Google certified digital marketing consultant specializing in search engine optimization and paid search advertising. We leverage on powerful tools, influential contents and data analytics to engage potential customers exactly when they are searching for your products/services. Also a serial internet entrepreneur, avid reader and father of 3.
So you’ve been thinking about it lately: how to increase inbound sales call coming from qualified prospects. Now you feel the void because all that you are doing currently or did in the recent past weren’t getting you enough leads or sales.
Let me get this in your head, business and marketing success requires constant improvement.
And I bet that’s one reason why you are here. Thanks for stopping by. You understand the fact that additional quality information would open your mind-eye to new possibilities. And possibly, enable you to take the required actions.
Without progressive actions, it will be painfully hard to meet up with most of your important responsibilities right now. And as a business owner or marketing manager, this could mean that important goals will remain unaccomplished for a long time to come. Sure you want better marketing outcomes sooner than later?
How To Increase Inbound Sales: Why Mobile Search Traffic?
First of all, this is a channel of search engine traffic (human visitors) that flows through mobile tablets and smartphones only.
Specifically, I am referring to people that are actively searching for precise products, services or information in search engines like Google, Bing and others.
And many more reasons why people from across the world conduct over 3 billion searches daily on Google alone. In the context of these varying search engine user intents, the words we use to do the search are called ‘buyer keywords’. That’s when the intent is to buy something online or offline.
You can also refer to these things as commercial searches. Interestingly, it happens daily across every niche market you can think of. Below is one good example with 720 searches per month.
In 2016, Google stated that around 50% of their overall search engine traffic now flows through mobile. And that includes the types of commercial searches mentioned above.
To underscore the value of commercial mobile search engine traffic, it was also revealed in one of their studies that 50% of local searches on mobile leads to a store visit within 24 hours.
Call Rail also found in a study of 10,000 businesses that 25% of overall inbound sales calls originate from search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. Enough of the numbers now, let’s look at how to increase inbound sales calls coming to your business.
While it is possible to get inbound sales calls from desktop searches, traffic from mobile devices delivers more phone calls. Click to call buttons contributes to growing potential in this context.
Mobile search engine optimization is mostly about taking specific actions that will impact your ranking for selected keywords. So that when people search with their mobile devices your site will be found. Here are some of the things you can do to get started on this one.
Go to Google search console. That is if you have it installed in your website. Click on search traffic, and then Search Analytics. On the next page that is open, click queries and pages as shown in the shot below. From there you will see the top search terms and most trafficked pages on your site.
Go to those top pages and make your phone numbers or click to call button more visible on them. Hint; just the top of your pages (header) is not enough.
Consider adding the call icon or phone number very close to your footer or just in front of it.
Note, if your pricing and service description pages doesn’t show up among the top 20 – 50 pages, endeavor to add it as soon as possible. Do this thing before investing a dollar or minute into active mobile SEO.
If you want to see the number of clicks coming from mobile search, click on the Devices radio button as shown in the screen shot above.
In order to improve mobile search ranking you need to track your website’s current ranking position in relation to the most valuable keywords. Seeing your current position will enable you make better forecast for ongoing improvement in the future.
It is also important for measuring the outcome of your optimization efforts or expenditure.
For this tracking purpose, you can us SERPs.com; they have free 30 day trial on all plans.
There are two ways you can find the most valuable keywords in your business. First is Google adwords data. If you have been running Google adwords advertising for a while and you are getting leads or sales conversion, take a look into your dashboard and identify these high value keywords.
If you have not been doing it on the other hand, you can run some cheap $50 – $500 test campaign to gather some real data.
The second source is call conversion or call tracking data. Identifying the exact keywords that have actually delivered real revenue is highly valuable. The key thing is to set some call tracking system in place to get useful insights from the data.
Invoca and Call Rail seem to be the best solutions in the marketplace for now. These tools will also make it possible to have a record of conversations between prospective customers and the person in charge of sales.
After selecting the search terms, create more quality contents. Build backlinks with these keywords from authoritative domains. You can as well use Facebook paid advertisements to promote your contents in front of mobile users only.
For more insights, see this call conversion and optimization case study of 48% increase in lead generation conversion rate for a travel agency.
Without doubt, common sense should tell you that slow site loading speed is a conversion killer. Hence, we live in a world of fragmented, short attention spans.
People want their needs fulfilled now, not later. I bet the same fact applies regarding your own personal and business needs too.
Need consistent growth of organic traffic and quality leads…? Click this link to Request Complete SEO Audit And Optimization Strategy.
So if your site is plagued with slow loading speed, you are already on the losing edge. Remember, you are always in competition for the limited volume of qualified prospects in your target niche. And the unfortunate thing is; this is the kind of problem you won’t see with your eyes if no one tells you about it or how to identify it.
From many different channels, you can spend good time and money sending traffic to your beautifully designed website.
But if it is not loading fast enough, under five seconds on average, conversion rate will remain painfully poor. Here is one of the seemingly minor but important areas where expert SEO audit will help to make measurable improvement in online lead generation strategy.
Practically, even two seconds improvement in your site’s mobile loading speed will impact both the search ranking and conversion.
Because of the instant gratification tendency in all us, anything less than seamless user experience on mobile screen puts your business at a disadvantage. One or two studies from Google’s Micro Moments report will expand your understanding in this regard.
Google offers their advertisers the opportunity to add phone numbers or click-to-call button to text based ad campaigns. This is what is being referred to as call extension. The idea is to attract people who need immediate and interactive human to human clarification before a purchase.
This extension appears in two ways.
If the device used to conduct a search is desktop, the real phone number will display just like the ad below. This can as well appear together with location extension.
To attract people doing their searches with mobile devices only, you can set your device preference to mobile preferred. And by using this mobile targeting option, you’ll increase your ad potential to get inbound sales calls and quality leads from targeted traffic. With this option, your prospects will see click to call icon or button within the ad. See sample below.
Here is one of the beginner mistakes I see in Google adwords advertising: not using location and call extensions. Take note if you a higher ticket service provider.
With the desktop option, people can also visit your landing page. So be sure to add click to call buttons in your landing pages too.
This is a single goal oriented kind of Google Adwords advertising. And that single goal is to get phone calls from people actively searching for specific products or services. This is one of the best means on how to increase inbound sales call.
Assuming you have been using Google adwords for a while now, congratulations: you now have some useful data points that can be used to create profitable call only ads.
If not, you can always start a test campaign with $100 – $500 depending on your goals, budget and type of business.
From your dashboard you should be able to identify the exact campaigns, ad groups, ads or keywords delivering profitable conversions to your business. With that data, you can then create tight loop call only campaigns to get both immediate and future sales.
‘Phone calls have the benefit of immediacy. It gives consumers the power. Most importantly, they get to choose when to connect, not when you want.’ – Amber Tiffany, Invoca.
Now let me ask you, isn’t this better that pushing products and services to the right people at the wrong time? Think about cold calls for a minute.
When you read the fact that 80% of internet users own smartphones, you also understand why ‘search’ gets a very large share of overall online activity. In some circles and countries, there is a trend now referred to as ‘mobile first demographic’ and even ‘mobile only’.
Think about the effect that personalization will have on your marketing. For those local services that often require personal touch, phone calls are bound to make a difference. Examples include legal, health, finance, human resources etc.
Using call only ads will help to attract people at the point of valuable purchase decisions.
The term ‘nursing staffing agencies’ is searched 2,900 times monthly in California, USA. Assuming you have health staffing agency in this location, then you get 50 phone calls per month and converted 3 callers into paying clients. How much would these three conversions worth in your business?
Sure you know your numbers more than me – revenue per placement wise!
Mind you that this is a conservative estimate. And you can target as many relevant keywords as you like. Wordstream has a detailed call only ad campaign guide for starters in this link.
See call only ad example below.
While this type of Google adwords ad can get phone call from real customers, reporting and conversion tracking is practically limited. You cannot see the caller ID, zip code or other useful data like record of call conversation with Google.
That’s where third party call tracking tools comes in. Again, CallRail, Call Tracking Metrics, DialogueTech are good options for this.
This is how to increase inbound sales calls with calls only ads.
Obviously, third party call tracking software providers tend to have more beneficial features than what is obtainable from Google adwords features. As one of the experts in this SaaS niche vertical puts it: ‘our ultimate goal is to help marketers and business owners see the full picture of outcomes from their marketing strategies’.
So this implies that there is always a half picture among many marketers and business owners.
According to Hubspot, 43% of marketers identify inability to provide accurate marketing ROI data as one of their biggest challenges.
Imagine this scenario, you are running a Google adwords campaign. From that campaign you are getting phone calls and offline sales regularly. However, the online conversion funnel which is the only part you track gets less impressive ROI because you can only see traffic numbers directly.
Eventually, you decide to kill the campaign. And then your sales volume starts plummeting downwards. Now, do you see the implication of half conversion picture?
Good data helps to make better decisions. At some points, it becomes a real competitive advantage. And that’s what inbound sales call tracking software does. Let’s look at some of the useful data points that can be leveraged in your online marketing campaigns.
Practically, this consists of many things in one. You will be able to see the name, zip code, phone number, advertising channel, campaign, ad and referring Url. With this information, you can plan better nurturing campaigns to increase conversion.
Unknown to many people, it is also possible to track inbound sales calls from offline campaign, just like online channels. Specifically for mobile search traffic, you can track Google adword campaigns, ad groups, ads and keyword.
Beside paid PPC search, these tools can also track phone calls generated from organic search engine traffic.
These data points can help you identify what is not working (wasting your money), and then eliminate them to save money for profitable marketing activities. With call recording for instance, you can spot a pattern of inbound calls that doesn’t convert at all.
For most of the tools in this niche, integration with Google analytics and Adwords makes it possible to track real conversions. So with the campaign, ad group, ads and keywords conversion data, you’ll then get full scale ROI report.
Now you can compare your marketing cost and revenue outcomes.
Call Rail and Zapier also give you access to 700+ integrations. Lots of interesting possibilities abound in between.
Connecting callers to the right person at the right time is very important. However, things get messy when your business has multiple branch locations. That means some qualified prospects will definitely be lost through a clunky call transfer process.
This is where automatic geographic routing comes into play.
Now you can have your callers routed to the right, nearest location. With zip or area code options, you’ll become able to define how the inbound sales calls would be distributed based on radius. People who do pay per call affiliate marketing already thrive in this regard. So that possibilities are within your reach too.
