Is Search Depreciating Organic Search & Hurting Small Hotels?

There are big changes in the wind that are going to shake up travel shopping and eCommerce. This article is a must-read to understanding what is happening.

In a previous blog (Is search the new media), we talked about how Search is changing and become more like Media. We suggested that Search is the perfect example of the sort of platform and function we can expect in the new media of the future.

We saw that Google is upping the ante for organic search and featuring its own properties, as well as preferred suppliers and advertisers, in preference to organic search.

To illustrate the point, we have created a video here. You will notice Google advertisers are on top on the right and its own places now above organic results. Organic is way down the list on many result pages. Ads on the right, sponsors on the top, Places under that, leave organic off the screen and much depreciated.

Notice also that Google Search is now in the eCommerce business, offering rates by date and links to booking options. And Google is providing its own places' websites in several cases. It lists seven properties on top of the map; these are 7 they think are the most appropriate search results. The mechanics of choosing the top 7 is not clear at all.

The fact is that Google is becoming a full-service platform providing websites, hosting, technology and fulfillment. But it is not necessarily working with YOU! 


We note that Expedia is well represented in Google Places' results and we know that Expedia is a big advertiser. But we also notice that a small hotel who does not advertise (Dover Beach in Barbados) is on Places and when you click on the link, it takes you directly to Dover Beach Hotel's official website. This is encouraging, as we were instrumental in getting Dover Beach Placed. It shows that big advertisers do not necessarily dominate. They do things right, they are authority sites, and they get listed. But as a small hotel owner, You too can be listed and linked directly. And it is not always the big OTAs that are the preferred suppliers. In the case of Coconut Court Hotel a small OTA is listed, and that is likely a result of their work in listing the Place and marketing it.

When you examine the Map-Website that Google creates for properties, you will notice that it is getting its photos from Panorama. So Panorama is a good place to put your images. It's an authority site respected by Google. Be there and you increase your chances of the largest search engine in the world listing you.

Summary

Its clear that search is transforming into a much more encompassing media. It is becoming a full service solution, offering e-commerce and fulfillment. Its methods to evaluate ranking are favoring large companies who are the major advertisers and depreciating organic search results. It is already very difficult for small hotel and tourism operators to gain first page ranking for their target searches. Small companies do not have the collateral of the big companies, they don’t have the content, and are not woven into the web in the same way as the big companies. They don’t have the know how or the time and resources to compete.

The new changes appear to make it almost impossible for small travel companies to get into the first page of search results for generic terms other that their own name.

Coming Next

In our next Blog we will look at these issue in detail and suggest what  a small tourism company can do to market its brand and sustain its niche against these odds.

Be sure to read and watch the next video.

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How Content Marketing Creates Top Brand Positioning

Content Marketing with Articles

This blog is about how articles can get you to the top of Google, especially if it’s done in conjunction with video blogging and the full social media indexing.

Social media is about conversation publishing: making comments in blogs, articles, videos, tweets and to web properties, about telling people something which is of interest to them and sharing your knowledge and experience.

The best way to describe this is to take you to an example. We were commissioned to build an eCommerce marketing platform for Dominica and to integrate that with the official Dominica website. We built the Bookings Dominica Central Reservation System. We created about 50 pages of information and wrote a major article: a Travelogue. From this we built several videos, articles, a magazine, bookmarks, tweets and press releases.

We then published the articles and videos. Articles must be unique; otherwise you might get ignored by Google and in some cases slapped. But videos can be populated over the net. We published the videos to our network of sites such as adventure travel destinations, romantic holiday destinations and many others.

We also used our eCommerce engine as a publishing system for travel products, specials, promos and packages. This is very effective way of advertising a car rental, package, room, holiday experience, etc. arcRes will publish these to our own portals, on the destination portals, the suppliers' own websites and hundreds - or thousands, in some cases - of affiliate sites.

We build magazines, another way to get good quality content into high quality sites, and create footprints on the internet. We’re doing this for entertainment, for education, to publicize, and most importantly to get links back to our sites and clients' sites. Google counts links; they see and rank this activity because it is useful quality content on quality sites.

The name of the game is to publish and market your brand in the best possible places, ones with high relevancy to the content and which are highly regarded by Google.

We then turn around and market those same places that are carrying your brand. It sounds like a lot of work and it is. That’s the subject of our next video, which you can get by just subscribing to our YouTube channel, Social4Travel1:

I’d like just to share with you the results of this particular program for Dominica. The website that we’re promoting primarily was the BookingsDominica.com website. We gained a PR4, a page rank of four, in just under a year. This is good; by contrast, the Dominica Authority Sites have a PR of 6, but they have been in business for many years and have a significant budget and network of links.

We had 500,000 Unique Visitors in that year, 30,000 linked directly to the Hotel Members' Websites. We will create a video detailing this shortly, which will be available to anyone who subscribes to our Social4Travel1 YouTube channel.

Article Marketing is a major component of AXSES SocialIndexEngine.com
The Complete "Done for You" Social Media Management and Brand Marketing Program  that Drives Direct Bookings to your Website on Autopiulot.

We will be sharing a whole library of HOW TO Market Travel videos. To find out more or to see the next articles, all you need to do is subscribe to our video channel, which is YouTube.com/user/social4travel1, click on “subscribe” and you will then get notified of any new videos that we produce about how to market travel, hotels and toward some destinations.

If you would also like to subscribe to our Social4Travel newsletter, just enter your email on http://social4travel.com; you’ll also be able to access white papers, reports, PDFs and information on how to market your travel business.

