We have recently launched a new website for VA Clare Valley, primarily a boutique wine business producing international quality wine, as well as olives, olive oil, red wine vinegar and honey.

Wineries are in a class of their own when it comes to marketing. They’re an attraction and a store, and often a restaurant and accommodation provider too.

VA Clare Valley’s focus is on selling produce, and the site has two objectives:

1. to attract potential visitors to South Australia’s Clare Valley wine region and encourage them to visit the cellar door, and
2. to enable produce to be sold online.

Our keyword analysis told us the words and phrases potential visitors and customers are keying in, and this guided us in structuring the site content.

Searchers are likely to find the site through destination searches on Clare Valley, and product-related searches. Google Analytics will enable VA Clare Valley to monitor this and adapt their content accordingly.

Many of the destination visitors are likely to be self-drivers, so the Getting Here section, with clear maps, is vital for conversion.

The Cellar Door & Shop enables VA Clare Valley to take orders online using PayPal, which takes a commission on sales of between 3.5 and 4%.

This article explains the benefits of using PayPal to sell online, and how to set this up yourself.

Above all, the site has engaging content likely to appeal to its prospective audience and convert them into paying customers - whether online or face-to-face.

Marcus is the Marketing Manager at Undara Experience, up in tropical North Queensland. He rang me yesterday afternoon to let me know he was heading out on one of his ‘boundary runs’, from Cairns out on the Savannah Way to Mt Isa.

He said he would be blogging about his trip, and true to his word, here is his first post in the series: Savannah Way Adventure Day One

What I really like about this series of posts is that Marcus is bringing the Savannah Way to life. Reading about the waterfalls (a town near Undara had 400mm of rain overnight recently), the green and the wildlife makes me want to be up there. I’m looking forward to this series of posts straight away, not just to see Marcus getting better at blogging, but because I am interested in the adventure.

Google tells me this trip is 1,116 kms - click on the icon map to see the route in Google Maps.

Google Maps is a wonderful resource that you can look at linking to from your posts. To link to a specific location as I have above, go to maps.google.com and search for the place you want to link to. Once you have found it, look for the Link to this Page link at the top right of the map. Copy this link and create a link to it from your post or page.

Marcus has linked through to his page on the Savannah Way from his blog post. That is always a good idea for your own website. If you have a topic that interests your readers and maybe you think will bring search traffic, create an information page for it. If there is a specific keyword you want it to rank well for (for example, a keyword you have researched), then make sure the keyword is in the slug and in the Title of the page. Each time you write a new blog post that relates to that page, you can link back to your main information page. Every blog post you write that links back to your page will increase its chances of ranking well with the search engines.

Finding a way to tell the story of your destination or experience should be at the heart of every tourism related website. The series of posts on the Savannah Way is just the start for Marcus and Undara.

Targeting your market is a much more precise process online, because you can find out exactly what people are searching for, what search terms bring them to your site, and which ones keep them there the longest.

Interestingly, as this article explains, online searchers are looking for more and more specialised information. And this is where niche businesses like yours can benefit enormously.

But how do you capture the searchers who are looking for the services, products or experiences you offer?

The answer is through intelligent keyword research - I say ‘intelligent’, because it isn’t just a matter of looking at the most popular search terms. You need to find terms that are more precisely associated with your business, with fewer actual searchers.

For example, a business that offers dolphin encounters will be competing for attention on the search term ‘dolphins’, which attracts over 7,000 searches a day. But ’swim with dolphins’ and ’swimming with dolphins’ are each keyed in 96 times a day.

Here’s an opportunity not only to publish content that attracts a niche, but to attract a more precise search audience. You know from the search term exactly what they’re looking for.

It’s important to note here that ‘dolphin swimming’ gets 22 searches and ‘dolphin encounters’ just 4 a day. Knowing this is vital to your success. You could guess which phrases are being keyed in, but if you know, then you have a much better chance of matching your content to those phrases.

