Planet Google—How Tourism Sales Professionals Can Mine It Better: Among the most popular sessions at the e-Tourism International Day part of NAJ’s recent RTO Summit West was that presented by Laszlo Horvath, CEO of ActiveMedia, a global online search, advertising and media agency headquartered in San Francisco.
Horvath, a familiar figure at NAJ conferences, used the occasion to introduce sales professionals to, or help them better understand, digital marketing techniques by focusing on how they can use the Google search engine to enhance their international reach.
With few exceptions, Google has worldwide penetration and greater market share than any other search engine.
In his presentation, Horvath zeroed in on the subject “Five Key Things Tourism Sales People Need to Know about Google that Will Make Life Easier.” A summary follows.
- How do we advise our webmaster to make our site searchable to international visitors? Said Horvath, “If you have your website google-ized in your language … your traffic will increase. Have your domain in those languages representing the markets you are after.”
—Great news: your English website is readily searchable anywhere in the World for anybody using English keywords.”
—Even better: You can have your website translated to get a lot more coverage. Best practices: have your own domain/URL or at least subdomain and set the specific country for these in Google Search Console and use hreflang tags to set the language.
—The hreflang attribute (also referred to as rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x”) tells Google which language you are using on a specific page, so the search engine can serve that result to users searching in that language.
- SEM: How do we generate international trade leads using paid search?
—Select a specific language. Keep the targeting worldwide (or if you want, specify target the country as well.
—Advertise in English and choose specific countries you want to target. This way you’ll attract international visitors who speak English.
—If you target the international traveler using their own language, have at least your landing pages translated. Having your site translated to that language is even better.
—Have people in staff that speak the language(s) you advertise in or use a company that can help answer phones, send emails in the target language.
- What free Google tools can help me save time and energy?
—Use Google Analytics to see and analyze website data.
(
—Go to Keyword Planner to see what your potential customers are searching for and what the suggested PPC bids are.
—Google Trends – Search and explore interest by time, location and popularity.
—Google Alerts – Use your company’s name, your executives’ names, industry, niches, and more to stay
updated.
—Connect to Gmail: Assistant.to lets you book meetings with one email through gmail. No back snf forth. Easy-to-use free scheduling tool.
- How Can Google help me find the best websites to connect with tour operators and consumers?
Use Google’s Advanced Search: https://www.google.com/advanced_search to easier find websites by region, language, etc. and use advanced search modifiers to narrow down your search. For example by using the exact words modifier.
- What tools exist on Youtube to translate our videos to make them useful to tour operators?
—You can add translated video titles and descriptions to your videos so your fans can find your videos in their own language.
—You can also add translations for channel, playlists and sections. This makes your videos, channel, playlists and sections more accessible to fans outside of your home country and helps you build a global audience.
—There is no automated tool exists on YouTube to automatically add these translations and these are currently limited to title and description not the content of the video.
—To add translated captioning to a video you’ll need to do it either through a captioning service or software. Two software programs are: Subtitle Workshop, MovCaptioner.
For more information, contact:
Laszlo Horvath CEO, ActiveMedia
- 2995 Woodside Road
- Woodside, CA 94061
- Office: 1.650.353.2310
- Cell: 1.703.801.1665
Email: laszlo@activemedia.com
