Presentations in Prague and London

Standing Room Only for John Peters at EyeforTravel, Prague

In the past month, I’ve had the honor and pleasure at speaking at two conferences in Europe.  First, EyeforTravel’s Sales & Marketing in Travel Summit in Prague and then EyeforTravel’s Travel Technology Summit in London during World Travel Market.

I’ve always been a big fan of attending overseas shows, especially when it comes to travel and technology.  Getting another perspective about what you do all day long is quite refreshing.  Not only are the presentations interesting and informative, but I find the networking opportunities fascinating. 

As an example, at one particular lunch, I was sitting with the VP of Sales and Marketing for one of Israel’s largest hotel chain, the Director of a UK based travel technology consulting firm and the Director of a marketing consulting company from Russia.  You can imagine, the conversation was anything but boring.

It’s always so interesting to hear other people’s point of view.  The overseas folks are hungry to hear our opinions and trust me, they have many of their own (especially when it comes to our politics). In the US, we forget how our politics impact the world. The good news, is that when it comes to “Search” and “Analyzing Key Trends”, my two topics, my foreign counterparts were all ears.

Many people asked for my presentation notes or even my PowerPoint presentations, so I thought you might appreciate reading the highlights of the presentations in nice, simple bullet format.  I’m going to break this post into two parts.

EyeforTravel’s Sales & Marketing in Travel Summit in Prague: Smarter Search Strategies:

In Prague, my presentation was titled: Smarter Search Strategies.  The presentation was a bit technical for sure, but following are the highlights:

With search, getting the basics done right is easier said than done.   

TOP 5 Most important things when it comes to Search.

1.     Site Taxonomy:  This is your roadmap.  Does it look like a clear logical path with all your pages and topics in nice neat order or does it look like a bowl of spaghetti?  At the end of the day, you have to make it easy for Google and Bing to understand your content.

2.     Internal Linking: Internally, pages should like to other relevant pages.  Again, everything has to be in clear order.

3.     Title and Meta Description Tags: OK, everyone knows about this and how each page is labeled and titled.  This, no doubt, is important.  But, did you know that these descriptions, done alone, are minimally effective?

4.     H1, H2:  These are your heading tags.  They have to confirm the title tags.  Don’t overdo it though, concentrate on one topic for the page.

5.     Keyword Density: Make sure to your primary page keyword (in title, h1, description, URL already) appear 3-5 times on a page within the content.

Most people/companies, unfortunately concentrate on the Title and Meta descriptions, but honestly, these items alone, while important, don’t do much of anything if that’s all you do.  Further, the list is mentioned in order of important.  Okay, enough of that boring stuff.

The other main topic I covered was conversion.  Everyone with a website wants more visitors.  That’s all they talk about.  Rarely however, do they put as much time into traffic conversion.  Here’s the point, if you get one hundred people a day to come to your site and one person makes a booking, you’ve achieved a one percent conversion.  Most people then try and figure out how to get two hundred people to come to the site.  That’s a fairly expensive proposition.  My point of view is that you’re better off trying to figure out how to get more people to buy from you.  If you can increase the conversion from one person making a booking to two people or heck, even five people, you’ve made amazing improvement and it didn’t cost you any more marketing money.

There are dozens of ways to attack this problem, however, I’m simply saying it’s easier to work on increasing sales from existing visitors than to increase the number of visitors overall.   Don’t get me wrong; as you scale your business, you need to do both. Remember however, not all traffic is created equal.  You need to know your conversion rates for each category of traffic (paid, organic, affiliate, etc.).

Part 2 of this post, on the WTM and EyeforTravel in London, will be uploaded later this week.