Remember too that the number of people visiting your site is less significant than the number of site visitors who find what they’re looking for on your site. Even more important is the number who book. So attracting people who are clearly looking for precisely what you offer is more important than attracting thousands looking for all sorts of other experiences and information.

How do you find out what searchers are looking for? I used Wordtracker’s free service for the figures given above. You can also take out a Wordtracker subscription to get access to more detailed keyword analysis.

Once you have keywords that are significant but not huge, you have a real opportunity to use them in your content, remembering to apply good search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques to attract people searching on those terms.

Glenn explains keyword analysis further in this article.

Last night we officially launched OM4Tourism’s unique model for website marketing to a select gathering from the tourism industry.

The enthusiastic support we received in response to Glenn’s captivating presentation was mixed with concern that perhaps we needed to be taken away by men in white coats!

Take a look at our new home page and you’ll see why. We are giving away websites and charging no hosting fees - and there’s no catch.

Instead, our revenue comes from the online marketing services we offer to clients who want us to help them with keyword analysis, writing web pages and blog posts, establishing e-newsletters and booking services, or running search marketing campaigns.

Our sites are designed to be self-managed by businesspeople, not technicians. The editing facilities at the ‘back end’ of the sites are user-friendly, and anyone who is used to word-processing will be able to pick up the basics very quickly.

What this means for tourism operators is you can have a fully self-managed website at absolutely no cost, with free tutorials from us to help you market your business online, using the built-in tools that come with your site.

Or you can hire our web designers and writers to do some or all of your online marketing for you.

For example, Goat Rock Texas is a site that we set up and are now hosting at absolutely no cost to the site owners.

The Croft family are managing the site themselves, happily uploading content and images, publishing blog posts and setting up their own banner artwork.

Periodically they receive an email tutorial from us explaining how to use the tools available to them within the site.

We are delighted to see watch the site develop naturally, infused with the family’s unique energy. It has lots of appeal for its target market and will no doubt draw plenty of attention.

Notice that the url contains ‘om4tourism’ - once the site is ready to cut over, this will disappear and the site owners will have their own domain name.

At the other end of the continuum is K2O, who also received a free site and hosting, but have purchased our online marketing services to carry out keyword analysis, establish the look they want for their site, populate the site with optimised content, and set up links and images.

We will also support K2O in monitoring Google Analytics for their site to measure its performance over time.

Given the excellent results we are seeing with other OM4Tourism sites, we are very confident.

You don’t have to create a whole new website to get better at online marketing.

Live History is an example of a site that we have converted to our platform, giving the business owners, Judith and Chris Cornish, more opportunities to get their story out to their target audience.

The new site has the same look and feel of the old one, and the content has been transferred to the new structure. So why is this one better?

Because it has all the online marketing tools that are vital for positioning the business, bringing in traffic, encouraging conversation, increasing conversion and boosting bookings. For example:

• Keyword analysis told us to put Hobart into the domain name to attract more searchers wanting things to do when they visit the city, helping to put Live History on the Internet highway instead of the backstreets.
• Like all OM4Tourism sites, this one is designed to be highly visible to search engines, bringing more traffic to Judith and Chris’s door.
• A blog with email subscription enables Judith and Chris to post regular news and updates to keep visitors engaged and enrich their site content.
• Clearer testimonials and accreditation are important conversion tools - they tell site visitors that this is a good quality experience.
• Easy access to booking and travel information with a prominent contact form helps visitors to incorporate the tour into their holiday and encourages them to enquire and book online.

In addition, Judith and Chris now have access to Google Analytics to help them track where their site visitors are coming from and what terms they key into Google to get to the site. They can then incorporate these search terms into their content to attract even more attention.

Here’s Judith’s response to the site set-up process:

Thank you so much to both you and Glenn for getting us set up with this new site. I know that it won’t be long before I am blogging with the best of them and our testimonials are flowing in from satisfied clients!

