The Hawaii vacations area of A1 Vacation Rentals.com recently dropped from Google's fifth search result to 55th.
The site, which promotes regional resorts, had been sending visitors who clicked on the results to its home page. After the dip, A1 began directing visitors to land on a site devoted to the region where the user wanted to travel. So now people looking for a Colorado ski vacation wind up on a Colorado resort's page.
That was a smart move, but there are still problems with the landing pages, said a panel running a clinic on ad copy and landing pages at the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York last month. The regional landing pages list resorts in alphabetical order in line after line of gray copy. There are no graphics, few links and sparse descriptions.
“Because these are expensive vacations, you might want to romance them a bit [in the copy],” said Lee Mills, media director at interactive marketing agency MEA Digital.
It's also a good idea to bid on individual resort names and locations on the search engines, advised Misty Locke, president of search marketing firm Range Online Media. And, she added, it would be helpful if specific resorts were hotlinked on the landing page. The only live links are to the resort locations.
The landing page for another resort site, Sandals.com, is attractive and well-organized, according to the panel, but where is the pricing information?
“There's two schools of thought on this,” said Mario Kuntz, Sandals' Web master. “We don't want to have the pricing information up high on the page because if they see it costs $400 a night per person before they read the content that explains the resort is all-inclusive, they'll be scared away.”
Another problem is that the 25% discount and the booking form are at the bottom of the page. The user has to scroll down to find them.
“On a travel site, people shop by price or date,” said an audience member.
At least move up the pricing information, agreed the rest of the panel.
A business-to-business site, ABC Leads.com, also buries important information at the bottom of its landing page.
The site provides mailing lists and leads for insurance marketers. It sells lists exclusively to one buyer and features discounted leads. This information and the pricing were at the bottom of a page too. “Exclusive” or “Discounted” should be in big letters at the top of the page, the panel said.
Add a telephone number at the top as well, says Mills.
“Even if people don't use the phone number, they like to know it's available.”
