Is Paying for SEO Worth It In 2019?

It’s quite common to come across obituaries of SEO Marketing which proclaim that the practice is dead.

The age of social media and the prevalence of other digital marketing methods, forces people to ask if paying for Search Engine Optimisation is really worth the investment.

To do this, it’s imperative for us to translate traffic, visitors and conversions into hard numbers or revenue, to quantify the process of SEO in monetary terms.

How To Measure SEO Value

Accurately measuring the value of SEO has been somewhat problematic since the very first days of search engine optimisation due to several factors.

Most SEO agencies measure the value of SEO using core metrics of traffic and conversions.

Before quoting a price, agencies collect data from potential clients about their current website traffic along with the number of sales and conversions from this traffic.

This provides an average conversion rate for the site.

The quoted price for an SEO campaign factors in data about budget, traffic and conversions, to provide a quantifiable ROI.

Most businesses running SEO campaigns have likely experienced a couple of commonplace problems.

The first problem was the time required to achieve results from an SEO campaign. With ever-increasing competition within organic listings, in certain instances it can take time to see tangible results.

SEO is therefore an investment in the long-term health of your website. This does make quantifying ROI hard, when performance is often reviewed at 4 week intervals, comparing each month to the prior year.

The second problem concerns conversion as very often an SEO campaign would not lead to an increase in the conversion rate. Overall, whilst traffic numbers may increase, SEO in isolation does not improve a site’s conversion metrics.

Overall, SEO isn’t an exact science, as say, PPC could be considered. There are far more variables to consider.

SEO vs PPC

SEO vs PPC is an age-old debate both methods of marketing closely associated with Google search.

SEO and PPC are entirely different forms of marketing and comparing these two would be comparing apples with oranges. The main differences is how traffic is obtained and where listings appear on the search results pages.

Many marketers turn to PPC or pay-per-click advertising to achieve fast results, but all research points out that PPC is not as effective for building your brand as SEO.

Strong organic rankings does more to show the size and authority of your brand than can be achieved through PPC.

Perhaps this has to do with the perception that organic search results are trusted by searchers and search engines which is not the case with PPC ads which can be bought using Google’s AdWords platform.

SEO Expert Rand Fishkin pointed out in the Brighton SEO conference in 2018 that the click-through rate of organic search results is an eye-popping 52.96%

This is much higher than the click through rate of 3.49% for PPC ads.

So, it should be evident that no serious brand or marketeer can ignore SEO.

At least, not over the long-term.

Direct Advertising vs Brand Marketing

It’s important to understand the difference between direct marketing and brand marketing as this will offer us further insights into SEO and PPC.

Direct advertising as the name suggests is any type of marketing which involves a call to action and is often a paid form of marketing.

In the case of direct advertising, a marketer pays someone to run his ad on their website, ad network, newspaper, or magazine.

PPC is a form of direct advertising as a marketer pays to run an advert on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Brand marketing is the opposite of direct advertising, and it mainly consists of all the activities which a business engages in to promote their brands such as blog posts, content marketing, podcast, organic social media, and PR.

SEO is primarily a form of brand marketing.

A brand is intangible, and so is the case with brand marketing as there is no established way to measure the ROI of your brand marketing efforts.

Even many veteran marketers are unaware of this distinction between PPC and SEO because they don’t realise that direct advertising is entirely different than brand marketing.

Brand marketing is more about telling the story of your business and establishing yourself as a reputed business in the eyes of your customers.

Once a customer is aware of your brand, he or she will surely consider your products/services whenever the need arises.

Brand marketing, unlike direct advertising, may not lead to a sale immediately, but it will surely be more beneficial for your business in the long run.

The same is true for SEO as it may not lead to an immediate sale, but higher rankings on SERPs will inevitably lead to more revenue and profits over the long term.

Does Direct Advertising Increase Sales?

There is no guarantee that direct advertising will generate more sales or profits.

There are several factors which we must consider such as the click-through-rate (CTR) of paid ads and the conversion rate of visitors who visit your website or landing page after clicking on your PPC adverts.

As we mentioned earlier, CTR for PPC ads is often as little 3.49% which essentially means that only 34.9 people out of 1000 who see this ad will click on it.