As Live History develops, Judith and Chris will be blogging their news regularly and uploading more images and testimonials. As they develop new performances, they can add new pages to the site very easily - if you can manage Word, you can create a page in an OM4Tourism website. And as the content builds over time, so will the authority and PageRank of the site, turning it into an online magnet for Hobart visitors.

Over the next few weeks I will be writing profiles on a dozen small tourism operators dotted around the country - all of whom have contributed valuable information to OM4Tourism on international marketing issues.

The operators featured have all agreed to share their marketing experiences, and you are equally free to comment, add advice or ask questions.

The first operator is attracting an international clientele to its small-group customised tours with some impressive online marketing.

Rich + Lingering offers luxury food & wine tours and customised tours, all for very small groups (no more than six), in South Australia’s Barossa Valley, Adelaide Hills and McLaren Vale premium wine regions.

After less than two years in operation, the business has just become the SA Great 2007 Regional Award Winner for Tourism Services, and taken home the SA Tourism Commission New Business bronze medal.

Targeting a Niche Market

According to Rich + Lingering’s Jason Miller, the business depends on clear and targeted branding to overcome the general perception that wine tours involve large buses and little specialist knowledge.

“There are a number of low to mid-priced mass market operators who basically provide a transport service for which there is a big market,” he told me.

“We are at the other end of the scale – private, small group, high levels of international wine knowledge, personalised service. It does take time to break these misconceptions, which is mainly done by developing relationships and having a strong brand.”

International guests make up 35% of Rich + Lingering’s total visitation. They are aged 30-60, professional/white collar, high net worth individuals, looking to develop themselves with food and wine activities and education. Most come from the UK and northern Europe, North America, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Jason reaches this market online (his website and others), as well as via agents, ITOs and magazine advertising - all carefully chosen for synergy with the business’s brand. To capture unplanned visits after arrival, he also works with Visitor Information Centres and has a presence in regional guides.

Online Marketing Insights

Jason puts great emphasis on web content, as 43% of guests find Rich + Lingering online, with most coming directly to the R+L website. He shared some valuable insights:

“Our key online strategy is to drive traffic to our site by achieving high Google rankings for specific searches (e.g. ‘private/luxury wine tour south australia’), but also a broad range of links and other good relevant content, such as travel tips, on other sites.

“Having good content on your website which isn’t too sales focused shows you ‘know your stuff’, is of value to the reader, and helps SEO [search engine optimisation].

“We also produce a seasonal newsletter which people subscribe to and can distribute themselves to their friends etc. This has been a great way to broaden the net. A number of our newsletter articles are further used in blogs.”

All great strategies. Interestingly, Jason finds that most guests use the site for research rather than bookings, and only a small proportion are booked completely online.

He believes this is due to the nature of the business. Offering customised, high-end tours means personal communication with guests to ensure all their needs are met. This is hard to do via a booking engine, so guests are encouraged to contact Rich + Lingering directly with their requirements.

My previous post went on a journey to find out where travellers are likely to end up when they research travel experiences online.

One of my searches - for an interactive dolphin experience in Western Australia - took me to 2 specialist operators: Naturaliste Charters and Rockingham Dolphins.

So why did these operators get my attention?

1. Relevant content, optimised for search

Well, for one thing, they appeared high in Google’s ‘organic’ search list.

These are the links that appear through a process of natural selection on the left-hand side, as opposed to the sponsored links listed on the right and sometimes at the top.

Their position in the organic links tells us that Naturaliste Charters and Rockingham Dolphins carry authority in the eyes of Google. To achieve this, the sites are search-optimised and contain relevant content (i.e. the content matches my search intentions).

2. Inbound links

It’s also likely that both sites are getting some quality inbound links, as this is another way the search engines decide on a site’s overall authority.

The best way to achieve this is to link to other high-ranking sites and encourage them to link to yours. Google checks where the links are coming from and only gives you brownie points for authentic links from relevant sites.

Naturaliste Charters has some excellent links at the foot of its home page, which are a useful resource for site visitors and will serve to encourage back links from those sites.

But while a high ranking will bring you traffic, it won’t necessarily hold the attention of your visitors or convert them to bookings.

