Well, for many tourism company owners it may always remain boring. It is not why they became an entrepreneur. But they cannot afford to not pay attention to it or leave it to third parties who do not intimately know their business. It is an essential component and foundation of any local marketing activity to grow visits or enhance revenues.
So, not surprisingly, one the most important things in tourism and hospitality marketing and local SEO and to grow visits and revenues through web presence is keywords. We use keywords in our searches all the time when we are looking online for travel products and tourism services. We do that at home behind our desktop, laptop or tablet. But much more so when we are on the go, we use our mobile to search for hotels, restaurants and attractions.
So, if we are looking for a thing to do near us, we might enter the term “things to do near me” into the search field and if your webpage also contains those words or words with the same intention your page will come up in the search results. At their most basic, this is how words signal to the algorithms of search engines what the webpage is about.
Understanding what customers care about
It is therefore very important that tourism company owners understand how tourists and visitors search and which keywords resonate with them. You must try to get to know what customers care about. The best way to do this is to actually talk with your customers or target audience. Some may even want to fill in a questionnaire which you have sent them. Finally and nowadays one of the most important sources: read all the reviews about you on Internet.
Also tourism and hospitality companies need to know how search engines work, so they can then learn to work with it, optimize pages and post content that will direct the search engines – and therefore, users – to their website. For that they need to do keyword research to discover keywords related to their business.
Google and other search engines and apps have built nearly their complete business around keywords. Google is by far the biggest player here. Especially in travel and tourism. So to keep things simple I will focus in my posts mainly on Google. Later I will also write about other players like for instance Facebook, Bing and Safari.
When done right, this fundamental online marketing activity can help rank your pages for more keywords and consequently get you more online traffic and people purchasing your products or services. You will also learn more about how your competitors are doing. How successful they are in online marketing. But also where you can beat them. And a successful entrepreneur will never find this boring.