Over the past few months, I have had many discussions with Tourism and Hospitality operators who wanted to know about what my business Untanglemyweb.com was all about. I noticed that after a while, one of the major reocurring theme that I used was "keyword optimisation". Now, this word is part of us online marketer's daily vocabulary. However, it can seem pretty scary to your local, small and medium tourism operator or manager... "Fabienne, can you please use plain English" is one of the response I often get! What I do is I give them a few examples and it relaxes the tense atmosphere straight away and the conversation can resume.

Now, I have done a few searches on "tourism keywords" and related, well, keywords on Google and I could not find a post in "plain English" illustrating it for the Tourism and Hospitality industry.

Since it is Indy weekend on the Gold Coast, that the sun is shining and that I have nothing better to do than work on the business, I thought I would take an hour break and set up a case study on keyword generation for the hospitality industry. As you would have noticed, I have started to develop a taste for Bed & Breakfasts (or B&B, bed and breakfasts - as you want it!) so it seemed natural to use them as an example.

I am a bed and breakfast owner and want to increase my rankings on Google....

Background: Let's pretend I am about to get my website designed. I have found the Bed and Breakfast and Farmstay Queensland website www.bbfq.com.au and I quite like it. Let's go then!

1) don't reinvent the wheel, look at what your competitors and industry associations have done: in your browser, explore the "view source" option. Open the www.bbfq.com.au website, and look for the "source code". In Firefox, its under Edit --> Page source. A window will open with some rather odd looking characters and text, this is normal and its called HTML. What you are after is located in the very top. Look below in the image for the text highlighted in green. This is what you are after. What this actually is the main keywords defined by Bed and Breakfast and Farmstay Queensland.

Is your brain a thesaurus? Had you thought about all these keywords for bed and breakfast? Start a list, write them down, repeat this step with other bed and breakfast websites you would have found on Google, add your own and lets go to point 2)

2) There are specific keyword research tools that exist to help you find keywords. One that is very simple but free is www.thesaurus.com. You then are looking at specific search marketing tools like www.wordtracker.com. They are very powerful but might be a bit too daunting for the small and medium tourism business owner. One that I particularly like is http://tools.seobook.com/google-gadgets/#kw . For the term b&b under Google Synonyms it gives me

3) Onto more serious things now. This is overture's tool http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ and Google's very own keyword tool https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

If you look at the image below, you will see that I asked Google keyword tool to tell me what keywords were used in the www.bbfq.com.au site. Don't worry too much about the gauges for now, but if you would like more start educating yourself and read about keyword optimisation. Or contact us! Once these exported in a text file, I got this:

accommodation gold coast

accommodation nsw

accommodation gold coast

australian bed and breakfast

b &

b&b accommodation

b&b queensland

b&b's

barn bed and breakfast

beach accommodation

beach holidays

bed & breakfast

bed & breakfast accommodation

bed & breakfast queensland

bed and breakfast accommodation

bed and breakfast association

bed and breakfast barossa

bed and breakfast bondi

bed and breakfast brisbane

bed and breakfast deals

bed and breakfast inn

bed and breakfast nsw

bed and breakfast queensland

bed and breakfast vic

bed and breakfasts

bed and breakfasts queensland

brisbane b&b

brisbane hotel

cairns

cairns accommodation

cairns accommodation specials

cairns bed and breakfast

cairns hotel

cairns hotel accommodation

cairns hotels

cairns wedding

cheap accommodation cairns

cheap bed and breakfast

darwin b&b

darwin bed and breakfast

daylesford bed and breakfast

farm accommodation

farm accommodation queensland

farm cottage holidays

farm cottages

farm holidays

farm stay

farm stay brisbane

farm stay gold coast

farm stay qld

farm stay queensland

farm stays

farm stays brisbane

farmholidays

farmstay

farmstay accomodation

farmstay brisbane

farmstay gold coast

farmstay holidays

farmstay nsw

farmstay qld farmstay

queensland farmstay

south east queensland farmstay

warwick farmstays

farmstays nsw

farmstays queensland

gold coast holidays

gold coast hotels

great barrier reef

guesthouse

maleny farmstay

mooloolaba

mooloolaba accommodation

outback

qld accommodation

qld bed and breakfast

queensland accommodation

queensland bed breakfast

queensland farm stays

queensland outback

romantic accommodation

scone b&b

scone bed and breakfast

sunshine coast

sunshine coast accommodation

toowoomba b&b

tractor qld

whittlesea bed and breakfast

working farm holidays

working farm stays 

Are you starting to get the picture??? Now you can thesaurus each of these new keywords... and get more!

4) now that you have all these great keywords, you need to make sure you use them in your site. Choose the most appropriate ones for each page of your site (different ones to summarise the content), the keyword and description tags in the source code, your blogposts and content... Touch base with your web developer and search engine optimiser and ask them to optimise your site based on these keywords! After all, it is YOUR industry. Give the IT professionals as much info as you can about it and by working hand in hand you will be able to rank higher in Google and drive more traffic, and hopefully bookings to your site!

How do you know if your traffic has increased? Read my post about website analytics!