Marcel Lee Pereira: Tell us about Wotif's search marketing strategy.
Matthew Varley is Wotif Group's executive general manager for online marketing. Matthew Varley: Wotif.com’s search marketing strategy revolves around driving qualified traffic to Wotif.com. The two key words are "qualified" and "traffic". Many people want to be number 1 on Google for a specific generic term like "hotels". We take a much more specific approach, by focusing on achieving impressive rankings on many keywords that are more likely to convert into a hotel booking. This combines the long-tail approach with internal data to make informed decisions.
Pereira: Why is search marketing done in-house instead of outsourced? What are the pros and cons of going in-house?
Varley: Our search marketing is done in-house for many reasons. The main drivers behind the decision are:
- Vertical specific knowledge and intellectual property
Working consistently in a specific vertical like travel allows you to immerse yourself not only in the search marketing side of the business, but also to be familiar with the core of the vertical. For example, travel is a seasonal industry, where one destination is in higher demand from a certain demographic at a certain time of the year. Knowing this, and tailoring a search marketing strategy around this knowledge is very powerful. On the flipside, agencies working across multiple verticals can bring learnings across from more competitive industries, however they will never know your vertical the way you do.
- Passion
The internal culture of Wotif.com is very passionate, with the core focus on delivering great deals to our customers. Our search team is surrounded by brand managers, an IT department and our customer service centre, all of which share their knowledge and passion for creating a leading online accommodation brand. Having an in-house search team also helps when evangelising SEO across the company, and factoring it in the important decisions of the company.
Pereira: How important is search marketing to you in relation to other forms of digital marketing?
Varley: Search marketing is a major part of Wotif.com’s online marketing strategy with organic (SEO) and paid (SEM) marketing used to drive traffic. We take a diversified approach to our online marketing and also use affiliate marketing, email marketing and social media exposure as other important tactics. Search marketing complements our offline marketing (PR and advertising) so that it all works together in an integrated offline/online approach. Search marketing is completely measurable so it is easy to instantly assess effectiveness and immediately respond and adapt where changes are necessary. In the highly competitive and fast-moving online accommodation industry, having search marketing effectively working for Wotif.com is extremely important.
Pereira: How does Wotif’s search marketing strategy differ from other travel search sites?
Varley: Wotif.com has more than 11,900 properties directly offering deals from 45 countries and this broad range of hotels allows us to cover more destinations as search terms. In addition, our strong brand and reputation, together with strong ad creative allow us to stand out from the crowd.
Pereira: From the conception of your search marketing plan till today, how has the site’s traffic developed, and what are the significant milestones that you have seen in driving traffic?
Varley: We have seen outstanding improvement in our site traffic. A major milestone was the redevelopment of our organic search pages to be more friendly to the search bots. This organic traffic does not rise overnight and takes a long time to build, and by optimising these pages years ago we have built up the strong organic traffic that our site enjoys today. Paid search traffic can give your site traffic an instant kick but it is limited to the amount you are willing to pay for each click. The combination of these two search marketing techniques provide a balanced strategy and has helped Wotif.com’s traffic consistently grow year on year.
Marcel Lee Pereira is editor of iMedia Connection Asia.