Marketers have long been aware of ad blindness. Due to the explosion in the number of ads consumers have developed an indifference to paid ads and most people avoid them at all costs unless they are interested in the product being sold via a PPC ad.

Another factor which we need to consider for the viability of PPC ads is their high cost as even a low priced PPC campaign can run into thousands of dollars every month.

Large companies with massive marketing and advertising budgets may benefit from PPC ads, but small and mid-sized businesses stand no chance as the extremely low CTR and conversion rates make it impossible to break-even with AdWords on a more limited budget.

SEO Return On Investment

Hopefully, by now, you will have an idea that measuring SEO ROI or return on investment is a bit different than measuring the ROI of an AdWords PPC campaign.

Essentially because they are two completely different mediums.

PPC is a form of direct advertising which can be easily measured using the standard marketing and financial metrics, while SEO is a form of brand marketing which makes measuring its ROI difficult, if not impossible.

Although you can measure the ROI of SEO by using SEO tools, you will need a powerful marketing automation or CRM software which can track each lead your SEO efforts generate.

Web analytics are far more advanced today than was the case a decade ago and now you can easily track almost everything about your traffic, visitors, sales, and conversions.

So, measuring the ROI of SEO is possible if you use the right tools and are willing to put in the effort required.

Can SEO Help Increase Your Sales?

SEO, unlike PPC, leads to permanent results as if you follow Google best practices.

If you approach SEO the right way, you can gain a high rank on SERP and you may even be able to stay on the first page of Google for months or years to come for your target keywords.

PPC, on the other hand, will benefit you only if you are running your ad campaign or in other words only as long as your budget lasts.

A well-executed SEO campaign will lead to a higher rank on SERPs which will increase the number of organic visitors you get regularly.

The best part of all this is the fact that this will be targeted traffic as SEO remains by far the best medium to get visitors who are already searching for your products/services.

Organic search visitors tend to have a higher conversion rate and are more likely to buy from you as compared to visitors who may arrive at your site via other channels. A significant increase in the number of organic search visitors will automatically increase the sales and will positively impact your bottom-line.

Is paying for SEO is worth it?

Considering all the points we’ve discussed above, it becomes clear that PPC is not a substitute for SEO.

Most marketers overlook the fact that despite the longer lead-times, SEO remains one of the most effective marketing strategies available to any business.

It can be concluded that SEO is worth paying for, although how much you should pay for SEO is a tricky question to answer.

This largely depends upon your own current position, budget, and ambitions for the business.

Have You Tried AdWords Smart Display Campaigns? You Should!

Google AdWords is considered by many as the best weapon in a marketer’s arsenal and this is true to a large extent.

AdWords is a very powerful tool which also happens to be one of the most complex marketing tools ever devised. Even many long-time users of the platform are not aware of several of its features due to the complexity.

Smart Display Campaigns are one of the most attractive features of AdWords, but few people understand how smart display marketing works and even fewer have used this feature.

So, in this article, we will discuss AdWords Smart Display Campaigns in detail and will shed some light on why you must use AdWords Smart Display Marketing for increasing your conversion rate.

What is Smart Display Marketing?

Smart Display Marketing can be considered a glimpse into the future of marketing as it uses cutting-edge technologies developed by Google.

At its core, Smart Display Marketing is all about artificial intelligence and marketing automation. The basic idea behind this revolutionising concept is to automate everything such as bidding, targeting and ad creation.

Marketers can significantly reduce the time which they spend in creating and optimising AdWords campaigns with smart display marketing as it requires a minimum amount of time to manage and delivers superior returns on investment thanks to Google’s AI (Artificial Intelligence) and algorithms.

Let’s discuss how bidding, targeting and creatives are automated with smart display marketing before proceeding further.

How Does it Work?

Smart Display advertising uses marketing automation to reduce the amount of time you must spend in optimising your campaign, as now Google’s algorithms and artificial intelligence will optimise your AdWords campaign for you.

AdWords Smart Display campaigns automate three important parts of a PPC campaign, namely Bidding, Targeting, and a Creative portion of ads which essentially includes your ad copy, images, and call to actions etc.

