My Blogs are getting spammed by travel companies
Below are four sites that have been spamming my travel websites recently. I expect the holiday companies concerned don’t know about this directly but have hired an SEO agency to do this “work”. The comments left have all been vaguely on topic but not directly related to my original posts so I suspect this in automated process they have set up. On many of my sites I have now disabled comments which is a shame as it is a good way to get direct feedback from real customers but I just found it was too much work to moderate and the percentage of spam was high.
1) ocean-florida.co.uk – On page 1 of Google for the term they have in the anchor text in the links they are leaving in the blog comment so maybe this sh*t does work… Also what’s with the link to a poker site in the footer ?. I reckon they could improve their SEO by getting rid of that !
2) packyourbags.com – Have only made it to page two for the term “Cheap holidays to Turkey” that they were spamming me with but are on page one for “Cheap holidays to Greece” which is another one they have been trying to get their links down for.
3) beatthebrochure.com – Connected to the Florida website and also features the same poker site in the footer. Again this site ranks for the Tenerife Holiday term they have been spamming my sites with.
4) goldtrail.co.uk – Bit of a strange one here, the link they have been trying to get down is cheapaccommodationsinturkey (yes, all one word). It hasn’t worked particularly well for them but if you do search Google for it you can see all the places they have managed to get their comment and link published.
SEO Benchmarking
How Best to Target SEO Performance
A while ago I spoke to someone about SEO and they said they were willing to pay someone to “increase the share of traffic from natural search”. Fair enough, I’m sure there are plenty of people who would do the same. The problem is how to measure this in order that it will improve business performance. Doing a simple “if you increase my % visitors from natural search engine traffic to 25%, I’ll give you xxxxx” gives the following potential problems :
- Bit extreme I know, but it could cause divisions in the commercial team. Lets say the SEO responsible gets so target driven that they think the easiest way to increase the natural search share of total traffic is if newsletter and type in traffic falls!
- Natural search engine traffic increases but the traffic quality is reduced. An example would be getting traffic related to “xxxx complaints” where for most affiliates anyway the focus should be more like e.g. “Buy xxxx” or in the case of travel “Book xxxx”
- Traffic comes from a country that won’t convert because the focus on Geo-targetting has been dropped in favour of a mad dash for traffic.
The solution then is perhaps to :
- Sell everyone in the organisation the benefits of good SEO and give them some pointers on how to improve.
- Target specific positions in major search engines for key, converting keyword phrases. For physical products you will be looking for “xxxproduct delivered”, “xxxxproduct best price” depending on where the strength of the site is. For travel you might be looking for “Book xxxx hotel” or even with specific travel dates “Four Seasons Paphos from Glasgow 30th July”. 100% affiliates will be looking for phrases at the end of the buying process but anyone building a brand can be forgiven for getting traffic at the earlier stages of the buying cycle.
- Target the traffic to specific pages which will convert in one way or another (email / twitter recruitment or a sale).
SEO and job applications
Thought for the day
When employers are getting 200 applications for every vacancy you have got to expect that someone will be doing a quick filter of all the applications they get, so it’s important to make sure you get your keywords in (matched to the profile on the advertisement), so now am I going to apply some SEO techniques to my CV and cover letter.
Then when it comes to interview, I will use some conversion techniques to close the sale and earn the commission.
Monetise your most visited pages
Quick & Simple Tip:
I was chatting to a group of travel bloggers last week and a lot of them found this tip useful.
1) If not already, start analysing your site. Google analytics is very useful and free.
2) Find out your most popular pages from organic search. You might be surprised which ones they are, could be in some unloved corner of your site!.
3) Make sure these pages are either monetised, lead into other well monetised pages or have some other benefit for you such as encouraging your users to subscribe to your email or RSS feed.
Google UK keyword checker
How to research keywords from Google.co.uk
Useful for helping you decide what domain to register.
This is something you really should do when looking for domain names to register and also to give you the best chance of search engine success to decide what titles to give the web pages / blog articles you publish. It is also interesting to have a look at all the related words to what you have put in. To give you an example, I was researching cruise keywords recently because I think there is a lot of online growth in that sector still to come and noticed that as well as terms such as “cruise ships”, “cruise deals” that I was expecting there was also “cruising for guys”, “gay cruise” that hadn’t occured to me.
This tool is free and simple to use :
1) Go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
2) On the front page you can choose to tailor results to your country.
3) Whack in the keyword or phrase in the box as well as the word verification box and press get keyword ideas.
4) What you will see is the number of searches for the last full month and the average monthly number of searches from the rolling 12 month period.
I hope this was useful, please leave a comment if you have any tips or questions.
Why travel is so competitive for affiliate marketeers
Have a look at a generic, broad search term for holidays or flights in a major search engine and you will see that the vast majority of the time the top ranked results are not affiliates but major entities in the travel business. How then can a travel industry affiliate ever hope to make a success in the field and get a return on the time and money she or he spends?
First we need to look at why the field is so competitive.
The main reason is that some of the other entities you will be competing against will be owners of inventory. When I say competing this could be competing for keyword / search terms in the pay per click search arena or pure /natural search engine ranking.
Because most travel products are perishable (i.e. when a flight departs with empty seats there is zero revenue from those and no way to get revenue from that after departure), the owners of inventory can get into a mindset that almost all the revenue from a sale of otherwise unused products is “incremental”, a flight sold at £99, less tax and charges of £15 is £84 revenue compared to zero if the seat goes unsold.
So in a strange way the inventory owner might be persuaded to spend £83 on getting that seat sold = a large budget for PPC, SEO or any other marketing.
Compare that to the position of the affiliate. Even on a generous affiliate scheme where he or she might get 5% and would have to pay tax on that, the difference in budget is massive.
What can a travel industry affiliate do ?
The answer is to avoid the main and broad search terms and find a niche. The simple fact is that this area should be a lot less competitive so you have a chance of getting in the top 5 on a search engine and that means traffic and then the hard work begins of converting the traffic into sales. So much the better if you have knowledge of this niche and optimal if you have a passion for it.