This makes it possible to identify the exact locations that get higher volume of leads and sales per month.
As the business owner or head of marketing, you may not be able to see in real time how your sales reps are performing on the phone.
Sales call recording helps to identify patterns, address buyer objections and improve on employee conversation intelligence. Most of these tools also offer the ability to record outbound and inbound calls from specific numbers too.
From the call records, you may consider building a script based on proven conversation angles that lead to closed sales.
The ultimate fact here is that better information will enable you and your team to make better decisions with regard to marketing budget allocation. And this is the essence of seeing the full conversion picture, not half of it. Thus, you’ll continue to miss out on the data and competitive insights if you don’t have call tracking set up.
With a platform like CallTrackingMetrics, it takes just $19 per month to get started. Other costs also apply, but it’s not going to be comparable with the benefits.
While this is not meant to be an exhaustive guide, these are some of the practical ways on how to increase inbound sales call or quality leads from mobile search traffic. Taking the time to explore further will certainly give you an edge over your competitors that are not doing these things right now.
Even though there are no guaranteed outcomes, it is really worth putting to test.
One of the most important things that you can accomplish with call tracking is to eliminate or reduce expenditure on marketing channels identified with lowest ROI.
Moreover, you can use Google adwords conversion data to improve your business blogging strategy. Finally with a full tracking solution, it becomes possible to measure the ROI from your Google adwords, business blogging and organic search engine traffic.
Need more phone calls from qualified leads within your target locations?
Get In Touch To Discuss Your Marketing Goals And Challenges Today. You may want Request SEO Audit if you want long term compounding ROI.
Build a website. Start a business blog. Leverage social media. You’ve done all that. And now, you still need better marketing strategy for staffing firms. Keep exploring further.
I don’t know where you got all of the ideas you have tried in terms of effective recruitment agency marketing.
Here is what I know. While the tips often suggested are good, most of your colleagues who suggest them often do not have full knowledge and experience of how to put these things to fruitful work.
Building recruitment website is good. Consistent business blogging is beneficial. Free social media posting is also good.
The problem is that majority of contents written by recruitment experts don’t have specific details on how to implement each of these online marketing strategies effectively.
Note, I am a consultant just like you. But what I do is digital marketing, not recruitment and others.
In order to avoid paying for professional digital marketing services, many business owners choose the free and easy path. But in practical terms, free and easy doesn’t always work.
In other words, filling your pipeline with low quality, non converting leads won’t bring the exact type of clients or size of revenue you want.
For those people who understand the inseparability of risk and opportunity, they use Google adwords every other day and month. A search for ‘staffing agencies Liverpool’ showed this sample below.
And for others who invest in this proven marketing strategy, remarketing helps to increase effectiveness, quality lead generation rate and revenue.
And that is what we’ll be discussing throughout this post. First things first.
Purchase Intent: When people do active search for the price of services they need, the purchase intent is usually high and obvious. Think of adding words like affordable, price, cost and fees to the search terms that describe what you are selling.
Matching Context: Let’s look at location for example. You may assume for some reasons that every business in your target niche have the need for what you are selling. Then you’ll set off reaching out to people who are demographically qualified, but not interested or can’t afford your services. Paid search advertising helps to attract only the people interested.
Immediacy: whether online or offline, interruptive advertising breaks attention pattern. Consequently, it annoys potential clients in moments of personal engagement. Search engine marketing reaches out and attracts prospects exactly the time they are searching for your services.
As a testament to how well it works for many, not all of the people that use it, almost 82% of Google’s $21 billion revenue in 2016 came from advertising; mostly adwords.
And because Google owns around 74% of global search engine market, the businesses spending this money include the ones in your market niche and location. Just do a search for ‘staffing agency fees in your location’ and you will find more.
This is an online marketing strategy that displays advertisements to people who have visited your website home page or specific page.
When interested prospects come to your website and leave without converting into qualified leads or paying customers, you can use remarketing to follow them along their purchase journey.
Interestingly, this can be done across desktop, mobile and tablet devices.
If you understand the concept of buyer journey, you’ll know why less than 3% of website visitors convert on their very first visit.
Interestingly, many business owners who operate mostly offline still assume that their most qualified prospects don’t spend time online. However, what they don’t know is that many high ticket deals that end up offline actually originate online.
Beyond my personal opinion, Bright Local reported in their blog that 77% of local searches on smartphone lead to offline business visits within 24 hours.
Thus, when interested prospects who visited your website from different online destinations leave without converting, you can bring back a percentage of these people with Google adwords remarketing strategy.
The fact is that those who spend money on remarketing and those who don’t are not at equal competitive advantage.
With a snippet of code placed on your website, you’ll start building a list of people who visited your home or other specific pages. By building this audience list, you have additional opportunity to bring back a percentage of previous visitors.
The interesting thing is that this can be done even though they have not signed up for your newsletter.
So do not think again that newsletter or contact form is the only way to generate leads from your website. You need quality traffic first.
Now, here is how Google adwords remarketing work specifically to help maximize ROI on marketing budget.
First is the standard display remarketing. After placing the code which could be generated from Google adwords or analytics, your ad would be set to display in form of banners or text on the website of people participating in Google display network.
This is perfect for growing brand awareness within your location and niche market. When these previous visitors continue to visit other websites (over 2 million affiliate websites) they will continue to see your advert across desktop, tablet and smartphone devices.
Second is the remarketing list for search ads. After set up, this one shows as standard search advertisements that appear on top or below organic results.
When people continue to search for services related to what they viewed on your website, your remarketing adverts will continue to show up.
One key benefit here is that you can use 100+ keywords to retarget them.
For instance, 800 prospects searched for ‘recruitment consultant service fees’, then visited and left your website without converting. When they continue their search for other keywords related to this one, you can use same to reach and bring some of them back.
Here is an images that explain more on how google adwords remarketing work.
The third option is email list remarketing. Upload a list of emails. Set up your remarketing campaign.
When people that own these email addresses sign into Google properties, (Google search, Gmail, Youtube), adwords remarketing campaign can be shown to them.
Now let’s say you have 3000 emails in your list of new leads, previous clients, employees and partners. You can segment your list and show relevant ads to them.
Video remarketing is the fourth option. Video is one form of content that often have higher engagement among people who are serious about brand distinction. By creating a streamlined funnel, your campaigns can be shown to only the people who watched a video on your website.
No doubt, video makes influential impressions. Leverage video contents to generate leads for your staffing agency services.
Here is one google adwords remarketing case study of 239.7% ROI you can take a look at.
If you have been into consistent business blogging for your recruitment services firm, you are probably generating a considerable volume of organic search engine traffic.
Depending on the quality of traffic you do get with regard to buyer keyword optimization, remarketing will actually help to improve your conversion rate if done properly.
For instance, with Google analytics you can build an audience of people who spend a specified amount of time on your website (or specific pages) and left without converting.
As you may already know, longer time on site is a positive engagement metric.
Within 30 – 540 days, your remarketing ads could be running to reach and convert a percentage of these highly engaged lists of qualified prospects.
And you don’t need to sign them into your newsletter or other lead magnet before doing that.
While this may be true for some people and in some instances, it doesn’t hold true in all cases.
What the people that give and buy into such advice don’t know very well is the difference between brand awareness campaigns and direct response marketing.
If you are starting out and you depend 100% on growing brand awareness sorry for you. When your account goes in red line, you’ll understand the need to think, act and learn faster by taking good calculated risks.
And in case you are not comfortable spending your time on promotional social media activities that produce nothing beyond useless metrics, the time may be now and not later.
After reading the same article, someone wrote this in the comment section.
Comments like the one above and other reasons explain why some proactive consultants are searching for keywords like the ones shown below.
The fact is that there is competition in almost any niche you look into.
‘Entitlement mentality and passive hope won’t get you anywhere farther than where you are now’.
Now here is what I want you to do. Go and visit 10 or more websites of staffing consultants or firms you know in your niche and location.
Observe if they have retargeting strategy currently working for them. You will know by doing repeat search for related keywords in Google or visiting other websites participating in Google display network.
If none is doing it, well; you could be the first leveraging this competitive marketing strategy in your niche.
Note, there is nothing that stops you from combining brand awareness campaigns and direct response marketing if you know how to leverage technology, content and data.
At the end, what you spend on Google adwords will be determined to a great extent by you.
But what I have seen in many cases is that remarketing often has lower cost per click in comparison to standard campaigns. Obviously, this is a unique kind of high value traffic.
The other core determinant of Google adwords advertising cost are the following.
Market competition is the factor that determines how much you pay for each click or prospect brought back to your website.
Using Google keyword planner to do some research will give you an idea of estimated cost per click in your target niche and location.
Who runs your ads? If you are the person creating and managing your remarketing campaigns, then you will be practically paying less than others. So you won’t be paying Google adwords consulting fee to an expert or agency.
With a full time staff doing it, the cost becomes part of your overall operating expenditure.
In a case where you don’t have the time and expertise to run the campaigns properly, your next best option is to hire adwords expert.
With that you’ll be leveraging on the experience the person or agency had built up over some years.
From many different perspectives this is better than taking miscalculated risks with your marketing budget and losing a considerable amount of money in the process.
The exception is a situation where you have some funds to learn by real practice.
As for the adwords consulting service fees, there are many variables at play. Think of factors like location of the expert, level of experience, niche market, size of business and budget involved.
From whichever perspective you look at it, these things cannot be equal in all cases.
For example, a business that earns $1000 per sale can pay $50 to get a sale easier than another business that earns only $50 per sale.
However, this is not to say that adwords remarketing doesn’t work for low priced products or service.
Most experts and even business owners prefer to pay flat monthly retainer fee that range from $200 – $5000+. Once again, it depends on location, niche market and size of business and budget.
Some people works with a fixed percentage of paid search engine advertising budget. This takes into account the fluctuating workload that could be required in each passing month.
The most common numbers I see falls between 5 – 20% of monthly ad budget.
To maximize ROI, what I normally do here at Weblife is to fix 10 – 30% of overall Google adwords advertising budget for remarketing.
If you want to explore paid search as a marketing strategy for recruitment consulting firms, you should consider these numbers too.
Getting website traffic is good. Filling your lead generation pipeline is also good. But if a frustrating majority of your leads are not converting as much as you want, then that could be a feedback signal that you need to do something different.