Automatic Bidding

Unlike normal display ads, Smart Display ads work backwards in that you don’t have to set a bid for your ad campaign in the beginning.

Instead, you provide AdWords the CPA or cost per action which you’d like to achieve and AdWords itself decides an ideal bid amount for your ads after considering all the factors.

Smart Display ads use a special form of automatic bidding which is known as target CPA bidding. All you need to do is to give the AdWords a target CPA and AdWords algorithm will bid based on the data.

So, it will bid aggressively when data suggests that there is a chance of high conversion and will bid for a lower amount of data suggests that chances of a conversion are low.

Now the natural question arises what data the algorithm will use for automatically placing bids, as the success of your Smart Display Campaign rests on the data which is used for bidding.

AdWords considers several factors when calculating the ideal bid cost such as if a user has been on your website in the past or not, their online behaviour, which sites they have visited in the past and what they are interested in.

Although, a note of caution here as AdWords may bid quite high and low and you must be prepared to see a lot of volatility in your bid prices as it’s not uncommon for Smart Display Campaigns to bid as high as $10 or as low as $1 per click.

But in the end, high and low bids will cancel each other, and your overall conversion cost will be equal to or near to your target CPA.

Automatic Targeting

Smart Display campaigns use a similar automated approach when it comes to targeting and use data from your previous campaigns along with several other bits and pieces of information to target users who are most likely to convert.

AdWords will automatically re-market to users who have visited your site in the past using the best bids and ads which are likely to convert. The main idea of automatic targeting is to catch visitors in mid-funnel when they haven’t decided between you and your competitor.

AdWords will also consider the correlation between your main keyword and any other associated keyword when targeting these visitors.

For example, you sell car insurance and Google’s algorithm determines that people who are looking to buy a new car also search for car insurance quotes. So, AdWords will automatically target users who are searching for new car prices as these are much more likely to need car insurance which you are selling.

Google is quite secretive about how smart targeting works and only the above details are known about automated targeting which often drives marketers crazy as due to its automated nature you can’t control bidding or targeting.

Although it sits perfectly well with the stated aim of smart display campaigns as the main goal here is to reduce the time and effort which marketers spend in optimizing their ad campaigns.

Automatic Creative

Another salient feature of Smart Display Campaigns is the ability to automate the ad creation process.

This effectively means that AdWords algorithm will use headlines, images, ad copy and call to actions provided by you to create an ad which the algorithm and the artificial intelligence believes to have a higher chance of converting.

AdWords will ask you for creative assets which will be combined for creating an ad when you create your first smart display campaign.

Another advantage is the fact that AdWords will itself test several combinations of the creative assets provided by you and decide based on the results which image works with which headline.

So, you also don’t need to worry about A/B testing here as smart display ads will do this for you.

How Can I Take Advantage?

You can drastically need the amount of time and effort which you currently spend on optimizing your campaigns as Google will do this for you if you decide to use AdWords smart display campaigns.

And the best part is that you can structure a campaign around a target CPA which suits you.

Google’s algorithm will utilize information gleaned from tremendous amount of data collected by it to decide how to best use your money for driving visitors to your site.

A Smart Display Campaign, unlike a normal display one, requires little maintenance and the whole process is automated thanks to the AdWords algorithm, Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning.

You will find that your conversions become better with time as machine learning allows AdWords to learn from its mistake and it uses the data gathered to use even better ads and targeting.

What Stays the Same with Smart Display Marketing?

Smart Display Marketing can help you in minimising the time spent on optimising AdWords Campaigns, but there are several other aspects of marketing which will remain unchanged.

Building a recognisable brand along with winning the trust of a website visitor is a slow process and you can’t speed it up even with the miraculous power of smart display marketing.

Another factor to consider is the fact that ad blindness among the internet savvy population is at record high levels and conversion rates of less than 0.5% are a testament to this.

People have become increasingly efficient to ignore a display ad and smart display campaigns can’t help you with this.

Designing a landing page, website, and a sales funnel all take time and are essential if you want to benefit from smart display campaigns as without a well-designed sales-funnel AdWords or any other advertising platform is not going to help your business.

