Keyword Adverising can guarantee placement in search engines results and enable tourism service providers to provide descriptions of their services for a wide variety of keyword terms.

With a minimum budget of $10's of dollars even small organizations can generate meaningful amounts of business with keyword advertising. Many tourism organizations are finding the return on investment (ROI) from keyword advertising to be by far the most effective form of advertising they do.

Your keyword campaign needs to be focused on generating click throughs from buyers, not just browsers. Try to strike a balance between getting the visits you want, and not getting delisted from advertising for your keywords due to insufficient clickthroughs.

 

Did you know?

The key search engines offer revenue sharing opportunities for sites which wish to display content relevant advertisements... even personal sites can get in on the action.

 

 

Web sites with over 500 pages, which usually is only the case with tourism associations or alliances might consider a service called Trusted Feed: a pay for each click service which shows results at the top of the organic search engine listings.

Also called Direct, Data or XML feed it's advantages include continual reindexing, pointing to worthy pages usually buried deep in web site.

 

 

 

What the world needs now is marketing experise that . . .

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3.2 Keyword Advertising

Search engines enable advertisers to broadcast messages to consumers upon request. Advertisers pay the search engine for the right to display their advertisement or listing when chosen keywords are used by a searcher.

Both the search engine and the individual user has a genuine interest in seeing relevant results for their search. An advertiser with a compelling offer can greatly increase web site visits and sales with an appropriate Keyword Advertising strategy.

Since keyword buying is almost immediately integrated into search engine results, keyword buying can be a valuable tool for advertising seasonally relevant tourism experiences.

This page will explain the three basic keyword advertising solutions, strategies for writing effective ads, and steps to ensure that your ads remain visible to search engine users.

There are two basic types of Keyword Advertising: Pay Per click (aka Pay to Play or Pay for Performance) and Submit Url, .

Pay Per Click

30% of search engine clicks are to paid listings.  Pay Per Click is fee-based on a per click basis, starting from $.05 to $.10. PPC operates as an auction where the highest bidder for a keyword combination receives priority listing by the search engine. The lowest bidders are displayed at the bottom of the list, sometimes a few pages deep in the search engine results.

Search engines do not guarantee that your listing will be shown even if you are the highest bidder for a keyword combination. With great competition for keywords, listings that fail to meet search engine user needs are dropped from the listings regardless of the pay-per-click bid. With proper planning you can ensure that your ad gets shown for your most valuable keywords.

The major ppc services are provided by: Google.com #1, Overture #2, Kanoodle.com #3 (results on dogpile, metacrawlwer, webcrawler, c-net and search.com). The major search engine results are shown over a variety of search engines. The relationships between search engines change often. Refer to www.BruceClay.com for current sharing of databases.

Writing Good Ads

Successful keyword advertising requires compelling text to generate interest, and placement that gets you visibility. Through trial and error, advertisers need to quickly establish clickability with the content of their keyword advertising content. Keyword advertising requires a great deal of diligence to check up on campaign performance and make adjustments as you go, testing out a variety of calls to click.

Ad Copy Writing:

Your aim is to attract tourism buyers to your web site, not browsers. Since the fees you pay are based on the number of clicks you recieve, it is most important to you that you are paying for potential customers.

Develop your keyword ad writing strategy to appeal to niche markets. The more narrowly you define your intended audience, the more specific you can be about your offer and the more likely that your offer will be appealing to the searcher.

Be sure to use language that appeals to the target market you are trying to attract.

Ad Copy Tips:

  • state a benefit or solution
  • Offer an incentive
  • Create a sense of urgency
  • Use a call to action
  • Promote your competitive advantage.
  • Include your keywords in the title and description, thus different keyword buys should have different ad content. (The keywords adversised for must be on destination page as well)
  • Make it different. Pay attention to what other advertisers are doing, but find a unique edge to your ads.
  • Survey customers: "What would they hope to see in an ad?' or when you receive a call, ask them why they clicked on your ad.
  • Entice the searcher to learn more.
  • test, test, test . . .

Landing Pages

Landing pages require testing and optimization as well as ads. After the ad listing, the next thing customers see is the landing page. Is your landing page clearly the best and most appropriate, based on the potential guests' keywords? Is the offer clear, headline attention getting? Do you have the right amount of copy? Enhnanced navigation for this page? All are necessary to convert the adword clicker into a potential guest.

Use Web analytics to watch user behavior and learn what changes to your landing page might improve return on investment.

Keyword Campaigns

You can create different keyword campaigns for each demographic, each product or service theme, different attractions and more. For your keyword campaign consider bidding on terms that include:

  • well known regional brands and place names
  • your own trademarked or business names
  • activities offered
  • combinations of the above - ie: "Fishing Charter Nipissing"
  • Features, benefits, or solutions of your service - ie: "Full Service Outfitter"

shows where keyword ads are shown

To be linked here:

  • sample google and overture reports.

