Targeting keyphrases during Keyword Analysis |
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"With a conversion rate of about 20% on name traffic that adds up to about 120 bookings every month just for that one search phrase." It is of course a certainty that of the 165,000 searches with 'Irelandhotels' carried out every single month that a small percentage (probably inthe order of 4% or so) would actually be interested in our 'Blue Dolphin'hotel in Mayo. There are obviously about 10% are interested in Mayo generallybut 60% of those would not be potential customers of ours. We'd be either tooexpensive, too cheap, in the wrong area or a host of other reasons why we arean immediate NO. The odds of actually securing a listing for ‘hotels Ireland’ or ‘hotels in Ireland’ is so slim that we would almost certainly be better offfocusing on traffic that might not be as plentiful but would almost certainlyhave a better conversion rate. A conversion rate is what our clients pay us for essentially. We aretasked with increasing ranking or managing a PPC account however what the clientactually 'wants' is for more sales through their web site. We have two ways of doing this:
The conversion rate is the percentage of people who visit the site inrelation to the volume of people who carry out an action on the site. Theconversion rate is usually expressed as a percentage or a ratio. Add to this the fact that not everyone using a particular search will visitour website EVEN if we have top ranking for it. Lets look then at the volume of people searching for ‘hotels mayo’.In the table below we can see that the actual change of a single wordfrom ‘Ireland’ to ‘mayo’ has had a dramatic effect on the search volume results. Itseems Mayo is not as popular a destination for the hotel booking public as onemight have hoped for. Only 18,000 searches a month are carried out for 'hotelsmayo' although we can probably triple that if we add in all thepermutations.
It is very interesting to note that specific hotels here get searched for byname. Take a look at the 'park hotel mayo'. There are 590 searches fromjust this one keyphrase. With a conversion rate of about 20% on name traffic that adds up to about120 bookings every month just for that one search phrase.Interestingly I'm not including the entire hotel name combinations andpermutations users might use here, if we include 'park hotel west Ireland' and other combinations then we could bring this up to 150 bookings a month. The average booking value for a hotel around this part of Ireland... isaround €120 per person per night and this probably pans out at anaverage booking value for two people over 1.2 nights at €300 which means thehotel name search is this case can actually be worth up to 150 x €300 = €45,000 in bookings every month. My guess is that its closer to €25,000as an average. Every single one of those people searching are worth over 30euro each! There is of course a serious danger here. I work as a search specialist.Given 25 minutes I could work out a neat and tidy way of circumventing the ParkHotel from appearing in first place for a search using the hotels name. Sinceits worth a lot of money in bookings to the hotel I could potentially hold themto ransom. Now because I'm not such a malcontented hotel hater I'm notparticularly inclined to do that.You can see how knowledge in searchcould leave an unsuspecting and innocently trading business open to all sortsof extortionate activity. How many more times likely? Well for a start we can discount all the people whowere looking for hotels in Irelandbut NOT in mayo. My guess is that this represents about 90% of the 165k peoplesearching for ‘hotels Ireland’.In fact odds are the ‘hotels mayo’ searchers are actually looking for aspecific type of hotel in a specific location (or thereabouts) at a reasonableprice. All we have to do is highlight OUR services and rates over thecompetition and ensure anyone who sees the competition also sees our hotel site. The question now of course is 'Is it easier to optimize the site orsome of its pages for ‘hotels mayo’ as a search?' After all howmany hotels can there be in Mayo? Well, Google tells me when I search for ‘hotelsmayo’ that there are a total of about 6 million pages categorizedunder this search. But 6 million is a lot smaller than the original 11million pages returned for ‘hotel Ireland’. It is also very interesting to note that ‘hotels mayo’ has just underhalf the pages returned that ‘hotels Ireland’ has returned. Does this mean that its only half as difficult to get a first position inGoogle.? Well the answer (thankfully) is no… it’s a LOT easier to optimize a site forthis particular search. Now lets see what our budding hotel booker is up to again. They havesearched now for ‘hotels Ireland’ and found a ton of booking engines. After an ten minutes they realized that thequantity of hotels on these booking engines is quiet high and requires furtherinvestigation and pricing. After looking over one or two of these they nowsearch for ‘hotels mayo’ which gives them another (albeit more specific)list of booking engines. Again our hotel booker will examine these sites whereon their travels they will learn the name and average rates of some of thehotels. If our hotel is not present on these engines then optimisation of the siteis strictly limited to securing two word phrases like ‘mayo hotels’, ‘hotelsin mayo’, We'll assume that our hotel has opted to be on a few of thesebooking engines. So casual searchers looking at Mayo as their destination willhave seen the Blue Dolphin Hotel on sites like expedia, Hotels.com and localsites like Discover Irelandand even MayoHotels.com (yes there is a mayohotels.com booking engine). In factmany of these booking engines are in fact the same engine under differentguises. Mayo Hotels.com for example is in fact an information site about mayowhich has become an affiliate room vender for FailteHotels.ie. MayoHotels don'tactually have any hotels signed up with them. they are essentially presentingthe hotels already featured on www.failtehotels.ie which itself isusing another application to present the hotels on offer. If our hotel has opted to place themselves on these engines then we areactually in a stronger position. The hotel must however ensure that theofferings on their own website outweigh not just the competitors but also theofferings for their own rooms on other sites such as Expedia and Hotels.com. Hotel booking much like all services and products sold online is acomparison purchase. Visitors to these sites are plentiful but conversions arevery low. We should not feature the 'Blue Dolphin' on the booking engine tosell our rooms though. We are featured on the booking engine purely to get ourname in front of the user. We would in fact prefer that the user compares us onthe booking engine to our own website. If they book on the booking engine thenfair enough and we know there is a 10-15% commission but so be it! We only wantthe user to write our name down or remember it. Alternatively we should probably ask the user in the 'hotel description'which we forward to the booking engines to visit our website- a line such as'Book here or visit our own website for exclusive hotel deals'. The odds arepretty high that the booking engine would NOT allow a link from this text tothe hotels site. But they might just ignore a line which told the user that thehotel appears first if they search for it by name. One trick practiced by acompany I once optimized for search was to tell the user that they could buythe item with a 10% discount if they put the discount code GJHJ434s (orsomething like this) into their booking but the feature was only available onlyon their own site. We'll cover this in 'Affiliate Marketing' in another article. However our booker we will assume sees our ‘blue dolphin’ hotel onseveral of these sites. Now we can be sure that we are onto a decent model forcapturing customers. |