You must also consider some potential downsides of Smart Display marketing such as lack of control over bidding, targeting and ads which are shown to prospects.

Google designed this feature with the aim of removing human intervention and supervision, but this also means that you will not have as much control as you used to have with normal display marketing. Instead, you are trusting Google’s algorithm and artificial intelligence to make these decisions on your behalf.

Also, keep in mind that Smart Display Campaigns are just a marketing tool which will not replace several other things which make a marketing campaign successful and must be used in a strategic way along with other marketing tactics.

How to Set up an AdWords Smart Display Campaign?

Before setting up an AdWords smart display campaign you must take note of the fact that Google has specified an eligibility criterion for Smart Display campaigns which at present is 50 conversions on display or 100 on search advertising in the last 30 days. If you don’t meet this criterion, then you will not be able to run Smart Display ads.

For this article, we’ll assume that you meet the eligibility requirements for Smart Display Campaigns.

Now all you need to do is to go to the campaign section in your AdWords account and follow these instructions…

After heading to the campaigns section, you must create a new display campaign as usual and you will see the following screen:

Now you will be asked to select a marketing objective from the list under “Drive Action” as shown in the above image.

All you need to do is select any option other than “Install your Mobile App” or “Engage with your mobile app”.

After selecting the objective, you will see another section showing the option to create a Smart Display Campaign. You must check this box to create your own smart display campaign.

After this step, you will be asked to provide your campaign with a daily budget, similar to normal display campaigns. You will also need to provide a target CPA at this stage.

Once you’ve completed these steps, AdWords will ask you for creative assets which work differently than normal display campaigns.

You’ll see the following screen:

As you can see in this image, you can give several headlines, descriptions and images to AdWords, which will itself create the ideal ad for your smart display campaign after combining all these assets and testing which variations works the best.

You must also keep in mind the restrictions placed over the size of creative assets, which are shown in the table below:

  • Headline (25 characters)

These need to work well with any of your descriptions, images and landing pages.

  • Description (70 characters)

Your descriptions add to your headline and invite people to take action. Make sure they work with any headline, image or landing page.

  • Images

The maximum file size is 1MB, and most common non-.gif formats are accepted. You will need to supply two logos, one 1:1 ratio (1200 x 1200 recommended) and one horizontal logo at 4:1 (512 × 128). A transparent background is best, but a white background will work fine, as long as the logo is centred.

Smart Display Campaigns also restrict the length of your headlines, descriptions, images and logos.

Once you finish this step, you are done with Smart Display Campaigns, as from now onwards Google’s algorithm and artificial intelligence will take over.

AdWords will itself create and test various ads based on the creative assets provided by you and within a week or two, you must be able to see the results.

You must also be a bit cautious about the daily ad budget as several experts suggest that your daily budget must be at least 10x-15x of your target CPA to generate enough number of impressions and conversions.

Be sure to add site-category exclusions to prevent tarnishing your brand or message.

In addition to reports such as Display Summary Report, Smart Display Campaigns will provide you with an Assets Report which ranks your creative assets as “Best”, “Good”, or “Low” based on the number of conversions these assets drive as compared to one another.

If AdWords algorithm and artificial intelligence feel that the campaign needs further conversions to optimize, then your ads will receive a learning rating which essentially means that AdWords is still learning about your campaigns and you must give it more time to optimize your Smart Display Ads.

Top Tips for Creating Smart Display Campaigns

Here are some tips for creating an ideal smart display campaign:

  • You must provide at least 5 headlines, 5 descriptions, and 5 images as this will allow AdWords to test a variety of combinations. You can even provide a larger number as the high number of creative assets have a positive correlation with better conversions.
  • Smart display ads also allow you to add your existing product feed which means that prospects will directly see the products being sold on your site and this is a helpful feature for eCommerce sites.
  • If you must make changes to your target CPA, then make sure you don’t make sudden large changes as AdWords algorithm takes some time to adjust to large changes. Ideally, you must keep the changes in CPA value within 20% and must resist the urge to revise it more than 20% as this may decrease your current conversions with Smart Display Campaigns.
  • Also, provide a logo if you have one as this will increase the number of placements for which you are eligible.