There are certain features of a site that help to keep your prospects’ interested enough to have a good rummage around. Both Naturaliste Charters and Rockingham Dolphins held my interest for different reasons, but I’m going to focus on Rockingham Dolphins because they kept me onsite for longer.

3. The travel experience

First, I could immediately read not just about the tours available but about what it’s like to swim with wild dolphins. And the good quality images help to tell the story visually. This all confirms for me that I want to share this amazing experience - I want to “be there, doing that”.

Tourism Australia research tells us that inbound visitors to Australia are “experience-seekers” first and foremost. So the experience needs to be paramount in your online content.

4. Personality and passion

It’s easy to get to know the crew through their profiles, which communicate their personality and humour in just the right measures. There’s also some interesting information on the history of the company that conveys the passion that led Terry to set up the business.

A conversational style with lots of personality is something that Tourism Australia also encourages in marketing material, since research shows that this is what visitors find most engaging.

5. Awards and affiliations

There’s also plenty of credibility in evidence on the Rockingham site, with awards and environmental affiliations. They now have my trust.

So don’t be afraid to blow your own trumpet - this is a vital part of the conversion process.

6. The booking process

In practical terms, if I want more detail I can download a brochure (quickly) and the information on booking and getting there is easy to find and clear.

If site visitors have to work hard to find out what their options are and how to make a booking, you could well lose them.

7. The all-important blog

There’s only one thing missing for me from these sites: a stream of news and stories that I can read and maybe even subscribe to. Naturaliste Charters does have a newsletter that visitors can subscribe to, but having news on the site is more immediately engaging and likely to lead to more subscriptions.

Blogging is vital for tourism operators in today’s online travel environment, and is an easy way to post regular updates and news. Site visitors can subscribe to a blog by email, or via an RSS feed which means they can receive your news stream without giving their email address - some visitors will prefer this.

Blogging also helps your search ranking, attracts online browsers through blog search engines (such as Technorati), engages visitors who are used to a more informal, newsy style of content, gives you more opportunities to link to other sites, builds a more comprehensive portfolio of content on your site, adds personality, and encourages interaction through comments.

The world of the web is a bewildering place for a small tourism operator. There are so many huge travel sites out there that it’s easy to feel like a very small fly caught in a vast web waiting to be eaten alive by the search engine spiders.

How on earth do you get attention amongst all the noise and flash?

First, have faith in the search engines.
Second, be authentic.
Third, be brave.

Search engine spiders don’t look for glossy, flashy websites. They don’t care how big your business is. They look for rich, relevant content. How great is that? This means you being authentic - talking online about your expertise, the experiences offered by you and your destination, and the people involved.

Make sure you optimise your site too, which simply means making it easy for the spiders to read the content. If you’re nervous about how to do it, this article demystifies the process.

Another important factor is inbound links. If there are other authoritative, high-ranking sites pointing to you, Google will take this to mean that you must know what you’re talking about.

Our travel sites zoomed straight to a 4/10 PageRank after just a few months of going live simply by paying attention to these factors: content, SEO and links.

What’s great about search engines is that they’re constantly onto those who try to fake it. So if a site tries to buy or sell links, they get penalised. Inbound links need to be genuine links prompted by excellent content on your site. And an inbound link is worth a lot more than a reciprocal link (i.e. you link to me and I’ll link to you).

Here are two of the best ways to get inbound links:
1. Have useful, relevant content on your site AND use your blog to link to useful content on other sites. Not only does this add value for your readers, but you’ll attract the attention of those other sites, and if they like what they see, they’ll add value for their readers by linking to you.
2. This is where being brave comes in - write articles about the travel experiences you offer and post them on article syndication sites, such as ezinearticles.com. Getting an article published on a site like this will automatically get you up to 3 inbound links from a high-ranking (6/10) authoritative site.

So the secret to getting search ranking comes down to:
Having faith that Google will rank you for the right reasons without bias (not forgetting SEO).
Being authentic in your content and your intentions when you manage links.
And being brave enough to publish your content beyond your own site.

