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Indigo Travel Tech’s Stephen Young on boosting your website’s SEO factor
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Villa Plus and
cruisekings.co.uk both invested in powerful analysis
emphasises that you should only make changes to your site if they are supported by analysis of the site. Analysis may reveal, for example,
that certain website sections were receiving few visitors, such as a special deals page – and so would need better marketing. However, for ecommerce
websites – such as OTAs – more powerful analysis is needed to make sure conversion rates are as high as possible. IBM offers analysis software called
Coremetrics, which Hoggan says can cost “tens of thousands”. Google launched a premium version of its Analytics tool (costing £90,000) at the end of September. Google’s premium version is
intended for websites with high traffic; it can analyse one billion hits per month, compared with 10 million a month for the free version. Both are designed for larger
companies, and the level of detail can prove key to solving problems. However, Hoggan warns it is not an “automatic sales boost”. “First you have to understand the data, and then make use of it,” he says. “One useful area is conversion rate optimisation (CRO). You can find where people are dropping off, as well as cross-browser compatibility.” He cites one client’s website that
was receiving a healthy level of traffic – but few sales. After cross-browser
compatibility analysis, using IBM Coremetrics, he
discovered there was a technical problem with the checkout basket. The analysis revealed that those visitors using the Firefox web browser did not complete the booking process, and exited the website before successfully paying for their product. The website was found to have
“browser incompatibility” issues, and the bug was fixed.
Invest in the best Direct-sell operator Villa Plus also opted for IBM Coremetrics. Business manager Simon Lifford says it is worth every penny, and this year became the first travel company in the UK to use it. “We used Google Analytics for six
years. It was fine, and helped us learn about analytics. But with IBM Coremetrics, although it’s a hefty outlay, you’ll learn all sorts of things.” IBM Coremetrics has a dedicated travel division, and Villa Plus staff
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across IT, finance and marketing underwent days of training. Lifford says its strengths are
being able track the performance of banner ads placed on other websites, and indepth tracking of visitor movements. Using the “Explore” feature to generate reports, Ilford says he tracks different entry points to the site, as
well as “journeys” around his website. “I’m fascinated by seasonality, so I’ll be looking at the conversion rates from January to July. I’ll look at the number of times people browse our site, and how they move around it.” One of Hoggan’s travel clients is
cruisekings.co.uk, for which he says the free version of Google Analytics just wasn’t enough. The ability of IBM Coremetrics to spot trends was another factor in Hoggan using this platform instead. “It really helps you to look at
segments of customers. It will tell you what you what you should be looking at – brand or non-brand visitors (visitors who land at your site through a search engine). For example, do non- brand visitors always leave your website on a certain page?” No matter how big or small your
website is, there’s definitely value in using analytics. But, as Hogan concludes, it’s not about the data itself, but about how you use that data to improve your website.
Search Engine Optimisation is often deemed too complicated to understand. At one end of the scale, digital agencies can blind clients with science, while at the other end there are “snake oil salesmen” who claim to be able to propel your website to the magic top spot of Google search results – for extortionate fees. However, these are four simple tips that can help you gain additional traffic and greater exposure on the search engines: Meta tags are descriptive words that inform the search engines of the core information on that particular page. Keep these concise and unique to that page. Title and descriptions inform the search engines and are used with the search results displayed on Google, Yahoo and Bing. Make sure these are informative and relevant. The search engines cannot see images or website themes used on your website, so to inform the search engines you must use Alt Tags to provide a description of the picture being displayed; increased relevance can help achieve a higher position. The search engines will crawl
your site, starting at the home- page then using links to find extra content. Always check your site’s Links and fix them if they are broken as this can affect your position within the search results.
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