If you haven’t heard, Google has upped their social game by recently launching a beta version of Google+. This new social platform may revolutionize social media marketing strategies for the travel industry. Here are a few tips from webintravel.com, written by Giles Longhurst, for what travel companies can do today to embrace the change.
What should travel companies do?
Google+ in conjunction with the Panda updates could be the biggest shift in search since it took off 13 years ago. Traffic from Google is for many travel companies the largest traffic source to their digital platforms and with Google revolutionising their algorithms, we have to embrace the change!Here are some simple steps that travel companies can take to make sure these radical developments in search can benefit their businesses, in addition to some strategic questions to answer to help protect your business in the longer term:
Quick wins
• Step 1: Integrate the +1 button so your customers can share WebPages they rate with their friends and peers.
• Step 2: Ask the whole of your organisation to set up Google profile pages so that they get into the mindset of analysing the content they read. This will allow them to better understand what grabs users’ attention, so they can build this insight into their own work.
• Step 3: Use Google Analytics or Google Web Master Tools to monitor how +1s are affecting your organic & paid search and which pages of your website are liked the most.
• Step 4: Build this knowledge into your content strategy.Strategic planning
• Review all of your website content to gauge quality.
• Prioritise key pages, but don’t forget longer tail search pages – these are the foundations upon which many websites’ traffic is built.
• Consider the integration and design of different page types, this is extremely important as it will be the users’ experience of the whole page and its features which will determine if they +1 it.