I would like to spend a few minutes talking about website conversion. Everyone has a site, but now there are some basic rules that apply to convert web visitors to customers.

1 – Click Count

How many clicks does it take for someone to enter their Credit Card info? The optimal # would be 3 or 4. Thus giving the guest less opportunity to get lost or leave your site. With LiveRez a web guest can usually book within 3 or 4 Clicks.

2 – Find the info you need

When someone visits your vacation rental website can they find what they are looking for quickly and easily? When someone lands on your site it should be point blank for them where to go and what do do.  Notice below the difference in where your eyes attact to and where you want to click first. Notice that on the first site, you dont know where to click.. on the Second you know right where to go to get the info you need.

Not a Good Example - Notice you don't know where to Click.

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Notice that you know right where to Click - A LiveRez Site

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3-Make a Pathway

One very common theme that we are seeing is website leading. Instead of just letting people land on your site and pick to do whatever they want, many people are creating pathway. They do this but getting the web guest to click on what they want and then leading them down a path, creating value and options for there product before eventually selling it. You can do this by using good site structure but also color colors and layout engineering. If you follow a LiveRez Built site, we put web guest in a path to give them all the info they need and eventually asking them for a booking!

Website conversion is not an easy task but is obtainable. Directing your guests into the right direction can really help increase your website conversion and also your sales. To learn more about online bookings visit our Vacation Rental Software site and see what LiveRez can do for you to Build  you an amazing site with an amazing Reservation System

Thanks!

Tyler Hurst

http://www.LiveRez.com

That is one part of the equation.  The other part of the equation is that you can learn tremendous information by analyzing the responses you collect from guests, prospective guests, and ‘just looking’ browsers.

One part I like about surveys is that there are some great tools out there that you can use on your website and through email marketing.  I have recommended Zoomerang and Survey Monkey before.  Today I ran across a new one Surveygizmo. 

Surveygizmo allows you to engage visitors and find out how they feel about your site experience by asking them directly. SurveyGizmo does just that. You can structure your surveys in many ways, including polls, quizzes, landing pages and even mobile marketing campaigns. Extensive analytics and reporting features are included.

A basic account was available at no cost. This is an actual working account (not just a test account) that allows you to gather 250 responses per month on an ongoing basis. Pricing for larger surveys is available at the site.

Another tool and strategy to look into to enhance your vacation rental business.  It is FREE and can provide you excellent data, as well as new guests.

Ralf
LiveRez

Cool Tool #1: Google Insights for Search
This tool gives you all kinds of information about any keyword/phrase in which you are interested. You’ll find out how searches for that keyword/phrase peak and ebb over time, where geographically your search is most popular, and what other keyword/phrases are used to conduct similar searches.

For example, at the time of this writing, we tested the tool using the phrases: “Web analytics” and “Web metrics”. The use of the phrase “Web analytics” has increased dramatically over the past four years while the use of the phrase “Web metrics” has decreased.

How can you harness all this data? Suppose you’re trying to figure out which product attribute to emphasize in an ad or on your website? As an example, this tool could help you figure out what’s more important to your audience: reliability, safety or price. Type in your terms, and see which ones resonate more with Google’s searchers.

Cool Tool #2: Google Trends
This tool shows you what the most popular searches on Google are in any given hour, plus a list of related news articles and blog posts that support the rise and fall of the traffic surges.

You can click on any of the keywords to learn more, including the hourly volume of searches, whether popularity is going up or down and (in some cases) where geographically the majority of the searches are coming from.

You can also put in your own keywords to see where your topic of choice stands over a selected period of time. We used the phrase, “email marketing”, over the past 30 days and saw that search interest surged weekly on Wednesdays and had severe dips on Saturdays and Sundays. The single highest peaks per week were tied into the publishing of press releases and articles on the topic, and the links to those resources were available for your perusal.

Cool Tool #3: Google Trends for Websites
This tool shows you the number of daily unique visitors to a specific site over your chosen period of time. The analysis details what regions visitors came from, what related sites they visited and the search terms those visitors have in common.

This tool does not work for sites with low traffic volume. However, it is a useful tool anytime you want to check out your overall business category, assess a potential online ad buy with a particular property or keep tabs on your largest competitors.

See this information from Think Eyetracking about where people are looking their search results – 2005 vs. 2008.

Description from Think Eyetracking:  As seen in the heatmap above, fixations are studded around the top 5 results and the majority of clicks are upon the top 3 results (discounting the sponsored link). The sponsored link was actually not well attended to due to the fact that searchers are now familiar with advertiser placement within Google. The 2008 heatmap supports the recent trend observed by Cornell University (Their study found that the top 3 Google results get 79% of all clicks) and by AOL (Findings were that 63% of clicks were concentrated upon the top three search results).

Furthermore when asked afterwards what they would normally do when they couldn’t find their desired search result on the first page of Google, 87% respondents replied that they would modify the search terms or refine the search by category. 97% of people tested answered that Google was the search engine they most commonly used and out of those people, 87% stated they wouldn’t bother using anything else.

