Every search engine marketing company needs flagship rankings. Since Clay Cazier, CEO of Zerobased, has extensive experience in the travel vertical, what better keyword target than “Hotel Reservations”. With over 1,000,000 searches per month and 38,000,000 web pages competing for the top results, this keyword is among the toughest online.
The project began with a standard travel affiliate database - the same one available to tens of thousands of sites already online. These databases offer partners the opportunity to book hotels through their reservation system at a 4 to 6 percent revenue share. (Comparable to Amazon.com but with much, much higher average sale amounts.) Simply posting a homepage with links to these properties wouldn’t be enough to get good rankings… there had to be a marketing hook. Simple, CSS-based design is it. While all the other contenders in the market place are using blinking banners and clutter to make the sale, HotelReservations.cc would differentiate itself with simplicity. This would also follow our SEO principle that, often, “less is more” in keyword targeting and optimization. So, with an established hotel inventory provider, solid design and marketing, the project began.
MSN.com/Live.com (the easiest search algo to crack) was the first to fall, yielding top 10 rankings for “Hotel Reservations” and “Hotel Reservation” within weeks.
Google.com is the ultimate target. It has been surprisingly cooperative, yielding rankings as high as #2 for “Hotel Reservations” but, more often, #13 seems to be the point of equilibrium for this site within its algo. Evaluate, optimize, grow is our mantra. #13 isn’t a bad place to begin optimization round 2, with revenue already growing from the site’s initial rankings success.
Interestingly, Yahoo.com and Ask.com have been slower to give rankings. What has been achieved is an interesting contribution to this case study, though. Working with a hotel database is all about doing new things with the same old content. So, instead of posting the Reservation FAQs to a page named “FAQ”, copying and pasting the provider’s content, the whole of the FAQ was re-written and published under the keyword-sensitive title “Hotel Reservation Service”. This phrase has gained rankings in Yahoo.com and Ask.com.
Conclusions are evolving, but point to the importance of careful market analysis in program development + the fundamental need for good keyword research and unique content. This remains a project that is in progress.
September 14th, 2008 by ZeroBased