The other way to look at is to do the same Google adwords you have been doing; this time differently.
If you take action to explore further, powerful audience segmentation capabilities exist within Google adwords remarketing.
For example your website audience can be segmented based on location, interest, on site behavior, purchase history, email list and many other interesting factors.
Remember to do some tests and find out if your competitors are doing remarketing right now. Find out from Google search and visit 10 competitors in your target niche and location.
Visit their websites and leave without becoming a lead. Then, visit Facebook and other websites, search for the same keywords and observe if they actually invest in this widely untapped competitive advantage.
In case you are one of those generating a considerable volume of organic search engine traffic from consistent business blogging strategy, then you already have a leg ahead of many.
Like I always say, good knowledge is half the battle.
Share your current search marketing challenges and experience in the comment section. You can as well join our Facebook group – The Search Tribe to discuss, discover and leverage working strategies to attract only the people in need of your products/services – Now.
Obviously, anyone interested in how to increase hotel bookings has acknowledged their current problem – low booking rate. And now, here you are seeking for practical solution.
So you’ve got 20 – 100 hotel rooms available for daily revenue generation. But the low booking rate poses a great challenge.
Wait; there could be an underlying bigger issue.
The profit margin recorded after deduction of monthly operating cost of round the clock power system, personnel and possibly Wifi falls far below expectation.
Interestingly, if your means of livelihood, personal growth and happiness depends on this hospitality enterprise, then there is a need to do something differently better.
However, when your daily schedule is filled with only the responsibilities of managing existing resources, policies and processes, I bet you’ll continue to lack the ability for better competitive strategies.
Now, how can Google search engine marketing help to increase hotel bookings? And why Google search in the first place?
Before we go in to explore how to increase hotel bookings from Google search, here is why I chose Google – with 77.4% market share, it is the #1 search engine across all countries in the world, including Nigeria.
Based on what we know about the digital landscape in Nigeria, majority of search engine traffic flows through mobile devices.
This includes people searching for hotel rooms and related services across different states, cities and locales. Below is a sample screenshot of what I mean.
Probably, you are reading this post on a mobile device. Remember that a great percentage of your target customers are people on the go – travelers.
Mind you that some of the prospects searching for keywords like these are not currently in Enugu (or your operating location). How do you reach them exactly the time they are in need of your services? Keep on reading.
To further buttress this point, a 2016 study by Hotels.ng revealed that 60% of hotel bookings happen on mobile devices. Other demographic insights also abound in that report.
Generally, search engine marketing is of two forms. Below this paragraph, we’ll explore them one by one.
This is a pay per click online marketing strategy in which people and companies pay money directly to Google to place their adverts relating to selected keywords.
Sometime it is called performance based advertising. And here is how paid search advertising work.
If I go to Google and search for ‘hotels in Abuja’ and then click your advert that popped up, Google will deduct a specified amount from your prepaid advert billing account.
Without the advert being clicked to drive booking prospects to your website, you won’t pay anything. In other words, you won’t be paying for visibility and brand impressions only; just like radio, newspaper, television and bill boards.
On a deeper level, there are some market dynamics that determines how much you’ll pay for each prospect delivered to your hotel booking website.
You can check this post on how to set Google adwords budget for more insight.
This is the second form of search engine marketing. Unlike PPC search ads, you don’t pay money directly to Google or other search engines for them to list the links to your website for each relevant keyword or phrase. What is SEO you may ask?
Well, here is how search engine optimization work.
First it is a process of making your web pages eligible for higher ranking within search engine result pages and for specific search terms.
This involves doing research to select the relevant keywords and phrases that real prospects use when they are searching for specific products, services, location, equipment or solution to their current problems.
You use tools like Google keyword planner, Ahrefs keyword explorer, Long Tail Pro or Semrush for this.
The second part is using the selected keywords to create contents for your website and individual pages. Examples are service descriptions, blog posts and other web pages.
Thirdly, organic SEO is about building links that leads both human users and search engine crawlers to your website. These are the core parts of active search engine optimization.
If you are not active in this regard, it means your hotel website could be an empty conference hall.
In order to leverage search engine optimization to increase direct hotel bookings, two options are in front of you – learn as much as you can and do the work yourself or hire an SEO expert.
The same thing applies to pay per click search engine advertising with Google adwords.
Thus, the whole essence is to reach and attract interested prospects only and exactly the moment they are in active search for your services.
Google calls this purchase loop ‘I Want To Buy Moment’.
Now, let’s look at specific ways and actions you can take to boost your hotel promotion strategies. I believe these will enrich your sales promotion ideas at the end. Here we go.
As noted earlier, a great percentage of prospective, money-in-hand hotel customers are travelers on the go.
Based on this fact, you don’t have to depend 100% on local residents or people within commutable distance. But how do I know, you may ask?
Well, I am a typical example of young adults who book hotel rooms only when they travel. And as for me, I often start my search for rooms within my budget prior to arriving on the location.
The other time is when am already on the road – inside a bus or an airport.
Going beyond operating location is a perfect strategy for single state or city hotels. This could be a real competitive advantage if done properly. In some countries, Google adwords provides capabilities to reach people who are inside an airport.
Other than this, you can as well select the location of prospects you want to attract vis adword location targeting.
Think about people searching for keywords like ‘hotels near Lagos airport Ikeja’. Add your own city name if you are not operating out of Lagos.
If you want to increase the quality of your daily, weekly and monthly website traffic (ie: real prospects), then local search engine optimization is one of the best ways to accomplish that.
It is simply a process of using location based keywords to attract people from organic search engine result pages.
The premise is that people searching for such terms in relation to specific services are often within that location or interested in visiting very soon.
Soon in this context could be within the next 24 hours or 30 days.
This also implies that even people from outside the country searching for hotels in specific cities will find your website. Among other things, it gives the potential booking customers opportunities to see your rooms and prices before visiting the location.
To do this very well, there are lots of intricate dynamics behind it. However, except you want to take online SEO course, here is a guide on search engine optimization for hotels.
If you are still shouting at radio stations during working hours all in the name of growing brand awareness and inducing top of mind recall, think again.
On the surface it may seem there is no special time for growing brand awareness. However, when it comes to direct service marketing, advertising at different hours of the day can hardly have equal effects.
And we all know that with most traditional advertising mediums the outcomes of your advertising spend can hardly be measured.
In effect, you are throwing money in the air or gambling when you pay for brand impressions only. Without doubt, I am 100% sure you need results better than that.
So what am I saying about strategic timing?
Launch your Google adwords campaigns when prospective customers are in booking mode. This will increase conversion rate.
Run your ads between 12:00pm – 09:00pm. Increase your ad spending on weekends. Note that you can as well attract people searching for competing hotel brand names and then show what you’ve got at the right time. Don’t ignore this.
When it comes to amenities, all hotels are not created equal. The same fact holds true for the taste and purchasing power of your target customers.
Someone spends good amount of money to build aesthetically cool hotel website. And within that, there are lots of images displaying rooms and amenities as well as a page called gallery.
But the big question is how many qualified prospects visit this website on daily basis to see all the amenities that makes you the best in town?
The other practice is to create social media pages. Post few pictures and forget it or some boring contents that no one cares to read.
Contrary to this, you can use Facebook advertising to make your amenities visible to a well targeted audience based on demographic variables like age, gender, location, industry, job titles and many others.
But that isn’t the focus of this post for now.
Interestingly, there are many ways to showcase your hotel amenities to qualified and interested people even before they decide to visit a particular hotel.
Let’s look at some of them in the context of google search engine marketing. The following options apply to both adwords and SEO.
Swimming Pool Related Keywords: Examples ‘Enugu hotels with swimming pool’ ‘hotels in Abuja with swimming pool’. If you have this in your place, use Google adwords to attract people to a page that showcases them.
Conference Hall Related Keywords: Think of search terms like ‘event centers in your location’, ‘conference halls in your location’ and others like them. Create specific pages for this and start driving search engine traffic to them.
Fitness Gym Related Keywords: Both local residents and periodic visitors often look for fitness gyms within the hotels they choose to book. Give a special page to your gym facilities. Add multiple clear images. And start driving traffic to it.
#Tip: Add phone numbers and email on top of every image. People searching for specific products and services are often in price comparison mode. And some people may not be aware that the amount in their hands can afford quality amenities like your own.
Yes, I know it is stated clearly in your website. But here is one fact worth reiterating.
‘The biggest room in the world is the room for improvement’ – Anonymous.
And I guess this is the single most important reason why you are reading this.
Unless there is a law banning the display of prices in your operating location, by all means make your price range known to as much prospects as possible.
Note here that the statement or goal isn’t to make your price range and amenities known to everyone in your target location, but only the prospects actively searching for your type of services.
People searching for keywords like ‘affordable hotels’ in your target location are often in price comparison mode.
The usual intent is to find what matches their personality, taste and budget. If you are waiting for them to reach your website or location before they know, then you are practically missing out daily on online advert originated bookings.
Once, again the essence of price comparison in a pre-booking context is worth repeating.
Well, Google adwords remarketing helps smart business owners and marketers to key into that context.
The thing is that when interested prospects visit your website and leave to continue their search for some reasons, remarketing or retargeting gives you the opportunity to stay in front of them across different online mediums and devices.
Through Google adwords, you can use this competitive marketing strategy to bring back and convert a percentage of people who viewed your website or specific pages.
For example, if I visited a page about hotel room rates in your site and leave to continue my search and price comparison, Google adwords remarketing list for search ads (RLSA) make it possible to target only the people who viewed that specific page.
Remember that a great percentage of (local/international) travelers start their hotel search 1 – 7 days before arriving at a specified destination.
If you are creative enough, you can use influential ad copies and exclusive discounts to reach only the prospects who visited your booking page within the last 1 – 30 days.
Here is a remarketing case study of over 200% ROI on $4168 ad spend.
Beside RLSA, Gmail, Youtube, online banner display, past customer emails and even Facebook can be leverage to launch an integrated remarketing campaign to increase hotel bookings online and offline.
Below is an example of remarketing ad done on Facebook.
With this, you now know that hotel sales promotion strategies goes beyond free posting on Facebook and other social media platforms.
At this point, the question that could be popping in your mind is – how long would it take me to learn all of this?
Here is one good option you have – hire a digital marketing consultant. The other route is to employ a full time expert which will add up to your monthly salary bill.
