Who Needs Google? 5 Simple Ways To Generate Traffic Without Organic Search Results

Posted on Aug 5th 2014 in Search Engine Marketing

Who needs Google? Well, we all do. Ranking for important keywords is an undeniably powerful way to get your resort’s name in front of your guests and drive streams of relevant traffic back to your website ready to make a booking. But with Google constantly updating its algorithm, holding on to prime positions in the SERPs is difficult at best, and sometimes impossible without a sizeable marketing budget to play with.

Instead of worrying about slipping down the rankings and losing traffic, plan ahead. Protect yourself against inevitable future changes with these 5 strategies to generate traffic without Google organic search.

1. Google+

Forget the rumours: Google+ is going nowhere. Maintaining a healthy presence on the platform is a powerful way to drive traffic to your resort’s website, and you don’t even need tons of followers.

Google+ makes it simple to identify people who are likely to be interested in your property and group them into niche communities ready to be targeted with highly relevant content. Once you’ve put the work in to become a recognised and trusted member of a community, you can begin regularly sharing links back to your blog posts and other content.

2. Social Media

No surprises here. For most hotels and resorts, Facebook provides the biggest opportunity for driving traffic. The winning formula is pretty straightforward: optimise your property’s Facebook page and link back to your website. Regularly update your page with links to relevant and interesting content and make it easy for your guests to share your site content on social media by including share buttons.

If you have the resources, try testing other platforms such as Twitter and Instagram to see if they’re useful for driving traffic with your particular audience.

3. Q&A Sites

Question and answer sites such as Yahoo Answers and Quora are an often overlooked opportunity to drive targeted traffic. If you can offer a helpful solution to a question about accommodation or your local area, you’re sure to send interested traffic back to your site and may end up with a new and loyal guest. Don’t be tempted to set up your own questions to answer though; the aim is to drive traffic by providing helpful information in an open, non-spammy way.

4. YouTube

After Google, YouTube is the internet’s second biggest search engine, serving up video results for over 3 billion enquiries each month. With more searches being processed here than through Yahoo, Bing, Ask, and AOL combined, the site is ignored at your own peril.

Well produced promotional videos can drive lots of traffic, so if you haven’t done so already, it’s time to show off what you have to offer through an engaging virtual tour of your property’s best features.

5. Email Marketing

With a conversion rate of 3.34% compared to search at 1.94% and social media at 0.79%, there’s no excuse for not capitalising on email marketing.

Don’t forget to run regular A/B tests on your campaigns. Often a small tweak to the subject line can have a big impact on open rate.

Are you already using these methods to drive traffic to your site? Do you make use of any other non-Google traffic sources? Let us know in the comments below!