What do you make of this trend?  I feel that the concepts of optimizing for a variety of search terms and especially keyPHRASES is more important than ever.   Shoppers have learned that they can get better results by getting more specific in their search requests.

Ralf
LiveRez

Google and Adobe have made recent announcements around the improvement in Flash being used in SEO.  Google’s Official Webmaster Central Blog used the following example of how a Flash website listing looked in search results before the new Flash crawling technology was installed:

And this is how the same Flash website listing would now appear:

The difference, as you can see, lies within the important descriptive content that Google can now index. This peek into Google’s accessibility, however, begs the questions: How well does Google index Flash? and How effectively can it be optimized for rankings?

Based on the information provided since the announcements, following optimization techniques for Flash pages:

1. The textual content within Flash can be optimized for specific keyphrase(s) to assist targeted rankings.
2. Text navigation within the website as well as text links within content can include keyphrase(s) to boost relevancy of the destination page. However, this is only applicable when Flash is separated into segments housed in separate files. For example, instead of creating a website entirely in a single flash file (i.e. www.xyzname.com/site.swf), the Flash file should be broken into segments housed in separate URLs (i.e., page1.swf, page2.swf, etc.).
3. Emphasizing (bolding) may help to raise the value of keyphrase(s). This seems to be a logical capability, but we don’t know at present if the new technology recognizes text emphasis.

Flash has made some amazing progress, but it still falls short of the efficacy of HTML when it comes to SEO.  Use it wisely.

Ralf

LiveRez.com

This tool allows you to enter your website and get a complete listing of how the search engine spiders see your website.  It itemizes out what features of your site may not be friendly or read at all by the spiders.  It also provides information about how often certain key terms appear on your site.

Look at these results very carefully and tune your website updates to make improvements.  Remember that SEO improvements do not show up immediately but require a few weeks and months to translate into measurable results.

This tool is a must have for your online vacation rental marketing and online booking efforts.  Keyword Spy will will show you exactly which keywords your competitors are bidding on in Google AdWords and how much they are spending.  It will also help you learn which worked work well for different players in certain parts of the country.  Helping you to design a more effective PPC strategy.

For example, enter the phrase “sun valley vacation rentals” and discovered who is bidding and who is coming up naturally.  When you click on a website name, it will show you what words they come up for.  The first 10 search results are free and a great source of some base info.

http://www.keywordspy.com 

This is a must-know reconnaissance tool for Internet search engine marketers.

Lets talk about some different kind of matching available with Google Search Marketing to help you with both market your vacation rental home using pay-per-click and SEO:
1.  The exact match – an exact match of the terms you place inside brackets when you enter keywords into your account. If you were adding an exact match keyword to your account it would look like this: [beach house]. Ads associated with this exact match would only show up for those specific keywords, that is, for “beach house” but not for “rental beach house”.

2.  The phrase match – terms are entered with quotes around them. The phrase match “beach house” term would allow ads to show when a searcher put in “rental beach house,” “beach house vacation,” or “California beach house”.

3. Broad match – is a bit more complicated. With broad match, you simply enter your phrase with no special characters.  This is Google’s default way to add keywords. With “beach house” into your account as a broad match, your ad would display for any search query containing “beach” and “house”.

Broad Search has morphed into Expanded Broad Match.  Now for example, account could end up displaying an ad based on your broad match keywords of “beach house” when the searcher entered “sand” or “sunshine”.

Over time, Google has stretched the relationship between the broad matched terms to the point that it is often difficult to see any logical relationship between the searcher’s term, your account’s keyword, and the displayed ad. This often results in the ad displaying for terms that are not relevant.

There are several approaches you can take to minimize the damage.
Avoid the use of broad match altogether. Exact match and phrase match often bring excellent traffic while avoiding Google making questionable expanded match choices. If you decide to run with broad match:
Avoid using one or two word keyphrases. Instead, adopt a practice to only run broad match on terms with 4 or more words in the phrase. This will minimize the chances of the Expanded Broad match algorithm misapplying your ads.
Identify non-relevant terms that the ad displays for and add those terms as negative keywords. If a searcher enters a keyword that is included in your negative keyword list, your ad will not display. The negative term negates the ad from showing. Developing a negative keyword list is an on-going effort. Don’t be surprised if over time your negative keyword list becomes quite long. Tools like the Google Keyword Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal), a good analytics program, and specialized tools like PPCProbe (www.ppcprobe.com) can help you identify negatives.Broad match can be very effective, but use it very carefully.Ralf
www.liverez.com�

Their latest publication:  Search Marketing 2008 Benchmark covers all the latest trends in Search Marketing.  See an excerpt:  http://www.marketingsherpa.com/exs/Search08Excerpt.pdf

Couple of immediate take-aways:
 - About half of online seller will increase their PPC and SEO budget by over 10%.
 - Only House Email Marketing has a higher ROI than SEO & PPC
 - SEO and SEM positions are very hard to fill
 - Long URLs are not good.  Short ones are.

If this is an area you plan to invest a lot of time and energy, the ME Benchmark could prove to be a very valuable resource for you.

Ralf
www.liverez.com