One thing is obvious to you and i. And that is; there is a great competition within your target market.
Thus, if you are not exploring new initiatives, you’ll continue to have the same unimpressive results you’ve always had. In addition to that, you could be losing even ready customers within your reach to the nearest smart competitors.
But now, with Google adwords you have a great competitive advantage. That is if you put what you just learnt to work.
Among many other things you now know how to go beyond your operating location, use precise location based search terms. And then leverage strategic timing, showcase your unique amenities as well as retargeting.
As noted before, the core benefit is – you’ll be attracting only the prospects actively searching for your hotel services.
Done very well, this will help you to answer questions around how to increase hotel bookings, both online and offline. Go take some actions today.
Share your experience or challenges in the comment section. You can as well join our Facebook group – The Search Tribe to discuss, discover and leverage working strategies to attract only the people in need of your products/services – Now.
Without notice, the business blogging mistakes you are making now wastes your time and money. Starting a business blog is easy. But getting good ROI from it is an entirely different challenge.
Read on to find out if you are making these mistakes and how to change your strategy.
Many people come from different backgrounds to start a business, and for many different reasons. This variation in backgrounds, approach and perspectives then determines the difference in business outcomes.
Depending on who sold the idea of starting a website to you, you may or may not understand the benefits of starting a business blog from day one.
Just so you know, a blog and a business website are not usually the same thing. These two can be built into one for maximum ROI or differently for varying purposes.
Even if you have an existing blog, you could be making one or more of these business blogging mistakes.
Hence, your revenue potential is being wasted in that regard.
If you have a business website without a blog, you may tend to think these two are the same. This could lead to a question like – why start a company blog?
As I have observed by interacting with many business owners, blogging or content marketing is not part of their current priorities.
In fact, some are still dependent on traditional offline marketing channels.
Hence, a lack of knowledge in this context excludes them from the benefits of blogging for business.
If you have a website currently attracting visitors, having a blog helps to convert a percentage of qualified leads to paying customers among other benefits.
Learn to leverage the power of pre-selling.
Below is the website for Quality Aviation Inc; commercial flight service firm without a blog. Obviously, their website is outdated and no one cares.
With a consistent business blogging strategy, they can start attracting visitors actively searching for keywords like ‘commercial flight certification courses’.
Unless your business revolves around marketing, majority of small business owners have limited knowledge of how online marketing works. Because of this reason, even some people who have business blogs have no SEO strategy in place.
And this means that your revenue generation potential is being wasted to some extent.
So you have been creating great contents. Probably you’ve been logging for months or even years. And you also share your blog posts in social media.
You could be generating some website traffic too. But your ROI remains below average, flat zero or worse still; unknown to you.
Wasting your revenue potential implies that the same amount of resources you spend on blogging without results could get better outcomes by implementing an SEO strategy within your blog.
Implementing search engine optimization strategies requires that you use keywords that your potential customers are actively searching for.
To get the best results, you need to optimize for the search terms in your titles, sub headings, body of content, images, internal and external links etc.
One of the key challenges facing entrepreneurs, marketers, business bloggers and copywriters is finding a balance between your interest and customer needs. Mismatched messaging in this regard leads to low return on marketing spend.
Business blogging is a form of active online marketing strategy. However, a lot of people make the mistake of writing about themselves, their company and products only.
Trying to force your message of ‘buy, buy, buy and buy’ on prospects attention hardly influence buying decisions in your favor.
Unfortunately, this is one of the business blogging mistakes I see a lot of people make in their company blogs. Consequently, they waste the limited resources that would have been spent on revenue growth activities.
Contrary to pushing your own interests beyond balance, it’s better to start your content creation with the keywords that your prospects are actively searching for.
The fact that they are actively searching for your products or services is a sign of purchase intent.
So forget your awesome product features and sell me a solution.
I bet it’s not every business owner that knows how online lead generation works or what it is. And this includes some people that are currently generating traffic to their company blog.
Generating website traffic is one thing. Getting real business value from it is another different challenge. See the screen shot below for searches related to ‘blog traffic’.
However, am sure it’s not everyone that knows what to do with the traffic after they’ve gotten it.
For some reasons, you could be among the people making the business blogging mistake of having no lead generation strategy. But just what is lead generation anyway?
According to comscore/baymard online traffic study, 70 – 95% of your website visitors will leave without buying your product or becoming a lead. A lead is simply a prospect who gave their contact information in return for something valuable or expectation of an offer.
Having a lead generation strategy in your business blog helps to bring back lost prospects via email.
With the email list you build, you can implement repetitive promotions to the prospects and previous customers in your list.
Thus, if you are not generating leads from your blog, then you are missing out on the revenue opportunities.
See this list building and email marketing case study for more insights.
I am sure you must have heard that there is never a significant accomplishment without consistency. Rome was not built in day you know.
You could be asking yourself right now. What are the key benefits of consistent business blogging?
One of them is consistent growth of your search engine ranking, website traffic, lead generation and growing sales volume.
Yes, these things can be experienced as the benefits of blogging for a business beyond lame posts.
If you are not consistent in your writing, publishing and promotion schedule, then you will always lose out to your competitors who are actively reaching out.
Consistency in this context doesn’t mean you must write, publish and promote every day. No. It means you should have a schedule that has some relative degree of frequency built into it.
This is one of the best kept blogging secrets among successful bloggers. You can outsource your content writing, publishing and promotion to experienced experts.
This is one of the biggest business blogging mistakes holding a lot of people back. They assume that great content is just enough.
And if you have great content, you will be entitled to viral traffic and sales growth.
After all, they say that content is king.
The content you create can be leveraged for growing revenue, but only if you promote it.
Without active blog post promotion, the revenue generation potential will remain untapped forever.
If you have 10 to 100 blog posts in your site, but they are not in any measurable way contributing to your overall revenue growth, then the resources you invested in creating them is as good as wasted.
Sure you need maximum value from your hard work.
Your blog post promotion strategies may include on page SEO, Google adwords, Bing Ads, Facebook Ads, social group marketing, content sharing sites etc.
Key point here is that you can do better than waiting for slow search engine ranking and traffic. Consider using direct paid advertisements to bring targeted traffic to your posts.
The painful part of business blogging for many is grinding out for months or even years without seeing progress. But how do you define progress in the first place?
That’s where conversion tracking comes in.
Done very well, your company blogging strategies can be contributing towards growth of targeted traffic to your sales and lead generation landing pages.
But without conversion tracking in these two instances, finding justification for continuity will pose a very big challenge.
Here is one of the reasons for the abandoned blogs I see most times.
The best way to overcome this is to integrate Google analytics and conversion funnel tracking systems into your blog. As important as it is, this should even be done before starting an active promotion campaign.
Ignoring conversion tracking makes you to lose sight of the data that could be used for conversion rate improvement.
After integrating lead generation and conversion tracking on a clients landing page, here is a screenshot of what he got from inside MailChimp and Google Analytics.
That’s 190+ email subscribers or leads in less than 5 days.
One of the main reasons why people make and continue to make these business blogging mistakes is limited knowledge.
For example, not having a blog at all or owning a website without a blog may not be seen as mistake.
In case you don’t know, a website without promotion is like a pack of business cards locked in a forgotten office cabinet.
In some sense, a website is like business cards as well. However, starting a business blog gives you space to communicate your value propositions while at the same time attracting a demographic of targeted prospects.
Unfortunately, the benefits can only be experienced if you get started.
Thus, if you are currently making one or more of these mistakes, then the time to do something different is now.
Perhaps, what you may actually need is simple reallocation of resources and realignment of your strategy.
Please share your business blogging experience or challenges in the comment section below. You can as well join our Facebook group – The Search Tribe to discuss, discover and leverage working strategies to attract only the people in need of your products/services – Now.
Whether you are aware of it or not, your business blogging strategy will certainly be based on either of these two things. First is real data. Second is assumption.
Besides, there could be overlapping combination of these two things.
Hence, they influence the approach and outcomes of your blog based content marketing efforts. Like many others, you could be facing some serious challenges in company blogging.
To overcome most of them, you’ll learn from this post, how to use Google adwords data for SEO in your company blog.
So whether you are just trying to start a business blog for the first time or you’ve been doing it for a while, taking action on the possibilities revealed here will certainly make a difference.
Why Google Adwords For SEO?
Before proceeding to discuss the specific action you can take to implement this, we’ll first of all identify the useful data points that can be used in the process.
Remember the key point is to leverage real data to improve your business blogging strategy instead of being 100% dependent on assumptions.
Why this interested me was because I saw a lot of business owners in different niche markets blogging without a plan.
Some of the niche markets I have observed this closely include event planning, staffing services, fitness and ecommerce. This is mostly from my consulting experience in these niche markets.
As you might have already known, it is always better to start with the end in mind. For many reasons, this is far better than randomly spending money and time with hope of the best outcomes.
Sure you have heard that Google adwords is risky and too expensive. Maybe you have tried on your own and lost money or you hired an inexperienced expert to waste your money.
Besides you could be using Google adwords right now to generate traffic, leads and sales. But you recognize the possibility of using a business blog and SEO to get more traffic.
Here is the interesting thing. Growing organic search engine traffic has a lot to do with keywords and the topics they represent.
Here is one true fact about the essence of keyword optimization in your content strategy.
This is one of the multiple ways in which Google determines searcher intent. Your own experience on auto suggested search terms is a real proof of this.
Contrary to what most people believe, it is not all about keyword search volume. Interestingly, the majority of keyword research tools in the market provide only an estimate of search volume and other metrics.
And because of this a whole lot of people start their business blog on mere assumptions.
I guess you may not have even bothered about keyword research. But the fact is that writing about random topics in your blog won’t get you the results you desire.
See this post on the 4 business blogging benefits beyond brand awareness. My point here; don’t stop at generic thought leadership posts.
Beyond search volume numbers, all keywords are not created equal.
There are buyer keywords and there are informational keywords. This matters even more when the motive behind your business blogging strategy and SEO efforts is to make profit.
Better than being focused on estimated search volume only, running some adwords campaign with $5 – $300 will give you some real data.
With that data, you will be able to align your company blogging and SEO strategies with business outcomes.
Practically, this is more valuable than merely measuring useless traffic and brand awareness metrics. This will help to solve the problem of growing traffic volume and low return on invested time and money.
