How to optimise your online Destination Guides to drive traffic
Contributors are not employed, compensated or governed by TD, opinions and statements are from the contributor directly
Google has defined and labelled the short bursts of research consumers take part in on their mobile devices as Micro-moments.
Micro-moments are described as: “intent-driven moments of decision-making and preference-shaping that occur throughout the entire consumer journey”.
These moments pose a challenge to travel agents who wish to engage their existing customer base whilst driving new customers to their website. The competition for travel agents has expanded from local stores to every travel agent advertising holidays online.
The needs of the consumer
The way in which consumer’s research and plan their holidays has changed along with the advancement of technology. Today, one in three people own a smartphone which makes it even more important that travel agents adapt to the consumer’s needs and offer the same support online as they would in-store.
Rather than sift through brochures and spend lengthy, set times, on a desktop, consumers now load a web page whilst on the go, gain inspiration (usually from social media) search and absorb information in short bursts of time before returning to what they were doing previously.
Some consumers will even use voice search to get the information they need by using virtual assistants such as OK Google or Siri.
Travel buyers journey
Micro-Moment Phase | User Search Query |
Dreaming | “what is the weather like in Barcelona in July” |
Planning | “Best restaurants in Barcelona” |
Buying | “Hotels in Barcelona” |
Experiencing | “Restaurants near me” |
The buying journey has changed with time and travel agents need to ensure they are targeting consumers correctly across key stages.
The travel agent needs to look across the key stages in a consumers’ journey and decide where to best place well-worded text ads. Correctly positioning targeted ads will help travel agents reach engaged consumers who are more likely to convert into a buyer.
What should destination guides look like now?
Destination guides today need to be available to consumers whilst they are ‘on the go’. This means that Travel Agents need to ensure they keep in mind that consumers can be interrupted at any point, and when they are searching they are probably doing so in a micro-moment. Information needs to be clear, relevant and comprehensive.
From a technical perspective, Travel agents should ensure their website, both on desktop and mobile, loads quickly and that the rich snippets schema tagging is properly utilised in order to show content to consumers within the search engine results in page, encouraging click-throughs.
Tracking and quantifying traffic
For travel agents to fully understand how their consumers are interacting with their site along the buyer journey they need to ensure they are investing time and money into keyword research and advertising along each stage.
It’s important that travel agents don’t use all or most of the budget tracking just one stage. For example, engaging with a customer during the research stage only is unlikely to lead to a conversion and so the data collected from this one campaign is largely unhelpful.
Engaging with a customer at the beginning and further along the journey will increase the likelihood of a consumer converging into a buyer. This will also help to paint a picture of what advertisements are helping to make this conversion through tracking along the consumer. Travel agents can even use retargeting to appear to a potential buyer who was previously researching on their website during the ‘dreaming’ stage.
* Amo Sokhi is an account director at POLARIS, an SEO agency based in London. Amo specialises in all aspects of digital marketing, including SEO, PPC, Commercial Planning, and Campaign Strategy.
Comments are closed.