This afternoon I’m going to judge some digital travel awards within the travel sector which centre around SEO or search engine optimization.
While big travel sites are investing heavily in agencies and in-house teams to revamp their pages, build links and create engaging and compelling content, many small businesses still aren’t and it’s a shame.
I’m getting married in 17 days time and it was my “stag weekend” on Saturday/Sunday just gone. My best men booked a cottage in near Monmouth for all of us to stay in and use as a base for a plethora of activities on and around the Welsh border.
They told me on the trip home that it had taken hours to find the right kind of place to take us on: near a pub, near some cool activities, not too far from a motorway from London with a supermarket nearby.
One of the reasons why they found it so tough was that the websites showcasing these kind of places - cottages, B&Bs, small hotels etc - just don’t have enough information on them to make an informed decision, an informed decision from a search engine or a potential punter point of view.
Earlier in the year I went on a trip to Dublin and thought I’d combine the trip with a weekend down in County Wicklow. It took me 4 hours of searching on all 3 search engines, travel review sites, mapping sites and more before I found the kind of place I was after – walkable to a pub, within an hour of Dublin, nice hikes nearby and a traditional Irish breakfast for my American fiancée to savour after a night on the black stuff.
Why did it take so long?
Because boutique web designers who throw up these kind of small, niche sites obviously haven’t got a clue about SEO. They aren't doing their clients justice by not titling pages properly and providing information on the local area or facilities that might be useful for users or search engines to rank them properly.
So let’s all do some evangelism the next time we’re by the sea, up in the lakes or walking the valleys of this great country of ours.
If the establishment’s website is a pile of dirty laundry then tell them and point them to Google, Bing and Yahoo!’s webmaster guidelines so we can help these small businesses flourish and get deserved visibility in search rankings, better site usability and more relevant and higher converting traffic.