Practically, there are too many variables that can influence the number of click you get on your Google adwords advertisement.
However, when you run some ads, it becomes possible to see the exact search terms bringing the most clicks or visitors to your site.
Obviously, this is far better than doing surface level guesswork with search volume data.
The interesting thing here is that you can see the actual results within 1 – 30 days. Unlike SEO, you don’t need to wait for 1, 6 or 12 months to see the most valauble traffic generating keywords.
Take for instance you set up a campaign targeting 200 keywords.
Then in less than 7 days, you see the top 20 keywords that brought the highest number of visitors to your website.
With this keyword data, you can do some SEO competition analysis and use them in your blog content creation. Keep reading. We’ll see the exact steps on how to use keywords click data in your business blogging strategy.
This is the amount paid per click bringing a visitor to your website via Google adwords. Besides the competition in your niche, this metric is mainly determined by advertiser’s set bid.
On the other hand, there are broad and exact match bid types.
These things determine whether your set CPC bid would be the same or variant. Every advertiser is responsible to set his or her own bid based on pricing auction policies.
As noted earlier, you can use Google keyword planner to see the estimated cost per click for your target niche market and location.
Unfortunately, these things are just what they are – estimates only. And this is where most of the assumptions start.
Perhaps, if you have used Google adwords advertising for a while, you certainly will have CPC data in your account. In that case, you understand that the inflow of website traffic will stop when you stop paying Google.
By using the search terms with highest CPC (most expensive traffic source) to generate organic search engine traffic, you’ll be lowering your customer acquisition cost.
Call it cost per sale if you like. Within this context, you’ll be missing out on the long term benefits of SEO if you don’t have a business blog.
However, a website without a blog can generate organic search engine traffic but it takes 10X active efforts and money.
But first, you have to identify the search terms with the highest CPC.
With adwords, your traffic is limited to your budget. Hence it ends when your budget is exhausted. But your organic ranking can last for 3, 6, 12 months or multiple number of years.
Beyond theories and my personal opinion, here is a study that shows how organic search engine results command more clicks than paid search.
This is simply the percentage of people who saw your ad vs the people that actually clicked. As a Google search engine user yourself, you understand the things that move you to click.
Even in terms of paid search advertisements, the reasons for clicking one ad instead of the other are always obvious.
Time, location, urgency, price, relevance and pain point; all matter in the mix.
The main fact here is that, like keywords, all ads are not created equal. You can do the best research. Make the best assumptions. But the outcomes will always mismatch your expectation.
Unfortunately, if you jump right into business blogging without an SEO strategy, you’ll have to wait 3 – 12 months to find out if you are on the right track or not.
And by that time, you must have invested some good amount of time and money.
Though Google adwords click through rate and organic search click through rate are not the same, the insights gained from one can be applied to the other.
Better to leverage the data on what has been proven to work than depend 100% on fallible assumptions.
Again, if you’ve had some Google ads running you will have access to the ad impressions and CTR data. By identifying the ads with highest CTR, you’ll see the exact keywords and ad copies that your audience finds the most attractive.
Again, this data point can be leveraged for effective SEO in your business blogging strategy.
If you are currently running a campaign by yourself or with Google adwords consultant, you probably have conversion tracking set up in your site.
For most business people, two major types of conversions are usually tracked.
A business in outsourced staffing services niche will be tracking mainly lead generation.
While a fitness equipment business with online store will be tracking actual sales. However, nothing stops you from generating and tracking leads for future sales conversion.
One of the key business blogging mistakes I see many people making is that of creating contents without targeted search queries.
This is the best way to align contents with the pain points, problems and needs of their target customers.
And for the few that do some keyword research, what everyone depends on is the estimated search volume data. The assumption is that higher search volume for the selected search terms will result in higher volume of organic search engine traffic from their blogs.
And that’s how some business bloggers get trapped in the problem of growing traffic volume and zero conversion in terms of leads and sales.
With the website conversion data in your Google adwords account you’ll be able to identify the precise keywords and ad copies that delivered actual leads and sales.
Sure it is good to have high traffic volume.
But what if the majority (55 – 95%) of the website visitors you spend money and time to generate are actually useless to your business?
I’m sure this isn’t what you want out of your search engine marketing budget.
By leveraging website conversion data in your blog content creation and on-page SEO, you’ll have some competitive advantage in your target market.
According to Google, 50% of local searches conducted on mobile devices leads to a store visit.
And most times it starts with a phone call.
Beyond the information that can be provided via text, image or video on a web page, some customers will still need clarification by talking with a sales rep.
And that is where Google ads call extension, call only ads and call tracking come in.
If you are using the two phone calls related ad options mentioned above, you probably have call conversion tracking set up in your campaign.
With some A/B testing and the help of your sales rep, you can begin to see the exact campaigns, ad groups, ads and keywords delivering actual sales to your business.
And this includes Google adword originated phone calls too.
This call conversion data has so much value if only you know how to leverage that in your business blogging strategy.
It’s all about understanding client or buyer intent.
And like most other data points, you don’t have to spend so much on content creation, SEO and traffic generation. And then find out 3 – 12 months later that it is impossible to break even.
By putting this data to work, here are some of the benefits that can be experienced in your company blog.
Empathy, not superficial buzzwords or grammar makes the biggest difference in building trust with sales copies. Yes, you shouldn’t turn your company blog into direct sales copies only.
However, there are different ways to align your contents with core marketing objectives.
By showing better understanding of your target customers’ pain points, you’ll be positioned more than many of your competitors to present a trustworthy solution.
And by relating with their current desires, hopes, fears and aspirations it becomes easier to touch the emotional hot buttons that will move them to a favorable action. This is exactly why stories sell.
Contrary to what many other experts would want you to believe, pre-selling your products or services via business blogging is not abnormal.
The only bad thing is starting the post and making the entire content focused on your interest.
Avoid writing fluff that shouts me, me, me and me all the time. On the contrary, it is better to dwell so much on your customer pain points. The things they care so much about.
Using content pieces like product feature review and case studies help to bring the target customer into a context of exchanging money for defined value.
Many studies in psychology had proven that we like people who believe same thing we do.
So in the context of buying and selling, we buy from people we like especially when the time is right. Sell me a solution, not your products or services. That’s it.
Beyond brand awareness, this is the ultimate goal your business blog is supposed to help you accomplish.
However, if you don’t have conversion funnel set up in your company blog, then generating leads and sales from it will always remain a distant day dream.
Starting your content creation with targeted keywords and pain points helps you to use your target customer’s language.
And if the language is mostly negative around their current frustrations, you’ll be moving a lot of them to take financially beneficial actions. Done very well, blog posts can promote your lead magnet, lead generation landing pages, quote request pages, contact forms as well as direct sales pages.
See this lead magnet example hosted on Brian Dean’s video landing page.
Now, here are some actionable strategies on how you can actually use the Google ads data in your business blogging strategy.
Both within your blog and search engine results page, blog post titles make a great difference in click through rate (CTR). For most people, it takes less than 3 seconds to decide based on headline if your content would be worth their time or not.
Here are some specific factors that influence most people to click one title instead of the other. This is based experience from many blogs I have built and that of clients too.
While using keywords in your title is good for search engine optimization that alone is not enough.
If your titles are not attractive enough, the entire content will be ignored. This will be happening both within your blog post archive, social media and even when you get some impressive ranking for the target search term.
Remember that the Googlge adwords data points discussed earlier is a potent source of keyword research. So that’s where you get your search terms from.
To make your blog post titles attractive, first step is the use of exact keywords that your target audiences are actively searching for. The Click through rate data in your adwords account is a good source.
You can combine two or more of these to make the most attractive impression. If you have the creative prowess, it is also possible to optimize your titles for more than one search query at a time.
This is one of the ways you can make your blog posts to rank for 100+ keywords depending on the length.
With your conversion data, using the search phrases that brought you actual leads and sales will increase the quality of overall website traffic you get from your blog SEO.
Brian Dean of Backlinko has a detailed post here on the importance of matching keyword commercial intent.
To get higher click through rate from search engines, try to make your blog post titles to have complete meaning and be moderately short.
See how CoSchedule headline analyzer will give you a preview of how your title will appear in SERP ranking.
Meta description is a brief preview of information about a web page ranking in search results. Google search engine crawlers use this snippet to determine the relevance of a web page to a specified search query.
If you are an avid user of Google search like me, you’ll already know where this information shows within search engine results.
Below is a screenshot of the meta description for the search term ‘business blogging strategy’.
In addition to the blog post title, using your selected keywords in meta descriptions make the web page eligible to rank competitively higher for that same keyword.
However, the inclusion of related keywords and other factors contributes to the ranking position.
Unfortunately, if your entire blog posts are created without on-page SEO practice, then your website’s potential for generating organic search engine traffic will be limited.
To get the best from this and other influential on page ranking factors, Yoast SEO plugin provides multiple features for this.
It’s all about the first 1 – 3 sentences in your web page contents.
Unless you understand why this is important, you wouldn’t care about proper use of keywords within your blog posts.
And for most business bloggers outside the online marketing space, this is usually the case.
Also in addition to titles and description snippets, the use of selected search queries within the entire body of blog posts makes a lot of difference in the ranking. For most people, two things always prevail.
It is either you are blindly creating more contents while hoping for the best outcome or you have a strategy aligned with your core marketing objectives.
My question is; which approach do you follow while creating your blog posts…?
Without writing keyword rich contents, you’ll be missing out on the long term benefits of search engine traffic that comes from the high rankings.
To get the best outcome without overdoing it, use the target search term five times or less within the body of your contents. Really depends on the word count though.
Another important area is to use it in one or more sub headings where relevant. Making moderate use of the key search terms for internal linking also boosts on-page SEO score.
By internal linking am referring to links leading to other pages within your sites and related pages within your niche.
Different from the exact search phrases you want to rank a page for, inclusion of other phrases related to it boosts your page potential to rank for multiple terms.
These are the practical steps to writing keyword rich blog posts.
Here is another interesting context for using Google adwords data in your business blogging strategy. Th reason is because the links connecting your web page with other pages with the operating niche is a big off page SEO factor.
For search engine ranking purposes, Google uses a set of variables to assign score to the quality of links leading directly to your website.
And one of the key variables here is the words or set of phrases with which those links are were built.
In simple human terms, these words help to describe the contents of web pages being linked.
