The answers to your TripAdvisor questions!

I was lucky to be invited as a speaker at New Zealand's e-tourism conference last week. I was even more excited when I read that Jim Brody, TripAdvisor's very own Destination Marketing International Sales manager was going to be there and I would be able to hang out with him (and pick his brain to death).

Now, for those of you who have met me you would have experienced the enthusiasm I have for making sure you all reap the benefits of well-managed TripAdvisor reviews! Over the past 3 years I have personally trained over 3,000 of you in online marketing and in every workshop I have held there are always questions on how to best respond to TripAdvisor reviews.

Some of these questions are pretty straight forward to answer but a few required a little more research. Jim Brody was blissfully unaware when I boarded my plane for Auckland that I had a list of TripAdvisor questions with his name on it! These are the questions and his answers:

Question 1: Changing your TripAdvisor sub category

I have often been asked if it is possible to change your sub category (e.g. from Speciality Lodging into Hotel) and if so how to do it? Those who have tried will know that there isn't such functionality in your TripAdvisor management account.

However, it is indeed possible! The best way to do it is not to email TripAdvisor themselves but contact your regional or state tourism organisation's digital marketing department. They will be able to confirm to TripAdvisor that your request is genuine and the change will happen. How good is that?

Question 2: For tours and attractions

Here is another tricky one I have been asked over the past 2 years, especially by tour operators:
"I tried to list my business as an attraction but I got rejected because I am also promoting local accommodation providers on my website".
Has this happened to you? If so you would have been listed as a "resource" which doesn't allow you to get reviews. Well, good news on that front as well. TripAdvisor is now more relaxed with this and allows tours with accommodation pages to be listed as attractions and therefore benefit from reviews. Again contact your regional or state tourism organisation's digital marketing team and ask them to put your request forward to Jim and his team.

Question 3: How about the paid business listing?

• Fabie: "Jim, what about your Paid option to allow your businesses to list their phone numbers, address and web address? How is that going?".
• Jim: "Amazingly well, we have had an overwhelming success".

Now you can interpret that however you like, but this is what we have found.
There are a range of benefits such as:

• Put your property one click or call away from 1,000s of potential guests searching your area

• Add your contact information (phone, website address, and e-mail) to the top of your listing page

• Create a special offer which will be seen on the first page of your local hotel search results and in e-mails to TripAdvisor members

We suggest you consider buying a business listing then using Google Analytics to determine the increased revenue the listing is generating for you business. There is no long-term commitment so you can pay monthly then after you have collected a few months worth of visits in Google Analytics reassess the impact on your bookings. It may seem costly but it can certainly prove beneficial and you can test its value by the goals you set in Google Analytics. If it adds more value than it costs, keep it. If not, scrap it!

Also, don't forget that inbound links from TripAdvisor are NoFollow! So while it is logical to think such a link would be incredibly beneficial, it actually won't help your search rankings! To find out more, check out TripAdvisor defends link policy on Business Listings, not search engine-friendly.

That's it for this TripAdvisor update. Do you think one of your friends in the business might benefit from it? Make sure you let them know about this blog post!

Have you got your pen strategy down pat?

I won't leave you though without reminding you that TripAdvisor reviews appear on your Google Places listing right at the top of Google.

Do you have a strategy in place to ask your clients to review you on TripAdvisor (what I call the Pen strategy) and is it proving to be a good income earner? If not contact me and our team at UntangleMyWeb.com will get it underway for you.

Trust us, we know what works and what doesn't! And we now know Jim ;-)
Until next time (look out for my next email, I have got a really big announcement to make)
- Fabie