  • keyword ad buying screens.

  • keyword results listings and reports.

  • where/how listings appear on search engines.

  • how other web sites get paid to show links for Google, etc. - Altavista.com show how search engines share data.

  • keywords in other languages...

Use narrow targetting of keywords. Although 80% of searches are for 1-3 word phrases, expect the average number of words in a search to rise as the number of web sites continues to rise.

Ensuring Your Listing Stays Put

Search engine value is determined by user satisfaction with the search results. The major pay-per-click services review ad content and landing pages, and assess the click thru rate to determine an advertisers relevance. The following will help maintain your ad.

  • The ad must link to a site/page that is consistent with content of the ad or it will be disabled. Be sure the keywords are given high priority and that any offers made are clearly available on the landing page.
  • Your ad must perform well, generating a minimum click through rate. In the early hours of your first listing, expect to see some of your ads get disabled. Continue to make adjustments to content and keep an eye on your click through rate.

Pay per click services provide an overview of acceptable practice. Nevertheless, you will receive notice if an ad fails to meet the search engine guidelines.

Top 10 Ways to avoid rejection:

  1. don't overuse capitalization
  2. avoid superlatives - Best, #1, etc.
  3. don't use your phone number in listing
  4. Use "and" instead of "&"
  5. ! - limit its use as per guidelines
  6. Do not have popups on landing page
  7. Make sure the keywords are on the landing page - in title preferably
  8. Ensure your content is relevent - consistent message and landing content. Any offers in the ad are repeated on the landing page.
  9. Use proper punctuation.
  10. Avoid short forms of words - ie:"$100/person" not "100/p"

Cost per Click - Ready, Set, Try it!

Required info to setup:

  • company info,
  • billing info, (credit card)
  • selected keywords,
  • title for keyword ad, (25 characters)
  • description for keyword ad,
  • destination url,
  • bid price for each keyword

Use a spreadsheet to prepare Cost per Click content ahead of time.

Benefits:

  • Ads are Immediately active.
  • Require a great deal of attention
  • Inexpensive: Can get started for $10's of dollars
  • Ads can be seasonally adjusted, paused and restarted.
  • Process is relatively easy, and some reports are easy to understand and facilitate adjustments to your campaign.

Drawbacks:

  • Be hot or be dropped.
  • Position can change quickly if new bidders come along.
  • Contextual advertising is the default setting for your ads which may put your ad in front of a number of searches that are not your exact keyword combination. As well ads will appear on other sites who display google ads that are consistent with the context of what is being displayed on the site at that time. See www.gmail.com

A variety of tools exist to help PPC advertisers manage their budgets; Bid gap management software is available from :bidrank, did-it.com epic sky, go toast, ppc bidtracker, send traffic

Submit URL:
(add URL, direct submit, Site Submit) and
Trusted Feed

70% of Keyword searches result in click throughs to organic (non-pay-per-click) content delivered by search engines.

These services provide preferred listing of your advertisement among the organic listings generated by the search engine. Since listings appear as organic search results they are preferred by some people on the web as being "untainted by the economics' of web advertising.

Most sites provide inclusion in directories for an annual fee ranging from $30/yr on sites like AskJeeves.com (inktomi: $39/yr) to $299/yr for inclusion on

Content is considered critical to achieve listing in the proper category and some sites such as Yahoo! do not guarantee listing, but only that your site will be reviewed.

Inktomi includes the new listings in 48 hours.

The fees charged for these search terms are for unlimited traffic.

Yahoo! listings are alphabetical. To Suggest your site navigate to the category that best suites your tourism organization and click on suggest site. All content on Yahoo! is human evaluated.

Open Directory Project/dmoz.org and Zeal listings are volunteer reviewed.

With Submit Url, there is no guarantees of good placement. Even submitting multiple times, multiple pages may not get you the ranking you desire. This is because other pay for placement adverising takes presidence over Submit Url listings. Nevertheless, any serious web marketing strategy should include attention to this service.

Five steps to submit url:

  • Evaluate keywords
  • Run Ranking reports
  • Edit Content
  • Tweak Site Design
  • Submit Url!

Coming Soon: AskJeeves Submit Url Report showing clickthroughs.

 
 

Know the needs and wants of your target markets. What are they looking for and what can you say in very few words to be considered?

Keyword expansion: True, most traffic is on the one- and two-word phrases. But the longer phrases are really important, and will become more important over time.

 

Microsoft's bCentral submission service: Submit It!

For urls & editorial guidelines: www.searchenginesales.com

Tips on Ad Writing from Overture

Adwriting tips from ClickZ

 

 

 

www.overture.com

www.findwhat.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This workshop is offered under the Strategic Tourism Development and Marketing Partnership for Northern Ontario, jointly funded by Industry Canada / FedNor, the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corporation and the Ontario Tourism Marketing Corporation.  Administrative support has been provided by Rainbow Country Travel Association.