TravelDigger.co.uk realizes the unique requirements of the travel industry in today’s modern web 2.0 environment.

Many businesses don’t consider their position on search engines below the number 1 spot. Out of the 10 listings on search engine pages most businesses presume that people searching for there businesses will click on the correct URL. How does a new customer know which is the correct URL?
A while back one of the eye tracking reports suggested that 85% of visitors to Google click on the first 3 positions. You need to ask yourself these questions.

Do you have a website listed in all 3 positions that promotes or protects your brand?

Do you control the content on all 3 websites?

Are you OK with letting 15% to 60% of potential business slip away?

If the answer is no you need to do more to protect your brand online, now.

By using these simple tips you can protect your brand terms on search engines from unsavory reviews and also claim back some business from resellers and affiliates or if your operating within the Travel industry, GDS systems.

• Domain Names
• When many companies enter on the internet to trade the usual only purchase a handful of domain names that incorporate there brand term. I most cases businesses purchase www.brand.com and www.brand.co.uk. This is a fundamental mistake, the remainder of the other domains, .org, .net, .tv etc are then left available for anyone to buy. Many of these domain names will be picked up by resellers and affiliates trying to generate sales of the back of brand terms being searched on Google, Yahoo and MSN.
  
• Solution: Buy up all variations of your brands domain name.

• Land, not Redirect
• A common mistake made by businesses when they purchase additional domain names relating to the brand terms is to simply redirect them to the main site i.e. point the .co.uk domain name to the .com domain name using 302 redirects. This offers zero benefit when protecting your brand, search engines will simply consider the main domain name to be the original site and then devalue the other domains that point to it.
• Solution: Create landing pages for the other domain names, the landing pages can consist of some sales material and deep link into the main site, it doesn’t have to be a full blown website. Setting up these landing pages on a separate server from the main site will also offer a small benefit.

• Blogging
• Get a blog, Get one now! Using a blog to output the latest news or special offers can help to combat brand theft. By simply signing up to a free blogging service such as wordpress.com and using your brand name in the blogs names such as http://brand.wordpress.com you can pick off another one of those positions on the search engine for your brand term.
• Solution: Open a wordpress.com account and use your brand term in the name of the blog. Remember to blog often and grow within your industries blogging community.
  

• Alerts
• You really need to be knowing when other websites are commenting on aspects of your business whether good or bad. To do this on a higher signup to Google Alerts, this will notify you when a website is talking about your brand and identify you websites using your brand terms to gain business. A way to monitor blogs and websites outside of Google is by setting up RSS feeds for search terms on Technorati,  visit Technorati and search for your brand, within the search you’ll see a RSS  subscride button. Add this to your preferred RSS reader.
• Solution: Setup Google Alerts and Technorait RSS feeds.

• Shift Focus
  
• When you start to receive bad online press and it filters through onto blogs one thing to do is to shift the focus by putting a press release or a special offer. Use the blogs you’ve created to distribute the new shift in focus. It is also possible to pay for blog posts on top bloggers websites. This could be a quick solution if your new blogs aren’t quite up to scratch.
• Solution: Push on new news via your blog and look at using a pay per post system like www.payperpost.com

I hope that some of these tips help you protect your brand within the online environment, these tips are just a sample of a full Online Brand Protection and Monitoring strategy. Hopefully they’ll be applied to your strategy.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: seo, travel, online brand protection,

 Anyway, this post really has nothing to do with that, I’m just getting claim to fame out the way.

A few large clients that we have the pleasure to work for have been asking us to optimise there sites for the term “leisure breaks”. So, after a very simple bit of research ( aksing people I know what they typed into to google the last time they booked a holiday) and using Aaron Wall’s SEO Book keyword research tools I quickly discovered that the volume for “leisure breaks” was quite low, about 1,500 search a month, even if I was to get first place and the meta description was great I would be lucky to get 20% click through rate. This would only be worth 300 visitors a month max. not that great. Armed with this info I jump on a plane and head of to the “Leisure Breaks” meeting with the client.

When this hot information hits the desk of the client a screwed up face turns and says “Our customers are searching for Leisure Breaks”, eh! no there not, but hey you pay me, so yes they do, and good day to you kind sir.

After several weeks of relentless SEO for the term “leisure breaks” we break into the first page of google.co.uk and gradually climb up to the rankings. Postion 2!, great, job done. We wait a month to see the traffic and sales fly in, we’re still waiting.

After a month of being in Position 2 for the term “leisure breaks” the new visitor count for that term doesn’t read well, 60 visitors. Oh no! Back to the drawing board. But the clients happy he’s second on google for a term that HE thinks people are using.  So in a blazing “Blue Peter” moment we spin on our heels and point the client in the correct direction. Weekend Breaks, Weekend Breaks, Weekend Breaks, that’s where the pot of gold lies. Another visit to SEO Book and we’re looking at returing half a million searches and with the same amount of SEO required it proves why clients hire professionals because, we know best.

Had the client listened to us early on in the process not only would there site be highly ranking for a value term but they wouldn;t have the big bill to change there website around from Leisure Breaks to Weekend Breaks.