Lunch runs a tourism business, promoting not only the cage shark diving tours Port Lincoln is famous for, but also his own guided tours of the Eyre Peninsula.

He also runs a wheat/canola farm, and on this particular day he was out harvesting his canola crop. As his harvester is GPS equipped, he could quite easily operate it and chat on this phone (hands free, of course). After a few carefully aimed digs at the Freo Dockers (just wait till next season), Lunch got on to the main topic of his call – Google Analytics.

While we talked about what was working for his site and where we wanted to improve, Lunch pointed out he had the best view in the world, looking out over the Great Australian Bight. And he sent me some photos to prove it.

Lunch is pretty savvy about the web these days, and by following his website via Google Analytics, he has seen first hand his growth in site visitors after optimising his site for popular keywords and writing blog posts.

Once Lunch gets his iPhone, he can install one of the handy Google Analytics apps (the BAM Analytics app is a good free intro) and also the WordPress app for iPhone. So he can take photos while on his tours and post them to his blog, and then check out his stats.

Lunch’s story is not unique. A lot of regional tourism operators can use technology to tell their story. And of course telling your story is a great way to market your tourism business.

I hope Lunch’s website continues to flourish and that the Dockers dish out some punishment next season.

Google Analytics and the Great Australian Bight

Lunch's Blog Post on Lake Eyre

In between organising tours on the Eyre Peninsula, Lunch arranged a trip up to Lake Eyre for some of his guests.

More importantly, he blogged about it on his site – you can read his post: Lake Eyre Tours and Safaris.

While Lunch’s post doesn’t rank #1 with Google, it is ranking on page 2 and sends a good stream of visitors to his website.

This example illustrates how useful a blog is for a tourism website – a short blog post might take only 15 to 30 minutes to publish (including photos), and can start attracting relevant visitors rapidly. And once you have blog-enabled website, it doesn’t cost you anything.

Consider the time and effort required to run an ad … and how well targetted it can be. The people that are searching for lake eyre tours, finding his post and coming to his site – they are pretty relevant visitors, you would have to say.

When you publish to your blog on a reasonably frequent basis, Google will index new posts very soon after you post them. So it is a great tool for getting your story out on a particular topic.

What events are coming up in your region that people will be searching for? When they are searching, do you want them to find you?

Time to do some more blog posts!

Visitors Flock to Lake Eyre

Araucaria Ecotours - Wildlife Tours ex Brisbane

Tour enquiry forms are at their best when they make it easy for visitors. Easy to understand what tour options are available, and easy to fill out the form.

Asking for too much information is not only unnecessary, you can easily turn people away. If the information isn’t essential, don’t ask for it until after you have the booking!

Your website should make it clear what tours are available, and your tour enquiry form can help reinforce that. Ronda has used two drop down lists to make it clear there are Day Tour options as well as Extended Tour options.

We’ve also found that adding enquiry forms to additional web pages (either customised tour enquiry forms like Ronda’s or even simple Contact Forms) can increase the number of enquiries. If people have a question forming in their mind, if you give them the opportunity to ask a question, they just might do it.

Increasing the number of tour enquiries from your website

Glenn: Hi Daniel, how important is the web to your business and why?

Daniel: The web is vital to my business. Web and Email based marketing generates more than half of all my new business. Through these tools I can ‘sell’ my product with little actual time or effort involved on my behalf. Secondly, by using these tools I am able to keep clients up to date with my products, which increases repeat business levels and brand recognition.

Glenn: How do you approach marketing your business on the web? What has worked best for you?

Daniel: Websites are great, but I believe that they need to have the added value of being a resource that potential clients can use, in this case for keeping up to date on fly fishing in Tasmania. Many of these users will eventually become clients in one form or another. Linked to the website an Email database is paramount to keep clients up to date with new products, offers, and prompting business.

Glenn: How do people find your website? What strategies do you want to employ to increase the number of visitors?

