Here's (some ideas) of what travel companies should be doing to get ready for the doors opening for international bookings ✈️:
👉Add "anywhere/anytime" selections into your booking forms - people don't know where and when they want to go, they just want to find a deal and a safe location. Don't rely on them knowing an exact date and location and instead be the experts that tell them the best places to go
👉Pull internal search and offsite search data and understand which locations people are "googling" the most. Where is most in demand, which location pages are getting the most traction, where does everyone feel safe to go
👉Use that data broken down by region and demographic to brief PPC and creative teams to get in front of them with the right products
👉High volume Digital PR activity to drive links to relevant areas of the site to boost them organically and drive brand awareness
👉Update all landing page copy to communicate security, safety and reliability
👉Update all location page copy to make them aware of local lockdown, curfew, covid restriction rules
👉Ensure your "things to do" pages are updated - people will be looking for activities through the travel company more than booking elsewhere. They want to escape but trust it will go ahead (e.g boat trips and excursions)
👉Start posting on social when everyone else is quiet
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There's only so much talent in digital PR right now and if you haven't noticed, everyones hiring.
Senior people who have been there and done that in digital PR are extremely rare and it will cost you a lot to get recruiters to help, they come with pre-existing ways of working..
my advice... create them. Progress your team you've got, dedicate someone to training.
My focus is to create the next level of digital PR talent - we have 25 in our digital PR team alone and growing even further. International countries (europe mainly) is even harder ...
And our focus is to train the next german PRs, spanish and Dutch to our standard.
It's faster to do that in 6 months that to get someone in at this rate.
We’ve been thinking about completely scrapping emails and going 100% on slack. Here’s reasons why we WONT be doing that:
1. It’s hard to hold people accountable to deadlines on slack. As someone who must set 20 tasks a day to their staff, I can’t remember half of them. Email ...
Is easier traceable, easier to find the deadline and easier to hold someone accountable without going through hundreds more messages that you sent between setting that task and chasing for it.
2. Slack has become the way to “chat at the water cooler”. Small talk, gossip, generic
Chat, is a big part of our slack now. We have multiple groups to keep convos focused, but strict tasks, documents, convos all get lost in it. Use email to separate it out.
3. You can’t bcc - I use this a lot when keeping people in the loop
Building links on top tier domains in the financial/medical space builds trust and authority with Google
In 6 months, we drove a 329% increase in organic traffic for a forex trading client of ours and 53% increase in organic conversions. A thread on how...
AskTraders came to us having NEVER landed a link on a national press before. Most of their backlinks were niche domains, financial press, and blogs.
They'd heard of our work and challenged us to change that.
So we came up with 3 strategies...
1. Press had never heard of AT before and the brand was so low, we couldn't even track it. So we needed to build authority with the media and ran a newsjacking strategy.
We used AT's traders as well as our newsjacking team at Rise, to push comments and data
How we turned around a 3 year decline in organic for a client in the medical space in 2 months, improved conversion rate by 135%, got them to rank in the top 10 for their biggest keyword for the first time EVER and get shortlisted for an award for it...
This client had lost visibility after every single “core” and “medic” update in the last 3 years and had to triple PPC spend to compensate. @riseatseven lasered in on the technical issues that had never been dealt with and made some huge brave changes ...
So what did it involve...
Tech SEO ✔️
Content ❌
Links ❌
Removed over 54% of pages onsite becauce they were absolutely worthless
Approx 50,000 previously canonicalised pages were added to robots
The site was also duplicated across at least 20 sites owned by the Group
We knew that demand for spas with outdoor pools and hot tubs peaked in Summer
And our cleint @SpaSeekers didnt even rank on the 1st page for these terms. They now rank 1st and 2nd. This is how...
Treatwell took no.1 position with a blog post covering "Top 10 spas with outdoor pools". The blog post had no quality links to this piece, just internal links and a listicle piece which couldnt be too difficult to beat.
The strategy...
1. Create a commercial landing page listing all spas available with an outdoor pool or hot tub 2. Create a blog post listing the top 10 spas from that list - with internal links to the commercial landing page and vice versa 3. Get links to the site surrounding hot tubs...