LINKS - Video Blogging

Dominica Video Example

Dominica Carib People - The Kalinago

A Fascinating Culture much aligned by folklore. This article is a personal account of my visit, meeting, discussion and research. Its a part of the Dominica Article Ranking ,Video Blogging &; Destination Marketing for Dominica.  For more on Dominica see http://BookingsDominica.com & http://bookingsdominica.com/dominica-nature-island.cfm




full article:
http://ezinearticles.com/?Dominica-Carib-People:-A-Culture-on-the-Edge&id=5244976

New Videos: How to Add Bookings to Facebook

With 500 million subscribers and a growing population of travelers using Facebook to share holiday information, travel plans and to check out reviews and share experiences, Facebook has become a power house for hotels and tourism. Now with the Integration with Bing - Facebook is about to power your search results in  away never done before. Our HubPage article explains some of the trends to note and contains videos on: A live demo of a Facebook bookings app, and how to setup arcResBookings on your facebook page.

The HubPage article covers several topics on Facebook and its future with Bing, Mobile Phones search and travel as it relates to tourism suppliers and hotel owners see http://hubpages.com/hub/Marketing-Tourism-with-facebook-Bookings-Mobile



For a Free Trial of  ArcResBookings see http://arcres.com/facebook-offer-bookings.cfm

Adventure Travel Destination Marketing Launched

AXSES officially launched its new Adventure Travel Destinations Marketing Portal http://adventure-travel-destinations.com. In a departure from our normal destination specific marketing such as http://BookingsBarbados.com, the new site includes multiple destination all of which offer special and deals for adventure holidays.

We see holiday and vacations as a form of adventure, even if you just go for sightseeing, you are traveling, going to new places or getaway to places you have been to before, to do something different, to meet new people and explore. There are adventure trips for family adventure holidays, romantic adventure vacations for couples, adventure getaways for singles, learning, culture, educational and gourmet adventures for wine tasting, great dining and every holiday escape.

The Adventure Travel Destinations' Affiliate page allows destinations, hotels and tourism operators to join in advertising their adventure holidays and to add special deals and promotions for travelers. Their is a video that describes the marketing benefits and a sign up link for hotels & tourism suppliers to:

Register Adventure Specials for a FREE 90 day Trial

Cost range from only $20US monthly for a special Ad on the entire network which include Smartphones (must have a Smartphone friendly website) and other optional features such as adding specials and booking options directly onto hotel Facebook pages.

Related links - AXSES CASE STUDY on Adventure Travel Destinations Marketing 
http://www.slideshare.net/irclay/adventuretraveldestinationsmarketing

Dominica Tourism Authority gets AXSES Arcres Travel Platform

The Dominica Tourism Authority (Discover Dominica Authority, DDA) selects the AXSES Travel Platform for the tourism industry in Dominica.

Colin Piper, CEO/Director of the Discover Dominica Authority, says, “We selected AXSES because its people have a deep understanding of the travel marketplace and the right suite of products and resources to help our travel marketing.”

The AXSES Travel Marketing and Bookings Platform is a unique marketing and bookings solution for destinations, hotels, tourism operators and car rental companies. It offers the full spectrum of advertising management, bookings, interactive branding and systems for direct marketing. It is ideal for destinations, as it plays by destination rules and promotes the destination product with direct to hotel and tourism owner sales and bookings.

AXSES, know for putting Barbados.org on the net, and owners of http://Barbados.org, is also a world leader in travel software. A team of Barbados programmers are now at work building what they call the next generation travel shopping platform. Many of AXSES' products are first of a kind. Its Facebook application, which allows Facebook Fans to get quotes and book direct from Facebook, published a year ago, is an example of AXSES leading edge innovative and adaptive thinking that caught the attention of Dominica.

AXSES has completed the first stage of the project which is to build the new e-commerce Dominica Marketing portal which is the Dominica Central Reservations Center http://Bookingsdominica.com. The sites have been Search Engine-Optimised (SEO) with dozens of 1st-page positions on strategic keywords.

A Dominica travelogue was completed as part of this project and it is being marketed with print and online Dominica magazine publications: TravelersInsights.com. TravelersInsights is a cloud publishing service for destinations developed by AXSES and part of the AXSES arcRes Travel Platform. The articles are being distributed to over 300 online ezines and are available on magazine and document services, like Slideshare, ArticlesBase, as well as TravelerInsights and BookingsDominica


The DDA and AXSES are jointly marketing the Dominica Reservations Center, which is being cross linked and marketed with http://dominica.dm the official website of the Dominica Tourism Authority.

AXSES is now installing booking engines on Dominica hotel websites using the arcRes bookings widgets http://BookingsWidgets.com.

As part of the project to create the Dominica Travel Platform, AXSES staged a 3-day seminar to the entire Tourism industry. The seminar was attended by over 50 tourism partners and enthusiastically supported.

AXSES key personnel Kathy-Lynn Ward and Kris Gooding delivered keynote addresses on web design, use of technology, branding & marketing in the interactive age. The seminar included interactive examples of AXSES Next Generation Shopping Platform, which is being installed as the Travel Platform for Dominica.

For more info on the AXSES Travel marketing platform, see http://TravelBookingsPlatform.com
Built on the arcRes e-commerce suites the travel platform combined advertising management with e-commerce marketing and publishing. arcRes Bookings-Expert the booking engine for hotel and tourism operator websites, allows hotels and activities, tours, car rental cos and tourism suppliers to advertise and publish their product and brand to smartphones (http://SmartphoneTraveller.com), Google Shopping, social media and hundreds of affiliated travel marketing sites.