However, if you are not building keyword rich backlinks it means that your business website is currently excluded from the real benefits. The benefits include quality leads, sales and profit that come from this SEO practice.
Remember that higher ranking for proven keywords makes for higher potential to attract qualified prospects to visit your website. The words with which web links were made are called anchor text.
And in the context of off page SEO, here are some specific types of anchor text links.
Exact Match Anchor Text Link: This is a type of link made wholly with targeted keywords. Example is this orange link to a page about ‘content marketing automation tools’.
Phrase Match Anchor Text: The text link contains the keywords being targeted for higher ranking. Example is this link to a page about ‘how to grow your blog traffic’. The target search term is blog traffic.
Branded Match: This is simply using a brand name to link other web pages. The link to the home page of this website ‘Weblife’ is an example. However, you always link to whatever page you like with a brand name. But is has to be based on relevant context.
Naked Url: This one makes use of a website address or page url to build backlinks. Website address example is http://weblifehq.com and page url is http://weblifehq.com/business-blogging.
One important thing to remember when building keyword rich backlinks is to diversify both the keywords and anchor text type.
If you ignore this, Google will penalize your site with low or no ranking at all. Check this post for more insight on anchor text diversification.
One of the key important things worth reiterating is that having a business blogging strategy is better than randomly creating and publishing contents.
Thus, if random blogging is all you’ve been doing, then it’s time to think above the prevailing assumptions. As you have read above, Google search ads is a potent source of traffic data whose value goes above search volume metrics.
Sure you don’t want growing traffic volume and zero return on the time and money invested in your business blog.
That is assuming you have one already.
Interestingly, if you are currently using adwords advertising or you have use it for more than a month, then the data points discussed above are already within your reach.
Note that you don’t need to have all the expertise before putting the data to work as discussed above.
Probably you are currently using a Google ads consultant or agency to manage your campaigns.
Whether you are aware of it or not, the person or agency may as well not have the expertise to use the advertising data in a business blogging context.
Think about what 20% reduction in customer acquisition cost, improved conversion rate or profit margin would mean in your own business.
At the end, the ultimate strategy is to align your business blog content creation, promotion and lead generation efforts with measurable business outcomes.
Don’t stop at growing brand awareness with thought leadership.
Your business blog promotion strategies are not working exactly the way you wanted. And you hate waiting to see results. Is there a better way?
Yes there are better ways you can try. That’s what we’ll explore in this post.
Here I cannot guarantee the type and size of result you could get. Let’s say you have acknowledge that your current promotional efforts are not be the best.
Probably, it is just about the way you do the things you do from which great results were expected in the past.
So you’ve been sold on the benefits of blogging for business. Now you do recognize this part of content marketing as a proven way of generating leads, sales and revenue.
Like many others, you’ve been creating and publishing great contents. But your business blogging ROI seems to be flat zero or simply below average. Assuming you have great contents, here is one fact you should take away from this post.
Without consistent business blog promotion strategies, you’ll continue to waste your time.
This will even get worse if you expect results from ineffective search engine optimization practices on your blog. This is where I see a lot of small business bloggers fail.
One of the reasons why business blogging takes so long to get results is that a great majority of bloggers depends largely on free, organic SEO traffic.
Unknown to these people, especially the people outside the digital marketing space, search engine optimization on its own takes time.
Your website is relatively new. Whether you are aware of this fact or not, Google and other search engines actually rank older web pages higher in most cases. This means that a website or page you create today can hardly come to organic first page ranking within one day or week.
Observe when you do a search sometimes you begin to see web pages that are 6 months to 3 years old ranking in the first page.
Here is a sample of an old web page ranking for the keyword ‘business blog conversion strategy’. (Add shot).
What you have is a static website. A static website with low number of pages cannot be compared to frequently updated, high quality content sites.
For example, you cannot compare a website that has 100 quality blog posts with one that has just 15 static company or business information pages. Practically, this has nothing to do with your business blog promotion strategies.
Interestingly, the one with higher number of pages will have multiple keywords with which people can find it from search engine ranking.
Competing with a static website means it will take long time to get good results.
Note that this doesn’t mean you cannot build backlinks to static websites and get good ranking and traffic volume.
Having established that search engine optimization is not the only way to get profitable results from your company blog, let’s explore some other ways.
But before doing that, let’s look at some measurable results you can get from your invested efforts and resources.
Targeted Website Traffic: While it is good to invest in growing traffic volume, all website traffic types are not equal. Most times, it is your promotional efforts, strategies and channels that will determine the type of persons that will visit your blog.
If you have been blogging for your business without measuring your targeted traffic volume, stop and rethink your strategies.
Quality Leads: This is one of the most important results that can be experienced in business blogging. While sales is also important, if you focus on sales only you’ll miss the boat.
On the internet, selling products or services to strangers is very hard. For most ecommerce businesses, the average conversion rate among first time website visitors is usually less than 4%.
This is why those that generate leads first before sales promotion often make more money from their websites than everyone else.
Interestingly, quality lead generation rate is another performance metric that can be measured over time.
Completed Sales: The question a lot of people ask is this, how can I convert blog readers into customers? Well I can tell you with confidence that it is possible. From this blog Weblife, I do get clients periodically.
That is without first converting them into leads.
The interesting thing is that I do invest time and money in active promotion of my blog posts to carefully defined audience segments.
Now, let’s look at the business blog promotion strategies one by one.
If you have been into company blogging for while, I bet you have heard of Facebook advertising.
Mind you, am not talking about organic free posting of blog posts on your business page or selected groups.
I said this because from my interaction with some business owners, there use to be a blurring line in their head. They say they are advertising their business on Facebook and other social media platforms.
But when I ask them how they are doing it, they point to free postings on their business page and selected groups. And then they ask, isn’t that advertising for other people to see..?
Well, am sure you need valuable results, not vanity metrics.
When was the last time social media comments, likes and shares on your post brought you a lead or sale?
The funny thing about this blog post promotion strategy is that most of the people that depend on it don’t measure their results beyond these vanity metrics. It’s pretty much like the so called ‘spray and pray’ advertising strategy.
In effect, it’s about paying money directly to Facebook to place your advert in selected sections of their billion user platform.
In the context of blog post promotion, the best Facebook advertising objective you can use is website click.
This is a simple advertisement that does nothing but get people to click the ads and visit your specified web page. In this case, you don’t pay anything unless people click your advert. And then the click leads them to visit the specified web page or blog post.
This is better than merely paying for visibility alone, either online or offline.
Another great benefit of paying to promote blog post with Facebook ads is the deep targeting options.
Contrary to free posting on business pages, you can choose the people to see your advert instead of reaching out to everyone.
Some of the commonly used Facebook ad targeting options include location, age, gender, interest, job title, marital status, purchase behavior, likes, hobbies and many more. And there is also the opportunity to build custom audience.
Assuming your blog posts are optimized to generate leads, sales or both, you can start getting results within 24 hours.
For many people, this is better than waiting for three or more months in terms of search engine optimization.
See how these 44 experts promote their blog with Facebook advertising.
Warning; if you don’t have the expertise to integrate every piece of the puzzle properly, you’ll end up losing money without any ROI at all.
Especially for Google adwords, using paid advertising to promote a business blog is not for everyone.
Fortunately, paid search advertising is a perfect way of promoting your lead generation blog posts. And just like Facebook ads, you can start generating traffic, leads or sales within few hours after your advert approval.
If you have tried adwords and failed, you are likely to generalize like many others that it doesn’t work.
Probably you were driving traffic to a general home page or misaligned landing page.
However, the fact that you tried and lost money doesn’t mean it won’t work for others. On the other hand, it is not even proof that adwords won’t work for you if your strategy is improved next time.
One thing I want you to note is that there is a great difference between buyer keywords and the rest.
This often determines who is going to buy your services within 24 hours, 30 or 90 days. In essence, the keywords you use makes a lot of difference.
While your blog posts may not be written to sell products or services directly, you can use them to address your target customers’ pain points, needs and desired outcomes.
The same blog posts could as well be used for building brand trust, generating quality leads and consistent revenue.
This is important because selling to strangers is hard, especially in a faceless online environment.
In the context of business blog promotion strategies, here are the key benefits of using Google adwords. Mind you, only those who act on this can experience the benefits.
Reach and attract people exactly the time they are searching for your products, services or related information. In this case, a great percentage of your marketing budget could be wasting if the timing is wrong, regardless of the channel.
Speak your customer’s language is something we hear about every time. But I learnt more of what it means from Joanna Wiebe of Copy Hackers.
With Google, a whole lot of different people often use different keywords to search for the same thing. Your blog posts and Google adwords advertising will give you opportunity to use many of them at the same time.
This is a perfect example of putting money at work. In many instances, the cost of one day advertisement on radio, television or news paper can buy you 30 days of consistent and automated blog traffic.
You don’t have to waste your time on generating low quality leads.
Retargeting is another perfect strategy for business owners and bloggers that hate waiting to see results. In essence, it is a different form of paid traffic.
Here I want you to note that retargeting and remarketing are often used interchangeably.
If you are not creating generalized industry contents that doesn’t bring measurable outcome, then you should pay attention here.
One interesting fact is that you probably have the traffic and money required for this.
Just as the name sounds, it is a simple process of reaching out to people who have visited your website or specified web pages.
Knowing that all of your blog readers won’t convert into leads or customers in their first visit, retargeting remains a competitive advantage for the smart people that leverage on that.
This online marketing tactic can be implemented on almost all of the paid advertising platforms you can think. From Facebook, to LinkedIn, Twitter, Youtube and Google, all of them have retargeting option in place.
And it doesn’t cost as much to get started.
In fact, based on many split tests I have done, it often cheaper than cold traffic.
Now let me tell you how retargeting works. When people visit your website from any online destination, you create retargeting advertisements on your preferred platforms.
These ads will then be served visibly to only the people who have visited your website or specified web pages within a specific period of time.
It could be 30 – 540 days depending on the platform you are using.
So this is how you bring back prospects who visited your blog posts, lead generation landing page, sales or contact page without converting into customers.
With regard to business blog promotion strategies, you can as well retarget people who have been to post category urls.
For example, if you have a blog category about search engine optimization, and then 1200 people visited within 30 – 540 days. You can promote offers related to SEO.
At the end you’ll bring back a percentage of these people and convert some of them instead of losing them 100%.
From Melbourne, Australia, a local furniture dealer approached me to help improve their digital marketing strategy. This happened on Facebook.
After installing Google analytics and search console, I did some analysis and found out that he generates an average of 4000 visitors per month. This traffic volume comes from 643 keywords ranking in different pages of Google search results.
But the lead generation and conversion rate was very poor.
Before that time, they don’t use any targeted keyword optimization in their business blogging strategy.
So I provided well research 100 high value keywords, writing and optimization guideline for their next 30 blog posts. We also optimized existing blog posts.
Then we moved to retargeting.
I used Google search console to identify the most valuable pages bringing highest volume of organic traffic to their website.
With that data, we created different ads within Google adwords and Facebook retargeting.
After the first 21 days, we brought in $6,400 revenue without additional traffic. That’s all from people who have shown interest in what they are selling.
Within that period we integrated call tracking system to identify the source bring the most valuable inbound phone calls.
The results amazed me so much that I learnt more about the importance of retargeting people specifically from organic search.
Now think about what a single sale could mean in your business if you have opportunity for repetitive marketing that builds interest, trust and conviction among qualified prospects.
My question now is this, what are the keywords your website or company blog currently ranking for? And how long have you been waiting for results? Probably you just abandoned your blog like many others.
Obviously, you don’t have a good reason to continue putting money and time in something that doesn’t work.
Before you close this page, I want you to understand that these are not the only blog post promotion strategies that can actually work for many business owners.
Moreover, I make no opinion to say that they are the best.
But these things originate directly from experience working for both clients and on my personal projects.
As for you, there is no limit on how you can put these blog promotion strategies to work. The most important thing is getting started. Like I use to say, having good knowledge is half the battle.
Whether you are the one putting out content for your company blog or not, you now understands better why SEO takes time. From this you now understand the contextual benefits of paid advertisements in your business blog promotion strategies.
So if you have to depend on free organic search engine traffic, you really need to wait as long as required depending on the effectiveness of your SEO strategy.
On the other hand, you can decide to set aside a part of your budget to explore the advantges of using paid ads.
With Google for instance, you’ll begin to experience the benefits of prompt timing, multiple keyword targeting, automated traffic as well as retargeting.
Finally, whether you are aware of it or not, your competitors are already thinking and operating in this angle. And you can only get an edge if you put what you’ve to work. Execution, not possession of great knowledge is where the competitive advantage lies.
When it comes to staffing agency lead generation strategies, many people still depend 100% on old parochial approach. Consequently, they operate blindly unaware of other marketing opportunities that exist beyond their current practices.
By parochial approach I am referring to an attitude of using the sample old strategies every other day, week, month or year without improvement.
While it is easy for everyone to have desire for improved marketing and business processes, not everyone knows how to go about it.
In the context of recruitment lead generation, not everyone knows the difference between business blog posts vs landing pages. Obviously, understanding all the iota details in online marketing for instance; shouldn’t be headache for everyone.
If you are the CEO of an agency for instance, marketing shouldn’t be ‘your thing’.
Granted you have your own over filled schedule. But if your lead generation pipeline isn’t working as much as you desire, then that should be your head ache.
Probably, you already have a consulting agency website. But unfortunately, there is no active business blog integrated inside from day one.
I know you have been operating well and getting clients without a business blog.
However, this also implies that you may not as well be able to tell the difference between blog posts vs landing pages. Irrespective of this, you have this strong desire to improve your staffing agency lead generation strategies.
On the other hand, you may have the approach of delivering or hiring someone to deliver Google adwords traffic to your home page only.
While the low conversion outcome that comes from such Google adwords advertising strategy doesn’t hurt, there is a sizable room for improvement.
Perhaps, understanding the difference between the two types of web pages will enable you to leverage either or both of them at the same time.
What then is the difference you may ask? The differences are in the contents, design, context and function. Even though there could be some overlapping factors, these things are not practically the same.
These are contents written on a web page usually the long form types that are meant to accomplish many different things.
Most times, blog posts exist on dynamic content management and publishing systems. CMS in this case can be used to publish web pages and contents without touching the underlying codes.
Let’s look at the core functions that make blog posts different.
As noted in the definition above, it is usually more of written texts. That is to say, majority of blog post contents are texts. However, quality blog posts often contain images, videos and GIFs at the same time.
But a bigger emphasis is always on the written text – headline, sub heading and body content.
This is the core of the difference. In most business contexts, the functions of blog posts are practically different.
Among other things, they are used for promoting expertise, products, building trust, growing brand awareness, generating search engine traffic, quality leads and sales.
If you don’t know how to accomplish all of these in a single blog post, then you really may need to learn more or hire a business blogging expert to help.
See this guide on conversion focused business blogging. (see sample post below/add shot).
So for those who are interested in how to generate leads without cold calling, starting an active business blog is one good option.
This is one of the proven ways to improve staffing agency lead generation strategies. In other words merely having a website won’t get the opportunities to increase your monthly billing.
The position of blog posts vs landing pages within a website are not the same. Based on prevailing web design principles, most blog posts exist within a website beside other contents.
That is, in a typical website, both other contents on the site, navigation links and blog posts exist visibly side by side. See what I mean below. (add shot).
So it is left for website visitors to decide what to read depending on the intent with which they came to your site.
Now we know that not all web pages are landing pages, what are they?
These are special pages created for a unique segment of your website traffic or target audience. Unlike blog posts, most landing pages are dynamic in nature with one or few form fields.
Let’s look at the core things that define landing pages in the context of staffing agency lead generation.
Though there is nothing that stops one from using long form landing pages like blog posts.
However, too many studies have proven that short, laser focused landing page often converts better. In addition to being short, it makes use of images and videos as well to induce conversions.
A form field that requires the user input is one key part of every high conversion landing page.
So in practical terms, fewer form fields convert better. Again, nothing stops you from packing too many form fields into your landing page.
This Trulia landing page is just a perfect example.
While it is possible to add opt-in forms within blob posts as part of your staffing agency lead generation strategy, most people don’t even do this at all. Note that it goes beyond adding generic newsletter lead magnet below your blog or on the side bar.
See this post on how content upgrades work.
Unlike blog posts, most high conversion landing pages often have a single goal, not multiple.
The premise is that multiple offers or call to action on a page puts people in a state of indecision. But when the entire, few contents are aligned with single intent of the visitor, conversion rate goes higher.
In the context of Google adwords advertising for instance, dedicated landing pages are used to generate service quotes, recruitment leads, build email lists, increase inbound sales call, deliver an ebook, white paper, video or case studies.
In comparison, dedicated landing pages often convert more than home page. However, you have to test both in order to find out what works in your niche and business.
In terms of landing page use cases, premium product developers like Thrive Themes, Unbounce and LeadPages have lots of landing page templates for any purpose you can think of.
In some sense, parochial approach could also mean that you are using one of these lead generation strategies and ignoring the other.
A practical example will be running Google adwords campaign and ignoring the benefits of starting a business blog 100%.
I say this because my research across different countries shows that many recruitment agencies that use Google adwords advertising do not have a blog at all.
In such cases it is either they are driving all traffic to home page, dedicated landing pages or both.
Even though the current conversions could be very impressive, your website’s potential for generating organic search engine traffic, leads and revenue from blog posts will remain untapped.
Below are some specific actions you can take to experience the benefits of using the two at a time.
Depending on your content strategy, quality posts within your business blog should be supporting landing pages too.
Note that am referring to simple text links only.
So make moderate use of selected keywords when linking. If you have a landing page about ‘how to hire passive candidates’, your blog posts about the same topic should be linking to it. Do this once or few times depending on the length of posts.
However, this can only work if you have a blog and some landing pages. Without these things, you’ll continue to miss out on the marketing benefits.
These are special lead magnets integrated within a long form blog post for the purpose of generating leads or building an email list.
They are usually embedded within the context of your blog post topic. Instead of leading directly to a landing page, what most people use is light box pop ups.
When you click the link on embedded content upgrade with a blog post, it opens an opt-in form or link to a landing page.
Check this content upgrade case study of 540% by Brian Dean of Backlinko. Below is also an example of content upgrade. (add shot).
For those who are yet to start generating leads from their basic website, it’s easy to sit where they are now and conclude that these things doesn’t work. Bear in mind that a lack of awareness of how landing pages and business blogs work doesn’t mean that the possibilities are not there.
Without a deep research, it’s not that hard to find recruitment agencies that are not using both an active business blog and dedicated landing pages.
Interestingly, some among these staffing consultants still use Google adwords to drive traffic to their home and other pages.
The benefits of combining the two apply to both potential candidates and clients visiting your website. This is one of the best ways to improve your staffing agency lead generation strategy.
Thus, in order to maximize marketing ROI, you should also consider making use of the two at the same time.
From my own experience with other consulting businesses as a digital marketer, the cost can never be equal to the benefits.
While dedicated landing pages offers the benefits of A/B testing, a considerable blog posting frequency will help in consistent growth of organic, free search engine traffic.
Now you know the different between business blog posts vs landing pages. Only you can tell whether you are actually making use of these effective online marketing tools in your recruitment business.
Even if you are currently using the two, it’s only the results you get from them that can prove how well they are working for you.
With a considerable Google adwords advertising budget, you can as well use same to start driving quality traffic to your lead generation landing pages and blog posts.
A simple research in your niche market within Google will reveal the extent to which your competitors are using these staffing agency lead generation strategies.
Share your experience and challenges in the comment section. Which one among the two is working for you now and why are you not using the other?
Today’s digital media landscape offers different ways on how to promote hotel website. Unfortunately, a lot of business people still assume that online marketing is for online businesses only.
Based on this exact assumption, many hotel business owners, managers and marketers keep on operating with the same old script. And that means getting the same old results they’ve always had from doing the same thing over and over again.
Hence, the low booking revenue situation got some people trapped in a frustrating puzzle wondering; what exactly is wrong?
So one day on a cool Monday evening, I was seating with some friends at a city hotel.
Just very close to the reception desk, a guy who seemed to be the manager asked; how many bookings did we record yesterday?
As a digital marketing consultant that had worked with other local businesses, I picked some listening interests.
The young lady responded, ‘two Sir’.
Both of them stared at themselves for some brief minutes and the manager went away.
While this may not describe your own exact experience or current worries, am sure you have the desire to increase your hotel room booking and revenue.
One interesting fact is that having the highest number of rooms and best facilities won’t bring in customers.
Thus, if your hotel marketing strategy is effective enough, it will begin to affect daily revenue generation. I bet you don’t enjoy paying salaries and other operating expenditures without impressive ROI.
Interestingly, for those who are barely breaking even from month to month as a manager, two things might be your problem right now.
Think it is location and signage that matters most, think again. Waiting for customers to come to you won’t affect your financial performance numbers positively.
And it is not a good competitive hotel marketing strategy.
You may say you have a number of affiliated taxi drivers that bring customers, but that couldn’t be enough. One fact is that they will always depend on stray prospects only.
On the other hand, one hundred percent (100%) dependence on referrals won’t make as much change as you desire either.
Sure the revenue potential is there, judging by the number of rooms and facilities in your hotel.
‘Life’s real possibilities are not as limited as our awareness of their existence.’ Something I never thought possible just happened in my presence within a single hour.
One man stated something that reads like ‘how can we know what we don’t know when we are constantly using our knowledge all the time’. I guess you know who Albert Einstein is.
The thing is that dependence on our limited knowledge and experience of what is possible excludes us from real possibilities that are currently unknown to us.
I see this type of exclusion happening in business and marketing contexts very often.
For example, you may have some theoretical knowledge of how to promote hotel website, but if you don’t put those ideas to work you’ll be excluded from the potential benefits.
In that case, what is practically possible if you should start promoting your hotel business website will remain unknown to you.
So as for 100% dependence on traditional marketing medium, it excludes people from the benefits of online marketing strategies for hotels.
If you have 40 – 100 hotel rooms plus high grade event spaces, but your revenue generation rate is convincingly low, then you have to do something different. One fact you should understand is that doing what everyone else does won’t make much difference.
By traditional medium, I mean radio, television, newspapers, billboards, posters, flyers, signage etc. While they still work in some cases, it is not enough in a competitive environment.
Practically, there is nothing wrong with these mediums. I’m aware they still work. But smart people don’t stop there in this day and age.
Now you may say something like, we have a website with online booking system. Congratulations.
But the fact is that merely having a website won’t bring you hotel booking customers. Having Facebook and twitter pages won’t cut it either.
Question, what measurable results have you gotten from your website and social media pages since creating them? Do you have an idea of how many qualified prospects coming to your website daily, weekly or monthly?
And just like the prospects that come to your front office to make booking inquiries, your website traffic (visitors) also flows that way.
The remaining part of the post details some ways on how to promote hotel website if you already have one.
But if you don’t have a hotel business website, you may consider starting a friendly conversation with an expert that has marketing experience.
It may interest you to know that most of the centralized hotel booking sites you know depend largely on search engine traffic.
The strategy is to attract people who are actively searching for hotels in different locations.
And almost all of the booking sites have daily, weekly and monthly budget for this quality traffic source.
However, nothing stops a marketing manager in a hotel with sizable number of rooms to invest in constant inflow of search engine traffic. By adding this to your hotel marketing strategy, you’ll experience the benefits beyond paying for visibility alone.
I bet that you, my reader had used Google to search for one product or service in the recent past.
Just as a testament to whether search engine traffic is profitable, Jumia, the leading ecommerce retailing company in Nigeria stated that 76% of their sales in 2016 came from mobile search engine traffic.
With Google search engine marketing, there are two main options.
This is a process of improving the quality and eligibility of your website for inclusion in Google search engine result pages.
To get the best ranking and results, it requires an ongoing month to month optimization process.
With this option, you don’t have to pay money directly to Google to include the links to your website in the search engine result pages.
The screenshot below shows the unpaid listing results of my search for ‘affordable hotel rooms in Ikeja Lagos’. (add shot).
To start getting the benefits of SEO for hotels, it is either you learn and do the work by yourself or you hire a digital marketing expert. Engagement plan could either be as full time job or consulting basis.
This one shows the clicks and traffic volume delivered to a client website via organic SEO. We use Google search console to track this.
On a deeper level you could go further to learn about the optimization process.
This process includes things like like keyword research, long form content writing, on page SEO, link building and analytics.
In many ramifications, this is a direct opposite of search engine optimization.
First you have to pay money for Google to include the links to your preferred pages in their search engine results page. Here is how Google adwords work.
You use some selected keywords to set your advert including location targeting preference.
And then when prospects search for keywords like ‘100 person event hall in Lagos’, a link to your page that shows event spaces will appear.
Consequently, someone clicks that link to visit your event space information page, Google will charge your adwords budget account for each of the clicks generated.
That is why it is called pay per click sometimes. Note here that you are paying for real visitors, not visibility only. And you are attracting them only the time they are actively searching for hotels in your target location.
You can as well set some of your adverts to be shown on mobile devices only.
Note that it is not everybody who arrived on your website will end up becoming a customer.
However, buyer intent keyword targeting, A/B testing and data driven conversion rate optimization will help to maximize ROI on your hotel marketing budget.
See sample Google adwords advertisement below for a local hotel in Colorado, USA. (add shot).
For further detailed learning, you can search for things like Google adwords call extension, call only ads, adwords retargeting, PPC bidding etc.
Remember that the main objective is to bring a growing number of people actively searching for hotel rooms and event spaces to your website. And then convert a percentage of them into booking customers.
And then convert a percentage of these qualified prospects into booking customers.
In practical terms, most of these people do their searches with two main intents – to identify hotel location (copy address) and compare price before the actual online or offline booking.
Regardless of your age, I can guarantee by 98% that you have an active account on Facebook.
If that is correct, then it means again that you could be one of the 900+ million people in the world who use Facebook on their mobile phones daily.
It also means you belong to several other demographic segments.
The fact is that hundreds of thousands and even millions of people like you and I spend good amount of time on social media every day.
Because of mobile smart phone penetration and other trends, the number of people spending 40+ minutes on Facebook daily is also on the rise according to business insider.
Interestingly, there’s no demographic you can think of that aren’t represented well on the big Blue social network.
In 2106, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer stated that the number of advertisers on their network now hovers above 4 million.
And if you look at the Facebook ad case studies on their own page, you’ll get an idea of industries to which these advertisers come from.
So because it delivers measurable business value, many business owners and marketers across the world use it.
Both for growing website traffic, lead generation, increasing sales volume and building brand awareness, Facebook ads work for big and small business alike. Done very well, it will also work for your hotel.
With Facebook advertising you can target prospective hotel booking customers based on their age, gender, location, industry, interest and a whole lot of other demographic metrics.
Check this complete guide on Facebook audience targeting.
Below is a screenshot of some hyper local targeting options available for effective advert setup. (add shot).
LinkedIn is the #1 professional network on the internet today.
With over 400 million active users, this network offers immense opportunities to reach mature, career conscious and actively employed individuals.
And within their network, you can find an interesting number of people from different locations across diverse industries, job roles and niche markets.
Probably, you may have an active profile in there too. One interesting fact is that a great number of these people go to different career networking and business events from time to time.
While some top level CEOs and executives attend one or few events per year, there are people who often attend out of state or city events almost on monthly basis.
The nature of certain jobs also moves people from one location to the other.
Obviously in many cases, these career networking travels warrant hotel booking in many cases.
Meet them timely, and you could start getting a bigger share of the booking revenue that comes to your target market in each passing day.
Remember that doing what everyone else is doing won’t get you the exact results you desire.
Assuming you are a manager in a hotel with 40 – 100 rooms, advertising in an online or offline version of a national newspaper won’t get you much ROI.
The reason is because, the display won’t be location targeted. And the contents are often read by everyone and anyone.
On the other hand, once a day goes by your advert becomes obsolete too.
For A/B testing, optimization and better ROI, there are different LinkedIn ad formats you can get started with. You can use sponsored contents, text ad or InMail that reaches people directly in their inbox. See this guide on how to advertise on LinkedIn.
The most interesting part of this network is the deep audience targeting options.
From company name to age, gender, industry, job title, field of study, skills, location, company size, you get them all inside LinkedIn.
Both on Facebook and Youtube, video advertising is an alternative ad format that delivers better audience engagement. Just think about the video vs text ad comparison for a while.
However, if you have been to Youtube lately, you’ll certainly see some advertisements promoting different products, services, brands and businesses. And because it works, a growing number of businesses now spend money on it.
Confirmed as the second largest search engine in the world, Youtube now boosts of over 1 billion active users.
The content on this site encompasses every topic you can think of. Moreover, the creators and audience cuts across every country, state, cities and locales around the world.
Youtube offers both free and paid options for promoting products or services on their platform.
With free video posting option, you don’t have to pay money to upload videos and add links to your website. Building an audience here depends on search keyword optimization and channel subscribers.
Paid advert options helps provides access to a large audience who might have not subscribed to your business page or channel on Youtube.
Generally, video ads can be shown to your target audience based on what they have watched, what they are currently watching or the keywords they searched for.
In the context of hotel business promotion, you can use Youtube video ads to showcase your real hotel rooms, event facilities, gym and other things that make your brand different.
In addition to that you’ll now add your hotel website address or even phone number for targeted prospects to see them.
With this, you don’t have to depend on stray prospects or people that live within commutable locations (distance) only.
Like the other hotel marketing strategies discussed above, you can do some A/B tests to find out what works better than others.
The key variations to focus on include ad format, video content and audience vertical.
The measurable outcome of your Youtube video advertisements will depend to some extent on the ad format you choose. However, in other to get better results you may consider retargeting for bringing back people who visited your website or watched your video.
Whether you have 40 hotel rooms, more or less than that, I’m sure that continued low revenue generation makes a business less profitable. You could have the highest earning potential, but if less than 10% of that is at work, then everything will always remain the same.
Maybe you’ve looked for ways on how to promote hotel business website because you already have one.
In that case, growing the volume of qualified traffic (booking prospects) coming to your site with booking intent will certainly help to grow your business.
To get started on that, you really need to focus on the most trafficked platforms on the internet – Google, Facebook, LinkedItn, Youtube etc. And as noted earlier, your target audience spends good amount of time on these networks in each passing day.
You only need to define, find and reach them.
At the end, what you’ll take away is the foundation of what is possible. This will now form a base for more research or to get expert inputs.
Fortunately, putting these specific strategies to work will help to maximize the ROI on your hotel marketing strategy.
Now you can as well join our Facebook group – The Search Tribe to discuss, discover and leverage working strategies to attract only the people in need of your products/services – Now.