Pros and Cons

Like anything else in life, Smart Display Campaigns have their own pros and cons and the ability to optimize your campaigns on an automated basis also means that you will have to make some trade-offs.

So, let’s consider the pros and cons of Smart Display Campaigns.

Pros

  • Minimal optimisation required due to the automated nature of Smart Ads.
  • Allows you to benefit from the cutting-edge artificial intelligence developed by Google as Google scouts for new clients instead of you and has a whole bunch of data to decide who is more likely to convert.
  • No need to spend time in analysing data for bidding or targeting as everything is automated.
  • Smart Display Campaigns create several variations of ads based on the creative assets provided by you and test these to discover the best converting variation.
  • Ability to exclude the sites where you don’t want your ads to appear.

Cons

  • You lost control in exchange for automation as there are few elements of a smart display campaign which you can control.
  • You will not be able to know who is being targeted due to the black box nature of the Smart Display Campaign’s algorithm.
  • Smart Display Campaigns take much longer than normal campaigns to optimize as AdWords artificial intelligence and machine learning will need some time to learn what is working and this time may be anywhere from 2 weeks to months.

Conclusion

Smart Display Campaigns are a great tool if used in the correct way. Ideally, you must use them as a complement to your regular display campaigns and other marketing tactics as they have their own pros and cons and work best in combination with other AdWords campaigns.

More importantly, they serve as a reminder of what marketing will look like in the future.

As there is an ongoing shift towards machine learning and artificial intelligence which will utilise big data for marketing decisions and it’s highly likely that soon we will see some other smart advertising options from Google which will be built using Smart Display Campaigns as a template.

Smart Display Campaigns must be run for at least a period of 2-3 weeks before deciding whether they are for you or not as even artificial intelligence and AdWords algorithm need some time for optimising a campaign.

Meaningful data can be gathered only when a campaign has been run for a few weeks and it may be too early to stop a campaign after just a week if you don’t see any result.

10 Frequently Asked Questions About SEO

SEO or search engine optimisation is one of the least understood topics in the world of digital marketing.

Most marketers and business owners wrongly assume that they need to have a technical background to grasp SEO fully.

Nothing can be further from the truth as with a little bit of effort even a non-technical person with no prior experience of coding can understand SEO and use his knowledge to get higher rank for his website on search engine results page.

It’s quite natural that most beginners will have some doubts and questions about SEO especially if they lack any prior experience in this field.

So, in this article, we will discuss 10 most common FAQs about SEO which most people have.

1) What is SEO?

SEO refers to the process of optimising your website and webpages to get a higher rank on search engine results pages or SERPs.

Overall the medium is focused on several techniques and best practices which are essential for getting a higher position in organic search results on Google.

SEO often includes creating search optimised content using appropriate keywords, backlinking, and on-site SEO.

Search engines use algorithms to deliver the most relevant results to the searchers. SEO aims to optimise a website or webpage so that the site in question can rank higher for its main keywords.

2) What is the difference between SEO, PPC, and SEM?

SEO, PPC, and SEM are related concepts which are often confused for one another.

We’ve explained SEO above and would like to add that SEO is mostly free of cost as a person is not required to spend anything, although it needs a good amount of time and effort as an SEO campaign can take months before you will start seeing the results of it.

PPC or pay per click advertising also allows you to get a ranking in SERPs, although you will have to pay for running your ads on SERPs as the name PPC itself suggests that it’s a paid form of advertising.

Google AdWords is the leading PPC platform which allows users to show their ads above organic search results on SERPs for keywords or queries of their choice.

PPC mainly uses a bidding model where an advertiser must bid for getting a place on SERPs and usually the person with the highest bid gets the top-most rank on SERPs.

It must be noted that PPC ads which are shown on SERPs mention the fact that they are advertisements and a user can easily differentiate between PPC ads and organic search results displayed on SERPs.

SEM refers to search engine marketing which includes both the SEO and PPC.

So, SEO+PPC are collectively referred to as SEM (Search Engine Marketing), although it’d not be correct to use SEO or PPC interchangeably with SEM as they are just 2 individual elements of SEM.

