5 ways to easily enhance the visibility of your tour operator website
Having a solid marketing strategy should be one of the cornerstones of your tour operator business, but let’s be honest…sometimes it all gets a bit overwhelming. Marketing is such a broad topic – it covers everything from your website and visibility online, all the way through to your pricing and color palate…you’re probably sweating already just thinking about it all. Combined with all of the other things you have to manage day-to-day, there’s no surprises that marketing sometimes takes a back seat when things inevitably get busy.
Arguably one of the biggest aspects of your businesses marketing should be your digital strategy, after all, over 60% of leisure travelers use online resources to book their travel, and a staggering 95% of travelers will rely on online reviews before booking a holiday. With these numbers expected to grow, it’s more important than ever that you feel like you have a handle on your digital presence.
So, with all of that in mind, we wanted to do something to help make the digital marketing world a little easier to navigate. In this month’s Tourwriter guide we’re diving into the foggy world of search engines. We’re explaining the basics and providing you with some simple, yet effective tips that you can implement to get your business in front of more of the right people: Your future customers.
Search Engine Optimization – what is it, why do you need it, and how do you master it?
Building and launching a website is only half of the job nowadays. Search engine Optimisation or SEO is an area of marketing which revolves around optimising your website to ensure it ranks organically on search engines and is ranking the best keywords possible for your business. Google’s search algorithm takes into factor hundreds of different elements when ranking websites. Unfortunately for all of us, the exact algorithm is not known by the general public, although we have some pretty good ideas. So, here’s our Tourwriter list of things you can do quickly to increase your organic ranking on google:
1. Deciding on a keyword
Deciding on the ideal keyword for your business is crucial when it comes to optimising your website. Essentially you want to find the best keyword that describes your offering and is likely to be something that your prospective customers will be searching when trying to find businesses like you.
Google’s keyword planner tool is a good place to start – it will scan your website and match it against criteria you set to provide you with a list of recommended keywords.
2. Don’t forget about your Metadata
The metadata is the website description which is surfaced by Google when displayed in search. Making sure it’s not only enticing for your prospects but also includes your keywords. This will help ensure your site is appearing in the correct places, for the correct people.
3. Include your keyword(s) in your body copy
The words on your website are primarily where Google will go to crawl through and decide what your site is about and how relevant it is to people searching for your keyword. Ensuring that you splice your keyword (or keywords) throughout the body text of your website is a must. But…be sure to do it only where it feels natural. Keyword stuffing is a practice that involves jamming the keyword into your site so much that you are essentially trying to manipulate the algorithm. Not only does it typically come across pretty ‘spammy’ to your website visitors but it’s also heavily frowned upon by Google, possibly leading to a blacklisting.
4. Keep it fresh
Updating your website with new content in the form of blogs, articles, and resources is an excellent way to not only provide your prospects with valuable content, but it’s also a great way to add your keywords to your site. Google favours websites that are updated frequently, so you really can’t go wrong with this tip.
5. Collaborate with others
Collaborating with other businesses to publish guest blogs, and cross-promote each other’s content will not only help increase the reach of your content, but it will also provide you with an excellent opportunity to increase the number of backlinks your website has. Backlinks are URLs on a website (not owned by you) that directs to your website. These wee suckers are harder to get as they involve cooperation with other website owners other than yourself…but when you manage to get them they can be extremely impactful for your website’s ranking.
So whether you’re just starting out on your digital strategy journey, or you’re a seasoned expert, we think these 5 tips will set you in the right direction for leveraging your online presence going forward. We’ve really just scratched the surface, so if we’ve got you hooked and eager to learn more we recommend checking out Moz, they’re experts in this stuff and we love them!
Here are a few links to some of our favorite resources for Tour Operators eager to know more about digital marketing:
