Feature: Search engine marketing

Article written by Mark Scriven, Turismotec Ltd.

In this the fourth feature on search engine marketing, Mark Scriven explains why, despite continually increasing entry costs, the internet is still a highly flexible, low risk and cost-effective way for the travel industry to generate business…

The internet is still a gold mine for all travel businesses.

Just a few years ago the internet was hailed as the great leveller, a place where the small business could compete on equal terms with the large brands despite their deep pockets. It was hailed as an opportunity for businesses of all sizes to compete on a global basis in a market with no borders and, best of all, it was pretty much free to play.

However, over the last two years things have changed. The search engines and major portals realised that they couldn’t sustain their businesses purely on advertising revenues or membership fees alone, and the dot com crash saw the end of unlimited funding. So they had to set about moneterizing their businesses as quickly as possible. This has come in the form of annual submission fees, express inclusion fees, Pay Per Click programs and other ingenious ways to extract revenues from advertisers.

At the same time the internet has boomed and most businesses now have a web presence. Google alone currently indexes over 3 billion web pages. This has naturally led to an increased level of competition for top placement for the more popular keyword phrases, which in turn has necessitated the need for at least some investment in search engine marketing and promotion. The old days of “build it and they will come” are gone for good on the internet and proactive investment is required in order to build website visibility.

However, despite the higher entry costs and increased competition, the internet is still an amazing opportunity for the small to medium sized travel businesses to implement highly targeted marketing strategies on a multi country basis, and in a very cost effective way. Lets look at the main reasons why this is so;

1. Travel is booming on the net
There is a wealth of research and statistics showing that the travel sector is one of the most significant areas of global internet usage. Consumers continue to embrace the internet and are becoming more accustomed to researching and booking their travel online. According to a recent report from PhoCusWright Inc., the Internet is now the leading source for travel research, and online travellers usually purchase their travel on the Web. In 2002 some 30 million Americans purchased travel online and, significantly, half of these people only buy their travel online.

2. Entry costs are still relatively small
For most businesses the additional fees are relatively small. Over 75% of global search engine traffic is currently generated by the big three of Google, Yahoo and MSN (Source: comScore Networks). Google does not charge any submission fees, Yahoo has a one-time submission fee of £199 and MSN has an express submission fee of roughly £25. These fees are manageable even for the smallest businesses and represent great value considering the amount of visitor traffic that these search engines can bring.

3. Website promotion services are comparatively cheap
There are many search engine marketing companies in the UK that can promote your website effectively for a relatively small amount of money. For example, a small website could be effectively marketed online for a whole year for the same cost as a 3×3 ad in the Sunday Times travel section for just one week.

4. Real time, highly targeted and low risk promotion
Internet marketing offers a level of flexibility, speed of implementation, targeting accuracy, financial control and accurate measurement that is simply unmatched by any other form of advertising. A Pay Per Click campaign can be active in a matter of hours, it can be precisely targeted with little wastage, it can be adjusted at any time, it does not require any significant financial commitment and if it doesn’t work you can simply stop the campaign. What other form of advertising can offer all of this?

5. The congestion charge effect
These entry costs also act as a kind of internet congestion charge and help to thin out the less serious players, and remove some of the search engine clutter which may otherwise hinder your visibility to you target market.

6. Big brand complacency
Many larger businesses still don’t market proactively on the internet, preferring to believe that their brand recognition alone is enough. Whether this is a rational policy or not doesn’t matter, what’s important is that this has effectively removed some significant competition and allows the smaller business a far bigger market presence than in any other media channel. For example, search for “cheap flights” in Google and you will not see one airline featured on the first page of the search results.

7. Pay Per Click can still offer good ROI
It is true that the Pay Per Click marketing programmes offered by most of the major portals are getting more expensive to use as they gain wider acceptance as a credible marketing tool. However, there is still a huge inventory of lower traffic but highly targeted keywords that can be bought for as little as 10p per click through. This is still very cheap in comparison to many other forms of both online and traditional marketing.

8. Significant delivery cost savings
The cost of converting a customer has reduced drastically since the advent of the internet and continues to fall with the wider distribution of cheap broadband services. For exa