Gearing up for SEO, PPC and social search trends in 2012

IN-DEPTH: Google is the biggest source of traffic for most travel companies and considering the way Google’s offerings are evolving, marketers need to be flexible and creative.

EyeforTravel’s Ritesh Gupta spoke to Adam Crawford, Senior SEO Manager (Europe), Cheapflights Media, Emilie Mouquot, Head of Global Online Marketing and Pleasance Coddington, Global Content and Social Media Manager about the latest trends.

By Ritesh Gupta

Google is being transformed into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships.

This is being termed as a major change to how Google’s search results are going to work. It’s a development that brands and business with an online presence need to scrutinise  minutely.  

EyeforTravel’s Ritesh Gupta spoke to Adam Crawford, Senior SEO Manager (Europe), Cheapflights Media, Emilie Mouquot, Head of Global Online Marketing and Pleasance Coddington, Global Content and Social Media Manager about the latest trends in search marketing and social search. Excerpts:

What do you think were the major developments for SEO and PPC in 2011?

Adam Crawford (SEO-related):

The release of Google+ was a big indicator of Google’s desire to take social signals into account.  We’re thinking of this more in terms of greater levels of personalisation that Google can offer users based upon their social networks and activity, rather than hard, across-the-board signals like link popularity.

Emilie Mouquot (PPC-related):

2011 saw major changes at the ad copy level on Google which gave marketers an amazing opportunity to significantly improve CTR. The introduction of longer headlines and the release of 3 lines of sitelinks gave more space to Paid on the search result page and bumped down SEO listings – good for PPC but bad for SEO!

What should the travel sector watch out for when it comes to search marketing in 2012?

Adam Crawford:  On the organic front: more personalisation. Google’s latest offering “Search Plus Your World” seeks to bring greater definition to personalisation whilst bringing new data sources into your results page.  This may shift the marketing emphasis for travel companies to focus on an earlier stage in the buying cycle to give a greater chance of being visible at the latter stages.

Emilie Mouquot: We should watch out for developments of Google’s Flight Search quietly expanding its routes. Flight Search could either become a threat or a new opportunity for online travel agencies. Only recently, Google started testing paid ads on Flight Search which could potentially be a new opportunity should Google decide to open it up to all online travel agencies.

What do you think are the major challenges for travel marketers at this stage when it comes to SEO and PPC? For instance, in 2011 a marketer told me a major challenge is the lack of online marketing knowledge which is still very prevalent across the travel industry, mostly due to lack of training budgets and resources.

Adam Crawford: This isn’t the case for us.  We have depth of experience within the team here and are able to offer an environment to rival search agencies, with specialists in different aspects of the SEO mix.  We’re certainly not alone in this respect, with many travel companies now having well established teams of in-house digital specialists.

As ever, I can see challenges coming from the evolving search landscape, with algorithms (like Panda), interfaces (e.g. Google Places, Flight Schedules) and Social-driven personalisation keeping online marketers busy this year.  Change like this is normal though, and is what keeps it interesting for us year after year.

Emilie Mouquot: I will have to agree with Adam. We have the chance to have very knowledgeable marketers in our team who keep up-to-date with the latest trends and new features on PPC. In such a fast changing environment that is online marketing and travel; it is critical for our marketers to be flexible and creative. Google is the biggest source of traffic for most travel companies and important that they embrace the need to have an internal or external team with the relevant expertise.

The factors that impact search results have changed drastically. The best search results are not just the ones which have the right content and meta-tags and relevant links pointing back to them. One also need to focus on several ranking factors such as the ones that are related to your website, content, relevance of business in online world, social circle and online reviews, search categories saturation etc. How should one approach the same as of today?

Adam Crawford: Despite perception, the core best practices haven’t actually changed a great deal in 10+ years: build a usable, accessible website and describe what it’s about in such a way that users and bots can easily understand it.  What has changed is the layers you need around your website for it to be continually visible because Google has developed many ways to measure the relevancy and usability of websites.

Be the kind of business that users are inclined to like.  Publish the kind of content that users are inclined to like.  Make it easy for users to send the signals back to Google that they like you.  Where you have a captive audience of fans, make sure Google knows about it.

How do you think the allocation of budgets towards PPC in the travel sector has evolved?

Emilie Mouquot: PPC is still in the top spot for the biggest marketing budget allocation with SEO, while budget towards Social Media is growing at a very fast pace year over year. PPC budget, however, is being spent differently over the years and Paid search marketers are looking into investing more budget towards activities other than Google PPC. Display & Retargeting, partnership and affiliate see their budget growing at a very fast pace while Google’s budget is moving at the same pace as CPC increases. 

As Google rolls out Google+ Pages worldwide and allows brands to create profile pages, it is being highlighted that businesses now have an option to take advantage of the relationship between social networking and SEO to increase their online visibility and return on investment. What do you recommend to make the most of such initiative from Google?

Pleasance Coddington:

Businesses have long had the option to take advantage of social networking and SEO to increase their online visibility and indeed many have been doing this for years; what Google+ has done has made this relationship so obvious that SEO and social media marketers must now ensure social networks are a driving factor in their activities. It's difficult to imagine that Google+ and the +1 will not have a significant impact on both indexation and ranking of URLs in search results, or even radically change the entire way the platform operates. All we have to do is look at “Search Plus Your World” that Google started rolling out this week, which returns both content that’s been shared with users privately along with matches from the public web. The best advice we can give is to ensure that all your existing digital platforms are fully +1’ed and that your Google Plus brand page is fully integrated into the entire roadmap of your Social and SEO marketing strategy. 

Brands have been quick to embrace Google+ but what do they need to work on in order to catch up with engagement currently associated with Facebook? How do you expect this to shape up?

Pleasance Coddington:

The first thing we all need to remember is that while Google+ is a social network, it is not Facebook. The same way that a fork is a piece of cutlery, but it’s not a knife. They have different functions and different advantages. Is matching Facebook’s engagement where the real value lies in Google+? We just don’t know yet. What we need to do now is examine, test and monitor what these functions and advantages are, and work out how we can best utilise them to support the marketing strategy and our overall business needs. It’s hard to say exactly how this will develop as it’s early days for everyone, but Google+ is certainly going to make a big impact on the digital landscape and I would recommend marketers do their best to stay ahead of the game.

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