Does your tourism business have a ‘low season’? Most do, although not all. For example, the south-west of Australia is particularly good at attracting visitors all year round, and has become known as a place to search for a winter getaway, as much as an escape route from the winter heat.

You only have to check Google’s Keyword Tool to see that Australians looking for a winter holiday often search in Australia’s south-west.

And now the Top End tourism operators are stretching their busy season to embrace the summer wet season too, encouraging visitors to experience the tropical environment in full flow.

If you’re looking to attract visitors all year round, you need to know what it is about your business that is likely to attract them to the cold southern winter, the windy coast, or the hot wet northern summer.

I mentioned Google’s Keyword Tool earlier – this is a seriously cool application that has recently been enhanced to enable you to see what people search for at different times of the year.

So not only can you find out what Australians are looking for throughout the year, but how their thinking changes from season to season.

You can see here what the search volume trends look like for winter getaway keywords month by month.

As you would expect, most holiday-makers are researching their winter break during the summer months, except for those searching for a last-minute bargain.

Using this tool, you can check what Australians and overseas visitors are looking for at other times of the year.

The Keyword Tool has been developed to use in conjunction with Google AdWords, which is an advertising medium we recommend to our clients.

But you can also use the Keyword Tool to tell you what keywords to use in your site content to help your visitors find what they’re looking for.

A quick update to Jane’s post about getting onto page 1 in Google Search through Google Local search results.

If local leads are important to your business, then listings in Google Local Search can help you appear above the #1 ranked organic search results in the Google OneBox.

I’ve written a new article on the topic of Improving Your Rankings for Google Local Search.

Get listed. Get reviewed. Get cited.

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.

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.