3) SEO vs PPC?

SEO vs PPC is perhaps the age-old debate in the world of search engine marketing and this question has been asked numerous times since the advent of search engines.

Many people wrongly assume that they can compare these two methods of marketing when comparing SEO with PPC is like comparing apples with oranges.

SEO and PPC are two different methods of search marketing which fulfil specific needs. SEO is aimed at getting free of cost, organic traffic from search engines, whereas PPC is a paid method of advertising.

SEO takes time to deliver return on your investment, where PPC can deliver instant results.

For a person running a website, it comes down to budget, timeframe, and needs as some business owners focus on both SEO and PPC for getting targeted traffic from search engines.

4) What is On-Page SEO?

On-Page SEO refers to the practice of optimising individual web-pages to get higher ranks in search engine results pages or SERPs.

This process is primarily focused on optimising the title tag using a keyword, subheadings using H1, H2, and H3 tags, outbound and inbound links, and SEO friendly webpage URLs.

5) How is SEO changing?

SEO has undergone several changes since its inception, as search engines update their search algorithms regularly.

Google introduced several changes in its algorithm with numerous updates during the past decade, and these algorithm updates have fundamentally changed SEO.

Google’s Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird updates can be considered as landmark changes in SEO. These updates impacted several websites both large and small as Google punished sites using duplicate content, or black-hat SEO tricks.

Another notable change in SEO is the increasing importance of social media signals as nowadays, almost every major search engine considers the popularity of a website on social media to calculate it’s rank on SERPs.

Check out our guide to the ‘How has SEO changed in the last few years?

6) What is Keyword Research?

Keyword research refers to the practice of identifying keywords relevant to a website as SEO and PPC both revolve around keywords.

Keywords are central to how a search engine works as anything for which a user searches using a search engine is a keyword.

SEO campaigns are constructed around keywords, so it’s essential to have a list of relevant keywords. Marketers use several tools such as the Google AdWords Keyword Planner tool to research keywords.

During keyword research, you can also identify alternative or similar keywords which may have a low level of competition as often most valuable keywords have a high amount of competition which makes optimising your website for these keywords difficult.

Check out our guide to the ‘best SEO tools for keyword research

7) Is blogging beneficial for SEO?

Blogging helps in improving a website’s SERP ranking in the long run due to several reasons.

Search engine loves fresh content and blogging allows you to create keyword rich, and relevant content regularly which is then indexed by search engines.

Blogging also allows you to get high-quality backlinks from relevant sites within your industry as having a high number of useful and engaging webpages automatically increases your chances of getting backlinks from other high-quality sites.

Blogging also keeps people longer on your site and increases the average duration of a visit which is considered a positive signal by Google and other search engines.

You can also target long-tail keywords with your blog and can incorporate long-tail keywords within your blog posts to increase your chances of getting a higher SERP ranking.

Check out our guides to ‘Evergreen blog content‘ and ‘Blogging as a Travel Businesses – Why it is Essential for Growth!

8) Are meta tags still important for SEO?

There was a time when meta tags were the craze in the world of SEO, and almost all webmasters were busy adding meta tags to their webpages.

Then, in 2009, Google announced that they no longer use meta tags for ranking webpages in their search engine results pages or SERPs. This changed the perception of meta tags in the eyes of SEO practitioners, and their use declined dramatically.

Many webmasters and SEO professionals still consider them essential for SEO, although no search engine apart from Yandex uses meta tags for ranking websites on SERPs.

Although, it’s still a good idea to use meta tags as these tags influence how your site is displayed in search results and may also affect the number of visitors which you can get from SERPs.

You can consider using Title, Description, and Keywords meta tags as these 3 are the most commonly used meta tags. It’s okay even if you don’t use meta tags as they are no longer used for ranking webpages. So, they only serve an aesthetic purpose.

9) What are backlinks and how they are important for SEO?

Backlinks are links from other websites which point towards your site.

Backlinks are quite crucial for SEO as the internet is built using external links and they remain crucial to understanding the relationship between websites and pages.

We browse sites after clicking a backlink which we may find in our social media stream, any other website or blog or at any other source.

