Q&A with Brendan Crawford, Latitude Group

Brendan Crawford, account director with search marketing specialist Latitude Group, answers questions about ‘search engine optimisation’ and how smaller travel companies should approach online marketing.  Linda Fox reports

Q: Why is search engine optimisation so important? If I’m a specialist with a loyal following won’t people find my website anyway?

A: Yes, chances are a loyal following will know how to find your website. But a lot of people, even loyal customers, use search engines simply because they’re so easy and convenient. When they do, they won’t just find you, they’ll find your competitors as well. Even if they’re using a search engine to find a particular website, if yours hasn’t been optimised for the search engines there’s every chance it won’t appear for many pages of results, if at all, and searchers rarely look beyond the first two or three. Is that a risk worth taking? Search engine optimisation is even more important now since Yahoo launched their new search platform. Just like Google, Yahoo now places a high premium on relevancy and content.

Q: What are the two/three most important factors in online marketing?

A: For a specialist travel company the structure and content of the website is critical. It’s all about knowing who your customer is and understanding how best to ‘engage’ with them. A properly structured, custom-built website will be far more visible to the search engines than one that’s been adapted from an off the shelf web design package or one that’s been poorly constructed. A good website will also attract more people, generate more interest, and deliver more sales!

Q: What should companies on a small budget do?

A: There’s no shortage of techniques in online marketing – email, banner ads, pop-ups, the list gets longer every day. If you’re on a small budget the best place to start is with free opportunities such as Wikipedia, blogs, newsletters, getting good quality links to and from your website. Pay per click advertising can eat up a significant slice of an online marketing budget, so smaller businesses that choose this route should avoid trying to compete with the big players and go for more specific, less common search terms. These will be a lot cheaper, so you maximise your spend. Finally, there’s SEO. In a way, specialist travel companies already have a headstart on the big players, but you need to work constantly on SEO if you want the search engines to give your website a consistently good position on their results pages.

Q: People always talk about the internet being a level playing field but is it really?

A: Yes and no. Yes, in that you can’t simply pay for the top positions on search results pages any more. No, in that big businesses will always have more to invest in what’s needed in today’s search engine environment – SEO is a certainly a great leveller! It’s a bit like treating your website like a filing cabinet divided into drawers, files, folders and sub-folders. If the information is labelled, well ordered and easy to find you won’t have any problem with the search engines picking you up. Smaller companies need to spend their money in the right places, and they do have the advantage of being able to act faster than large ones. At Latitude we have been making strides with social media and where it can impact travel.

Q: Why use a search engine optimisation/online marketing company?

A: Experience, knowledge of what works best for different types of business, and products that relate to different sizes of business. Latitude, for example, offers Latitude White for smaller companies where you get the technology but not the account management. Our core product offers high-touch account management with detailed reporting and in-depth tracking of where people start on a website, where they fall off, where they have come from. Companies really see us as an extension of their business and it’s easy for them to monitor what we are doing because it’s all performance led. There is no other channel where you can so accurately track performance.