…

In: PPC, SEM

Where I think most businesses, in every industry not just tourism, fall short is they fail to recognize the value of the SEM data that is available to them. We report on how many visitors came to our site as a result of SEO and PPC but we leave it at that. When doing keyword research you gain valuable decision making date – what do people search for to find my product? Then when you are start running PPC with those keywords you learn an even more valuable piece of data – does my product convert visitors. All of this data that you are learning  Read More…

In: PPC, SEM

Whether you are managing your campaign on your own or you have an agency you need to understand what to look for when evaluating performance. It is easy for agencies to spin the numbers and make everything sound good. So you want to have enough knowledge to make sure they are shooting it straight. Now there are A LOT of different things to look at and just analyzing the data can be a full time job in itself. So I will cover a few bits of data that you can look at that will give really great insight into how the overall channel is performing  Read More…

In: PPC, SEM

There are 2 ways to get started with PPC. You can dive in on your own or you can enlist the help of an agency. Let’s talk about getting started with each. Diving in on your own Be prepared to learn Anyone can run a Google Adwords campaign. That is one of the joys of this medium. However, successfully running an Adwords campaign means taking the time to understand the strategies and the terminology. If you are going to undertake managing your own campaigns you need to take the time to learn about it. Starting with the source is always good. Google offers an overview  Read More…

In: PPC, SEM

Pay per click search marketing is  huge potential traffic driver if you know how to harness it. Let’s look to some of the benefits and draw backs. Let’s talk about some benefits Adaptive Pricing One major benefit of PPC is that you can adapt the campaign to any budget level and it is relatively easy to set up. If you have a small budget you should be extra selective when choosing your keywords. You will want to select a few keyword groups that will allow you to reach a really targeted and qualified set of visitors. If you have a little bigger budget you can  Read More…

In: PPC, SEM

If you saw our series on SEO you know I stayed away from entering the SEO world for a long time. Well once I decided to plunge into SEO the Pay Per Click (PPC) monster sort of busted down the door and said you must get involved! As usual, I started doing some digging for a couple of clients on how PPC could benefit their marketing plans and as usual I learn some alarming things that spurred this 4 part series. I have a ton of ideas and thoughts swirling around in my mind about how to use PPC and SEO as more than just  Read More…

In: PPC, SEM, SEO

Search Engine Marketing or SEM is the term that is often used to describe paid search advertising. I think that is inaccurate. To me SEM should be the all-encompassing term for “search engine marketing” – know know what it stands for – which includes both paid search and organic search. The two are so closely related that if you are doing one separate from the other you are mostly likely wasting a lot time and money. I would like to spend a bit time talking about both of these channels and why they are important to your marketing efforts. Search Engine Optimization or SEO This channel revolved around  Read More…

In: Marketing Strategies, SEO

You have your SEO strategy, you have optimized your pages, you are seeing improvements in your search traffic. Now your done right? WRONG! This is were many SEO strategies begin to unravel. You got pumped up on SEO at a conference, worked like a mad banshee to get your site up to date with the latest in SEO, and then you run out of steam. SEO falls to the back burner and all that work you did starts to become less and less valuable because you haven’t continued your efforts. Here I am implore you! Please take up the SEO flag and wave it enthusiastically  Read More…

In: Analytics, SEO

Evaluation is where many SEO strategies falter. This is because there are a lot of outside influences that effect your website traffic and thus many SEO experts tend to shy away from the nitty-gritty numbers. Instead we see “25 keywords gained ranking and only 10 keywords lost ranking, so we are doing great” or “We have seen an 30% increase in search traffic”. (but we will ignore that there is an 80% bounce rate) Don’t get me wrong, those types of stats are important too but I believe there is a need to look a little deeper, even if it is a little scarier for  Read More…