In this article we’ll focus on the second step to increasing revenue using your website. The last article in the series will introduce in importance of statistical visitor and campaign tracking and tie the previous two steps together.

More often than not, during a period of a down economy, business owners tend to either stop marketing and advertising all together, or they’ll start throwing money at whatever they think might work to bring in new business. The problem with the later is that the business owner has no detailed plan to know what works, while the former is all together a bad idea. Using this ‘triple play’ process will ensure that you’re dominating your competition, while they’re scrambling to keep up, or will stop playing the game altogether.

In our last article we talked about how to increase the conversion rate of your website. It’s important to complete this first step because you can send all the traffic in the world to a website but if it doesn’t convert that traffic, all of your efforts will be wasted. If you’ve read and implemented the tasks from the first article, you’re now ready to begin driving additional traffic to your website. Completing the first step will give you confidence in knowing that the additional traffic you generate WILL result in increases in revenue.

There are hundreds of ways to drive traffic to your website. For the purposes of this article, we have simplified these many techniques into 5 primary categories. Those 5 categories are:

1.       Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Search engine optimization has gained much exposure over the last several years as being one of the most important source of traffic and revenue for vacation rental managers.  A simplified description of SEO would be ranking as many pages of your website as high as possible in each search engine. These high rankings or placement result in increased traffic and brand exposure. We feel that SEO should amount to at least 60% of your overall online traffic. With a good SEO program you can see large increases in traffic and revenue within 30-60 days of beginning a well planned campaign.

 

2.       Paid Advertising – The most common paid advertising channels are pay-per-click (PPC) marketing and banner advertising.  Of these examples, PPC traffic tends to convert at a much higher percentage than banner ads. Historically, paid advertising has been wrought with pitfalls and can get quite expensive if an account is mismanaged. Paid advertising should be used to fill in gaps of where your SEO strategy is lacking, rather than it being a large portion of your overall online budget. One benefit of PPC is that an account can be set up and show results in a matter of hours. One effective strategy with a new marketing plan is to rely more heavily on PPC in the early months while your SEO efforts ramp up.   While SEO traffic is on the rise, you can scale back your PPC efforts to achieve higher conversion rates at a lower overall cost.   Statistics show that the organic or SEO side of the search results get clicked on more often than the paid or sponsored links because people inherently distrust favorable search engine positions that have been “bought”.

3.       Content Distribution – There are hundreds of ways to distribute content online. Some ways you might be familiar with are article distribution and press release distribution. By distributing your content online you can see quick increases in traffic and conversion. However, think of content distribution as a secondary traffic source. You would have to write a lot of press releases to match the kind of traffic that high search engine positions can bring you. Furthermore, content distribution lends itself well to helping with the overall SEO plan in the form of new incoming links to your website. Content distribution is a time consuming process with many details. It is important to map out a realistic and consistent plan to ensure that you reap the long-term benefits of this technique. 

4.       Social Media Marketing – Three years ago, this might not have been a topic of this conversation. Just about everybody now has heard of Facebook, Twitter, and other similar social media websites. Social Media Marketing, if approached correctly, can send enormous amounts of traffic to your website very quickly. The popularity and volume of visitors to some social media websites can send traffic to your website, and many of the social media profile pages also rank well in the search engines, providing you with a double whammy in your SEO efforts. By establishing an online “clientele” on Twitter and Facebook means you have a group of potential guests who are interested in what you have to say. Easy and quick access to this group gives you a unique opportunity to market things like last minute specials and other offers that can help book units that may otherwise sit empty.

5.       Email Marketing – Last, we have email marketing. Email marketing is something that many lodging businesses don’t take proper advantage of. Any business with a website should be collecting email addresses, even if they don’t actively email to that list. Those folks that took this advice two years ago are reaping the benefits of having an email list during this recession. Think about having a group of several hundred or thousand people that you can email weekly or monthly to promote specials, events and more. You can even segment your list using demographic information like zip code, and email last minute weekend deals to past guests within driving distance! Take our advice and start building an email list so you’ve got a buffer for the next downturn in the economy.

So you’ve seen the 5 primary ways to drive traffic to your new highly converting website. Let’s tie some of this together so you can see the big picture here. In our first article we talked about the average website conversion rate in our industry is about .5%. Let’s say you’ve increased your conversion rate to 1%, and have doubled the revenue to your website. However, your website doesn’t rank well in the search engines, and you’re not taking advantage of social media or email marketing.

For simplicity sake, let’s say you used to have 3,000 visitors per month, or 100 visitors per day. Let’s also assume that your average booking is $1,000. .5% of 3,000 is 15 transactions, times your $1,000 average booking for an total of $15,000/month from your website. Since you’ve recently increased your conversion rate to 1%, you’ve doubled your income to $30,000 per month.

Now, using the techniques outlined in this article, you’ve implemented an effective SEO campaign that has increased your visitors to 300 per day or 9,000 per month. Given your 1% conversion rate, your average monthly income would be $90,000. In this example, we haven’t discussed an email marketing campaign or driving more traffic using social media marketing. We could also do more conversion testing and take your conversion rate to 2% or higher. Think of the possibilities!

In closing, we want to leave you with just one thought. There is only so much traffic that can be shared between you and your competitors in your local area. If you’re not doing the things that are getting you your fair share of that traffic…they will.