Presentations by the following executives…with a lot of good research data to follow:

• Krista Pappas, Microsoft Bing Travel
• Gary Jackson, Google Travel
• Anne Payne, BeDynamic
• Yen Lee, Uptake

Yen Lee of Uptake – “The Long, Fat Tail of Search”

Numbers that really matter

• 73% of consumers search before they make a booking
• They search an average of 10 times
• 86% of leads are generated by organic search (there IS a free lunch)
• Typical travel search is 3.1 keywords
  • It’s becoming more specific: was ‘chicago’…then ‘chicago hotels’…now it may be ‘chicago family hotels’
  • (this means they give us more context now)
  • Always tailor unique content to consumer preferences

Krista Pappas of Microsoft – “Maximizing SEM In a Tough Travel Economy”

• Read more…

Google and Microsoft explain how consumers are interacting with mobile…and how suppliers can reach them.

Thomas O’Neil, Google Travel

Mobile landing pages: designing the user experience

• landing pages are evolving
• 4 great examples
  • Hotels.com/iPhone
    • being first moving has big advantage
    • have 1 million+ app downloads
  • m.toyota.com
  • m.cnn.com
  • iPhone.fandago.com
• key take-away: there needs to be optimized landing pages for the consumer
• not everyone has an smart phone…design for less
• search google webmasters: “mobile seo”
  • search algorithm is different for mobile sites

Mobile search: what consumers are doing

• not usually willing to do more than one search
• probably won’t go beyond top 2-3 search result listings
• they search for roughly the same amount of words…but search less often
• SEO is extremely important. If you’re not in the top 1-3 results, you may as well not even be there.

Advertising on the go: opportunities to reach individuals

• 4 types of Google advertising opportunities
  • WAP search
  • HTML search
  • content network (on other sites)
  • YouTube videos
• understand which apps your audience is using to choose advertising opportunities
• Google provides a high level of reporting options

Read more…

Claim your hotel (or business)

Start off by claiming or listing your hotel in Google Maps.  This step is crucial for optimizing your local search visibility.

In my experience, even 15 minutes making sure all the details & keywords are correct pays dividends for months after.

Use the map on your website

Many hotels are using Google Maps on their directions or ‘find us’ page. It provides an extra layer of functionality to a traditional map image: allowing your visitors to see satellite and street view, as well as custom directions from anywhere they are.

Google provides a little widget that makes this process super-simple. First, you just search for your location – and click the Link link:

Following the customize embedded map link will lead to a page where you can edit the view, and obtain the website code:

Make a custom map

A logical step in concierge marketing, a custom map can show guests the special attractions in your area. Here’s a good example that Xotels created for the Puerto Antilla Grand Hotel in Spain – it shows golf courses in the region:

You may want to take this a step further and add rich media to the map. A 3rd-party tool such as Trippermap allows you to add your own photos to a custom map – which could work well for custom city tours:

Trippermap

Advertise on Google Maps

If you’re advertising in Google AdWords, your text ads will have the opportunity to display to people searching the maps.

For additional coverage, some businesses are painting logos on their roofs – like this Target store in Chicago:

Chris has a (spoof) tutorial on how to optimize your roof ads for Google Maps.