One common question that many resort managers share is how to evaluate their SEO effectiveness. To date, it can be difficult to gauge if your SEO is performing or not, let alone, fully grasp the requirements of an effective online advertising strategy. But now, the World Wide Web has changed a lot. It is now easier to track the progress of your Internet marketing campaigns. Most websites now provide you with the capability to determine the effect of your advertisement and how many Internet users have actually clicked on your Internet ads or visited your website.
In an ideal world, a resort websites’ SEO effectiveness would be evaluated by verifying the analytics for the keywords the resort is trying to optimise. There are several ways to evaluate the effectiveness of your web marketing technique in order to generate results and boost your resort websites’ visibility in the major search engines.
Let’s start with assessing the factors of your organisation. Below are three core competencies that together provide a holistic view of the factors that could indicate the performance of your resorts’ SEO:
The three competencies are:
Resources:
Your resort’s SEO strategy would make great strides if you have dedicated staff to manage it. Internal human resources should be made available for support and implementation of social media marketing initiatives. They are responsible for content creation, network development, promotion, monitoring and analytics, as well as community engagement. For instance, encouragement of all staff to have a profile and actively participate at the resort’s online community could help them embrace SEO. It is always best to have staff with prior background in SEO work. But in the absence of this, your team can quickly learn the necessary skills from many free online resources.
Analytics:
Having an ability to measure the impact of SEO efforts and, at the same time, delivering on-site traffic is fundamental to the efficient management of a resorts’ SEO campaign. Using SEO analytics can help one monitor its web rankings or at least provide five critical elements of functionality: (1) Dashboard: an analytics dashboard such as Google Analytics enable you to monitor campaign results based on a number of elements that are critical to your resort. Various analytics packages allow you to customise a dashboard for you to easily determine what important aspect you need in your business reports; (2) Funnel: even in resort management, you will rely on a funnel overview that shows a progressive report of SEO performance and its success in starting the initial contact which is critical in turning a potential guest into an actual guest. Funnel overview shows what percentage of visitors progress in each stage; (3) Geographic Targeting: this functionality would provide you with an understanding of where visitors who come to your website originate -both the location and time zone. From an analytics perspective, this is critical for you to understand given that there was a seasonality aspect to consider; (4) Website Activity: your analytics program has the capability to illustrate what the site traffic looks like, such as if people are getting to your action pages – your sign up forms, contact pages or how many pages do your visitors look at and what path do they take through the site; (5) Visits to Register / Search Engine Marketing (SEM): your analytics programs should also tell you which search engines are sending you traffic and what other websites bring you customer and potential customer traffic too.
Keyword Visibility:
Monitoring search engine rankings for the selected search terms or keywords can offer you a clear picture of whether your SEO technique is effective or not. Successful resort websites should have a highly optimised keyword structure so they can be indexed and displayed on top of other websites on the results pages of search engines. If you use web analytics, it should give you an idea on what keywords people generally use in searching for resort or tourism-related websites. All other web analytics program gauge other performance indicators from visitor numbers to page views, conversions, and sales – all of which involves diverse factors which are largely out of control of the person implementing the SEO. The only true SEO performance indicator is search engine ranking for the targeted keywords.
Of course, you can also recognise all sorts of problems and observe your SEO’s performance without watching your stats through analytics. But be sure to monitor your web traffic stats regularly so you can make necessary solutions or improvements should the need arise.
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