Daniel: I advertise in the leading Australasian fly fishing magazine, FlyLife, and sponsor their internet forum. This is as far as my very meagre marketing budget can stretch. With that said, I authored my first book in 2007, In Season Tasmania – A Year of Fly Fishing Highlights, and have been published or have featured in articles within Australian Traveller Magazine, Outer Edge Magazine, FlyLife Magazine, Tasmanian Fishing and Boating News and Tasmanian Sportsfisher Magazine. Just having my name out there increases brand recognition, and as a consequence, visits to my website.

Glenn: In your experience, what are the most important factors that help in converting an interested visitor into a client?

Daniel: Consistent contact by getting them onto an Email database mailing list. This should be made available as a service through your website.

Glenn: What do you rate as the most important factors to take into account for a business website?

Daniel: Clean appearance, no typos, great photos, clear message.

Glenn: Any other recommendations or comments for a business owner wanting to market effectively online?

Daniel: Get a website that you can maintain and update yourself. Publish professional quality photos, and get help with the text if this isn’t your forte!

We upgraded and redesigned Daniel’s Riverfly website as part of his Hidden Jewel award, including search engine optimization. Also check out Daniel’s book In Season Tasmania: A Year of Fly Fishing Highlights.

Marketing Tips from Daniel Hackett of Riverfly

We now recommend that our clients move to using Google Apps, and before you groan at the thought of changing your email addresses yet again – you don’t have to.

Your existing email addresses can be used and simply redirected into your Gmail account. So you still receive and send from your existing addresses – via the Gmail interface.

You can still use Outlook or AppleMail if you prefer it to the Gmail browser, and I’ve never seen a more effective spam filtering system.

There are other important benefits to using Google Apps, as Glenn’s article, Simplify Your Email Life, explains.

To demonstrate that every small tourism operator can make the switch without pain, Glenn interviewed Deryck Brockhurst of Boshack.

Deryck rates his technical skills as a 2 on a scale of 1 to 10.

Have a read of the interview, and if you can still think of a reason not to switch to Google Apps, let me know by commenting here or going to the Forum discussion.

How to establish an effective email service

It’s a bit like having a table of contents – it enables you to focus on the themes that are central to your site content.

So, for instance, if one of your themes is native wildlife, then it makes sense to have a category with that name.

If you are creating categories, they need to be visible on your site, so that readers can click a category and see all the relevant blog posts.

This means, for OM4Tourism clients, you’ll need to add the Categories widget into your sidebar so that they appear on your site. Our article on Changing the Contents of Your Sidebar explains how to do this.

You also have the option of adding tags to your blog post, and we highly recommend doing this.

Think of tags as your index. When someone clicks on a tag they see the ‘tag cloud’ – which is the equivalent of your blog index. They can then click to see more posts with the same tag – so it’s like looking in an index and seeing all the pages that include content that is relevant to that word or phrase.

This and many other online marketing tips appear in our support site OM4.com.au. For questions not answered there, go to our Forums.

How to use blog categories and tags

If the experience of Elizabeth Fleetwood is anything to go by, online marketing seems to offer the best solution.

Elizabeth runs Hobart Historic Tours, and is relatively new to online marketing. The path that led her there is probably familiar to many small tourism businesses.

“I had made some efforts to join in Tourism Tasmania’s international marketing efforts,” she told me. “But I find it too expensive and cumbersome for my operation. For example, it would simply not be worth my while to go to ATE [the Australian Tourism Exchange], as the minimum cost would be about $10,000.”

Another avenue to reach international visitors is through the magazines that go into hotels that attract overseas visitors. But again, advertising in these publications is prohibitively expensive for a small operation like Elizabeth’s.

“I think the future is more likely to be on the web,” she concluded. “And I am more likely to look at marketing opportunities in that medium.”

So far, Elizabeth has concentrated on links, including Discover Tasmania, which brings most of her online enquiries, and the Tasmanian Travel & Information Centre, with brochures in the Centre’s physical office in Hobart, which still brings the majority of her bookings, thanks to a great staff who know her product well.

She has recently signed up with BookTasmania, an interface that places her product on travel distribution sites at her discretion on a commission-only basis, while allowing a booking system directly linked to her own site.