Search engines give higher ranks in SERPs to websites which have a large number of quality backlinks from relevant sites in their industry. Backlinks are also important for search engine indexing as search spiders use these links to index your site in their database.

Backlinks are essential for the reputation and credibility of your website, and they also remain the most potent method of driving traffic to your site.

A single backlink from a reputed website which has a high userbase can give a new lease of life to your site as there are cases when a website got thousands and hundreds of thousands of visitors from a single backlink from a widely read website such as BBC or NYtimes.com.

It’s also important to note here that search engines frown on paid links and you must not pay to get a backlink to your website.

If Google finds out that you’ve bought backlinks for your website, then your site may be penalised by Google and may lose it’s ranking on SERPs along with a significant amount of traffic.

So, you must always earn backlinks instead of buying them from link marketplaces as such tactics no longer work, and often cause more harm than good.

Check out our guide to ‘the importance of links for travel businesses

10) What is Link Equity or Link Juice?

Search engines use backlinks to gather information about websites, and it’s assumed that certain types of links pass value and authority from one page to another.

The concept of Link Equity is closely linked with PageRank, which was the first and original algorithm used by Google to rank websites on their search engine results pages.

Google considers several factors when calculating the link equity such as the type of link, the authority of the linking site, relevancy of the link, following status of the link (do-follow link), the total number of outgoing links from a webpage, https status of the linked page etc.

Link equity can be controlled by using a do-follow or no-follow link. A webmaster may also choose to tell search engine’s crawler to ignore a link by using a robots.txt file and in this case also no link equity will be passed to the linked page.

Why Travel Businesses Need to Manage Their Online Reputation

Travel businesses are one of the few service-based sectors which have been disrupted by the rise of the internet and new media platforms such as social media.

The process of travel planning and booking a holiday has become primarily internet driven, as more and more customers use the web to research destinations, hotels, resorts, and even book packages.

Customers seek out travel businesses with good reviews over the ones with no reviews at all or with poor customer feedback.

According to several studies, 70% of the customers look at up to 20 reviews in their holiday planning process, while 33% will change their plans or choice based on reviews and almost 53% won’t book a hotel without any reviews.

These stats show us how important online reputation is to a modern-day travel business as the perception of a travel brand directly affects its sales and profits.

Online Reputation management is a learn-able skill and managing your travel businesses’ reputation will help you in a number of ways

Improve Trust and Credibility

Almost 84% of consumers today don’t trust advertising and other forms of paid marketing.

User generated reviews, on the other hand, are considered genuine and trustworthy by consumers.

TripAdvisor has revolutionised the whole process of reviewing a travel-based business, and most people visit this website multiple times during their holiday research process to learn more about hotels, resorts, and other travel businesses.

Your business doesn’t even need to be listed on TripAdvisor by you, as your customers can list it and then post a review.

But it’s not just Trip Advisor. There are range of potential review sites for disgruntled customers to choose from:

Source: BrightLocal

 

A few bad reviews on such platforms which are used by millions of users is enough to damage your reputation and may seriously affect your business.

While excellent and positive reviews will help you gain the trust and credibility of your future customers and will increase your revenue and profit.

Many travel businesses wrongly assume that they don’t have any option if a person has left them a bad review. You must reply to such reviews and address the issues raised by unsatisfied customers.

A positive reply to a negative review can have more impact than a positive review would.

Bad reviews are a brilliant way of showing that if something does go wrong you have credibility in how you deal with the issueMarina Cheal (Chief Marketing Officer at Reevoo)

Your reply will have a positive impact and will show to potential customers that you care about your reputation.

It may also change the opinion of the user who has left the bad review as negative reviews are often a result of minor issues which are often blown out of proportion by customers, looking for a platform to air grievances.

Often they just want to be listened to.

Have a read of ‘Your Business Needs More Negative Reviews. Here’s Why‘ by Neil Patel

Attract New Customers

Managing your online reputation will help you in attracting new customers as users are naturally attracted to businesses with a positive image on the internet.

Reputation management entails dealing with bad reviews and focuses on positive information about a business.

Gain valuable insights

Monitoring your brand’s online reputation will lead you to better insights and will give you an idea of how consumers and competitors perceive your brand.