The recent Tourism Directions & Distribution Conference in Sydney brought to light some important changes taking place in the tourism industry, which put you as a small tourism operator in much bigger shoes.

Giving the keynote address was Anna Pollock of Desticorp, whose views caught my attention and led me to read the white papers published on her site.

In describing the rapidly disintegrating travel distribution model of the 20th century, she lists three groups of providers:

1. Large global and national distributors, including wholesalers, ITOs, airlines and hotel chains
2. Systems providers and intermediaries, such as Galileo and Sabre, which include only the larger corporate suppliers in their databases, and
3. “The rest! Hundreds of thousands of small to medium-sized enterprises [SMEs] located throughout the globe that offer both direct travel-related services (accommodation, dining, transport, recreation and entertainment) and ancillary services (insurance, software, content, finance, weather, news, maps etc).”

I put the last point in quotes because these are Anna’s words, and it’s this large group of providers who are putting together the new model of distribution, which functions primarily online.

Anna goes on to say that this group is “waiting and ready for affordable, flexible, practical solutions that can connect them to a global market of demanding, capricious and valuable consumers hungry for the new, the unusual, the unique and boutique” (my emphasis).

If you sat up and said to yourself - that’s me - you’d be right. Small tourism enterprises have a huge amount to gain from the new distribution model that’s emerging across the world.

Says Anna: “There’s a revolution brewing that threatens to crumble the edifices of the corporate world.” (Don’t we all love to hear that?)

She’s talking about the same revolution described by Chris Anderson in “The Long Tail”. Chris explains that the ability you now have as a niche business to sell directly to prospects across the globe via the Internet means you can siphon off your corner of the market from larger businesses without depending on centralised distribution channels.

The problem for wholesalers translating a top-down model onto the Internet is that large, faceless sites, which are little more than a directory-cum-booking-engine, can’t interact, respond quickly to change or engage users with their personality and depth.

The threat to wholesalers comes from you - and others like you - the more focused sites and distribution systems (the brokers described by Anna Pollock), which are able to:

• beat the generic sites in the search rankings through authoritative content in a niche area,
• build trust and engage users through strategic blogging,
• maintain a personal conversation through targeted email marketing, and
• provide a fuller service through partnership with industry affiliates.

We’ve just seen our first two sites designed specifically for tourism operators reach a Google PageRank of 4/10. This is an excellent result, and if you’re not sure why, I’ll explain.

An online marketing site is designed to get results.

It’s a dynamic system that attracts the site visitors you want, engages them in your content and converts them to paying customers.

To achieve this, your prospects first have to find your site, and many will do this by keying relevant search terms into a search engine - the top 2 being Google and Yahoo.

What Google “spiders” do when they search the web is decide which site pages are important enough to display in the ‘organic’ listing when someone searches on your keywords. By ‘organic’ listing, we mean the main listing on the left of a Google search results page, as opposed to sponsored links that have been paid for.

Here’s how Google explains PageRank to online searchers:

“PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.”

So a PageRank of 4/10 within the first few months of going live is a very good result for NingalooBlue.com and GreatOceanRoad-Torquay.com.au - many sites never make it that high.

However, there are other factors that help their sites to be found by their target readers. Google continues:

“Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.”

This is where Keyword Analysis is essential. Having an authoritative site is important, but using the words and phrases that your prospects are keying in is vital. These are your keywords, and when Google spiders crawl the web looking for content that matches those keywords, you want them to find your site. Where, how and how often you use those keywords will help Google to make the match.

And before any of this can happen, Google has to be able to ’see’ your site in the first place - that means submitting your site to Google for indexing.

So - there are 3 vital steps here:

1. Create authoritative content on your destination or style of travel that attracts back links from equally authoritative sites.
2. Carry out Keyword Research & Analysis and incorporate your top keywords into your site content, headings and tags.
3. Submit your sitemap for Google indexing.