Yesterday, we released an extensive study measuring the natural search engine visibility of the twelve major travel companies in the Fortune 500, and sought to answer the following three questions:
1) How visible are Fortune 500 travel companies in the natural search results of the major search engines? 2) Does leadership in the traditional marketplace translate to leadership in natural
search visibility? 3) What strategies can Fortune 500 travel companies implement to improve natural search visibility?
Analysis was based on visibility in five major engines: AOL, Ask,
Google, MSN, and Yahoo. A wide range of keywords were used, covering travel agencies, airlines, vacations, hotels, resorts and other travel-related information, and scoring was weighted by the
relative search frequency of each term. For this comparative set, researchers focused on broad terms, non-localized terms, and non-branded terms to ensure as little bias as possible.
Overall, we found that the majority of Fortune 500 travel companies are doing an adequate job in terms of achieving natural search visibility, and these companies have paid at least some
attention to their natural search presence. Based on the overall brand scorecard results, all 12 Fortune 500 travel companies appeared in the natural search results for the target set. But overall,
none of these companies broke into the Top 20 sites of this competitive travel keyword space.
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The companies analyzed in this study included the major U.S. airlines, along with such key
brands as Hilton Hotels, Harrah's Entertainment, MGM Mirage, Marriott International, and Starwood Hotels and Resorts.
Among the findings, the research revealed the following:
Search visibility was relative to Fortune 500 rank. Coincidentally, the relative size of the company related to its natural search visibility score. Plenty of room for
improvement. Most of the measured sites did not have an optimum level of visibility, compared to other Web properties on the overall list. Age of domain a factor. Older
domains were a common factor among high-performing sites; these sites are considered to have a higher level of trust and quality attributed to them by search engines. Quality, not
quantity. F500 travel companies with many distinct domains did not necessarily do better than those with fewer domains, which revealed that: Copycatting was apparent, sometimes to
the detriment of natural visibility. In a few cases, major players used the same CMS, the same platform, and/or the same architecture. If one of these elements was not search-friendly, then
each of these competitors would be at an equal disadvantage in the search results. Airlines beat out hotels in the keyword set. Online agencies had the highest presence in the
study, while airlines bested hotels in the Fortune 500 space. The Top 100 also included 14 travel-related info sites such as About.com, three general information sites such as Wikipedia, three
vacation rental sites, and one movie site, the Internet Movie Database. Based on these results, here are a few recommendations for those companies interested in gaining share in the natural
search space for broad travel terms:
Reevaluate competitive keyword sets and recognize other highly visible companies as direct competitors in the keyword space. Creating a
few focused Web sites may work better than creating a number of fragmented sites under different domains. When developing new natural search strategies, conduct in-depth and focused
research on the strategies and tactics of the leaders in your relative keyword space. Avoid copying traditional leaders without understanding the full implications on search presence.
Instead, ensure that all adopted strategies are search-friendly Avoid going the micro-site route. Instead, build up site equity by hosting specialized content on the main domain.