Linking out to other relevant sites to encourage back links is a good strategy for achieving higher search ranking, and you can read more about how Elizabeth is doing this in my blog post.

With the percentage of international visitors booking her tours now at 40%, Elizabeth’s attention is focusing on the quality of her product and marketing online. Getting these two things right will take her a long way towards building her business cost-effectively.

Profile: A search for cost-effective marketing

A River Bed is a self-contained retreat at Airey’s Inlet on the Great Ocean Road.

Already doing well domestically, Wendy Deighton is looking at ways to get the message out to potential visitors from overseas.

Given that the Great Ocean Road is a highly popular destination, we believe Wendy’s best bet is to have a presence on dynamic destination-focused sites, and this reflects her own plans to forge strong online links.

She is already listed on OzStayz, GreatOceanRoadHolidays.com.au and we have just put her in touch with Tim Kottek and Yvonne Hunter at GreatOceanRoad-Torquay.com.au.

These sites will certainly help to bring her attention from an overseas audience.

She is also keenly aware of the need for thorough keyword research to attract more visitors, and recognises something that we have also recently discovered – ‘kangaroo’ is one of the most highly searched wildlife terms!

Kangaroos have been seen on the front lawn and often on the other side of the river which guests can view from the studio – something that will definitely help her to get the attention of overseas visitors wanting a truly Australian experience.

Wendy also points to the difficulty some small operators face when clients want them to arrange every aspect of their trip for them.

Tourism operators aren’t travel agents, and you don’t want to spend time organising a complete holiday when you only benefit from one small part of the package.

Creative packaging with other tour operators in the same region can give overseas visitors exactly what they’re looking for though. Then all they have to do is book transport – very easy to do online.

In addition, each operator involved in the package promotes the whole deal, which brings more attention to you.

Beyond this, linking into the best destination sites and relevant online travel agencies means even if you get a direct enquiry from a high-maintenance client who wants more than you are able to offer, you can refer them to your affiliate site.

By funnelling destination searches into an effective site with recommended tours and accommodation neatly packaged – we believe operators such as Tim, Yvonne and Wendy could be onto a winner.

Profile: Forging links that bring traffic

So when you upgrade your site, or make any changes that result in new URLs for your pages, don’t neglect the index.

This means ensuring that every page gets indexed, not just your home page, and that redirects are planned and implemented.

Having every page indexed gives searchers more opportunities to find you because more specific content is crawled by the spiders.

For example, Undara Experience has a page on the Savannah Guides in their site. When you key ‘Savannah Guides’ into the Google search bar, a link to this page appears on page 1 of the search results.

Our recent upgrade of the Undara Experience website has made a big difference to the amount of content Google has indexed.

Their old site had some excellent content – but the Javascript menus made for a great spider trap, so only 23 of their pages were indexed.

Less than a week after going live, almost twice the number of pages were indexed, and now they have 66 pages in the Google index.

We also set up redirects from all their old pages to the relevant content on their upgraded site – a vital part of any website revamp or upgrade.

Just like setting up postal address redirects if you move office, you need redirects set up for every one of your indexed pages. Otherwise when the index brings up one of your old pages during a search, clicking on the link will give the searcher a ‘Page Not Found’ result, and the link might be removed.

The same goes for sites linking through to your site. As soon as they realise the page is no longer there, they may simply remove the link, and lost inbound links are going to be detrimental to your business.

There are a few ways redirects can be established. The best way is to use an Apache 301 redirect that tells search engines the page has been permanently moved.

When a site upgrade is involved that will change the URL of any indexed page:

1. Get a list of every page indexed by the search engines (you can do this by entering site:youraddress.com in the search box of Google and Yahoo).
2. For each page indexed, record the old URL and the new URL.
3. When you upgrade your site, make sure a redirect from the old page to the new page is set up.
4. When your site changes over, test each of the old page URLs to test the redirects are working.

Implementing 301 redirects is quite technical, so make sure your web developer knows what to do.

Help Google point searchers to your pages