You can use the insights gained to create an effective marketing strategy after considering all the information gained through the process.

Tips for managing your online reputation

Monitoring

Monitoring your online reputation is the first step of any good reputation management strategy as you can’t improve what you can’t measure.

Often businesses will need to do an in-depth audit of all the information online about their businesses and then set up automatic alerts to monitor each time their brand is mentioned on the internet.

You can easily set up Google Alerts for your brand or use automatic monitoring tools such as Mention or Cision to track each time your brand is mentioned over the Internet.

There are also numerous tools available for monitoring mention of your brand on social media sites and some social media tools such as Hootsuite has this feature inbuilt within them.

Claim your listings

As mentioned above, anyone can list your travel business on travel comparison sites, review sites, and social media platforms.

It’s a good idea to claim these listings as your own as it will allow you to control the process and reply to reviews.

Some sites such as Facebook have made the process of claiming a listing easier, but with others, you may have to wait for days or even weeks.

Respond to Reviews

The only thing worse than a bad review is not responding to it.

A lack of response shows to readers that you don’t care about the complaints of your customers.

It also portrays you as insensitive and careless about your online reputation. So, always respond to bad reviews and try to address the issues raised by your customers.

Don’t act defensively

Many travel businesses make the mistake of defending themselves or their employees for unsatisfactory service.

This further harm their image in the eyes of potential customers who often read responses to bad reviews carefully while making a purchase decision.

Defend your actions only if it’s crystal clear that the customer is wrongly accusing you of something which you didn’t do.

Be quick

You need to reply to any bad review promptly as a slow response may further complicate the issue and may lead to bad publicity.

If the review requires a detailed response or some time to sort out the issue, then acknowledge the review and provide a timeframe for the complete answer.

Create Valuable Content

Content has become an integral part of modern online marketing, and most consumers make their purchase decisions based on valuable content created by the seller.

This is especially true for travel-based businesses as travel businesses are primarily selling experiences, and most travel businesses use content to provide a glimpse of these experiences to potential customers.

Rich and valuable content, also called Evergreen Content, can help you stand out from the competition and will also enhance your reputation in the eyes of your customers.

Make sure that you include images and videos in your content marketing strategy as these are the most appealing form of content for potential travellers.

There is no one size fits all approach when it comes to content creation as each business is inherently different and needs a custom content strategy to succeed.

Ideally, you must develop content which entertains and educates the potential customers at the same time and arouses a desire in them for your services.

You can test several content styles, formats, media channels and make a detailed plan to promote your content after studying the data.

With some testing and tweaking, you will be able to find the right combination of elements.

Read more about ‘The True Power of Evergreen Content – A Case Study‘ from Moz

Have a social media strategy in place

Social media is often the first place where customers look for travel inspiration, and several studies suggest that almost 87% of millennials use Facebook for travel inspiration.

The same study suggests that 97% will post on social media while travelling.

These stats show the importance of social media marketing for travel businesses. No travel business can afford not to have a social media presence, and this is also important from the point of reputation management.

It’s a well-known fact that most people post about bad experiences with a travel brand on their social media profiles and often the effect is compounded due to the viral nature of social media.

A single bad review will be instantly seen in the news feeds of all the people who are associated with the unhappy customer.

Tips mentioned above for managing bad reviews on review sites such as TripAdvisor can also be applied on social media. It’s important to promptly address a bad review on social media and thank the customers who’ve left you a positive review.

This will show others that you care about your reputation and are actively monitoring each time someone mentions you on social networking sites.

Social media is also a prime example of word of mouth marketing as people tend to trust recommendations and reviews from their friends and acquaintances.

This fact can be used to your advantage as a single positive review will help you in enhancing your reputation in front of hundreds of potential customers.

Conclusion

We hope that you have now realised the importance of managing your online reputation.

Perhaps we can never overestimate the importance of reputation management in today’s digital world where a single Facebook post or tweet can destroy a brand’s reputation.

By following the tips mentioned above, you can monitor your online reputation and increase your sales.

You may also contact us for help with reputation management, as we have helped hundreds of travel businesses in the past to create a positive digital identity.

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