5 Things I Learned About the Future of Search | Google Marketing Live 2019

Every year Google Marketing Live is a showcase for the newest features, technology and direction of Google’s advertising platform. Marketers from across the globe listen in as the future direction of (digital) marketing unfolds over the 2 days of sessions. Google not only announces the newest features coming to Google search, display and more...they hint at trends and areas in which they think you should start investing your time, technology and money for more successful marketing. Here’s a quick list of the top things I learned about the future of search from Google’s Marketing Live 2019.

1. The Future of Search Marketing Is VisualPeople have shown their affinity towards image and video based platforms and formats from Youtube to Instagram, Facebook, Google Home Hub and more. Google understands this direction and understands that the future of search ads will also incorporate these media types.Gallery ads - Although in the past Google claimed they wouldn’t crowd the SERP with flashy banner ads for visuals, it looks like the engagement metrics for these types of ads are just too great to pass on. Available later this year, Gallery ads will offer a visual ad format that will be featured at the top of the search results page allowing up to 8 images with tag lines under each.Google Lens - Google search already includes this technology. You can simply click on the Google lens option in the search bar, snap a photo of an object and you will instantly get back search results with advertisements related to whatever you took a picture of.Image Search - What appears to be a page out of Pinterest’s book, Google is reimagining the image results page to incorporate shopping ads along with standard image results based on your search intent. Google has found yet another place to monetize the search results.
2. Understanding Language Matters For the Future of SearchGoogle’s search algorithm already depends on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning to advance itself. The shortcomings of AI have always been its ability to understand and pick up on the nuances of language. Google continues to advance its AI’s capabilities with language but understands growth in this area is where the future lies.Synonyms - Google search has evolved as the algorithm advances it’s understanding of language through synonyms. Google Ads is now matching up your exact match keywords with similar queries with a new match type called “Exact Match (close variance)” -keywords their machine thinks mean the same thing or have the same search intent. The future of search depends on the machine’s ability to understand these relationships in language and it’s definitely come a long way.Related queries - Depending on the purchase, the consumer journey can last through 100s of different touch points across dozens of websites, searches and more. Google understands these related query connections and that the next time you pick up your phone, the desire is to pick up where you left off in your search. Google wants to help you along this journey by allowing you to return to your previous search focus and provides the tools to do so. In the end, this means that Google will keep the user within the Google platform for a longer period of time, through more touch points and help them advance down the conversion funnel, allowing Google opportunities to monetize through each step of their journey.
3. Google Wants To Own (and monetize) The Entire FunnelNumerous times during Google Marketing Live 2019, presentations referenced how long and complex the consumer journey is. It is apparent that Google aims to own and monetize this entire consumer journey. Hotels have seen this for a long time with the evolution of the knowledge panel and Google Hotel ads. Google wants you to discover, shop, plan, engage and now purchase directly on the Google platform. Here’s a few ways they are doing this:Discovery ads - This new ad campaign type provides brands with the ability to reach consumers when they are open to discovering new things, ideas and more. They are rich, relevant and creative, with a swipe-able image carousel that will be available in the Youtube feed, Google home discovery feed and gmail.Youtube Bumper Ads - Google’s ever growing video advertising offering will now include a tool to automatically generate 6 second video ads in Google Ads with no additional production cost. It uses machine learning along with editing capability to produce 3-4, 6 second videos you can begin using immediately for video advertising.Paid Search Ads Evolution - Search has long been a channel where consumers begin and end their purchasing journey. Google is not only expanding ad types within this channel, they are improving capabilities for users to purchase hotels and travel (along with retail) directly through the search engine. Google is also introducing more and more audience types that allow advertisers to better speak directly to different types of consumers at different points during their buyer journey.Google Trips - The most notable travel specific presentation at Google Marketing Live 2019 was focused around Google’s announcement that they were making Google Trips functionality available on desktop (it’s been available on mobile for some time). Google Trips is Google’s move to own the entire trip discovery, planning, researching and booking phases for hotels, transportation, restaurants and flights. Google is funneling consumers down this path, making the competition and the importance of a well optimized Google My Business and Google Hotel Ads strategy even more essential.
4. Google Wants You to Focus On User Trust & Inclusive Marketing

In a move that I think is partially PR focused, Google stressed their focus and commitment to user trust, privacy and ability to control your own user data. What is important to take out of this is that Google and other search engines will continue to give more power and ability to users to control what data they share and how their data is used to personalize the advertisements they are presented. But, let’s face it, consumer trust goes hand in hand with a brand’s success. If they can’t trust your brand they won’t buy your products. Google wants you to continue to use and purchase their products. They also want your business and brand to take the same stance.

Privacy/security settings - Google is expanding it’s privacy and data security settings with new tools to give users more control as well as giving them more transparency on how data is used to personalize ads. The future of digital advertising seems to be trending towards less specific data as users take more control of how their data is used by advertisers. Be aware of how this impacts your ability to track conversions.

Focus on Inclusive Marketing - The world is a diverse place, and chances are, so is your brand’s audience. To be more successful in today’s world it’s important to portray your brand as inclusive of all genders, races etc. But, this MUST be at the core of your brand and not just a marketing gimmick. Develop ad creative that portrays inclusion messaging and that speaks directly to more specific and targeted audiences. https://insights.newscred.com/inclusive-marketing/

• Embrace Machine Learning

Google’s message to advertisers as more and more data is taken away by privacy laws and settings is that it’s replacing this data lost to privacy laws/security settings with more machine learning options. Data is going to continue to be taken away from marketers as consumers take greater control over their privacy and security settings. Google is telling marketers to counteract this with the help of machine learning.

Insights - Advanced features like smart bidding, uncovering learning the machines are generating and understanding your most valuable customer audiences can all be accomplished with machine learning. Embrace these insights to advance your campaign performance optimization.

Campaign management - Machine learning takes away mundane tasks like bid management and automates them so you can focus on the human element and ways to plan by customer instead of by channel.

Creative testing - Machine learning gives us the ability to automate and expand creative testing, giving us more ways to test and tell the brand story with the assets we already have. Responsive Search Ads, Responsive Display Ads and Youtube Bumper ads are just a few examples of this.

Measurement - Embrace machine learning to give you better ways to measure campaign impact and performance while protecting user privacy.

It’s really hard to fit in 2 days of learning and discoveries into a brief blog post but these are just a handful of the ideas, trends and technology Google announced for the future of it’s Google Marketing Platform. Embrace what the future brings, keep testing, keep tracking and keep strategizing.

Questions for what the future holds for your hotel digital marketing strategies? Reach out to GCommerce today!

3 Steps for Successful 2019 On-Page SEO For Hotel Websites

Over the years the mission statement for successful on-page SEO for hotel websites remains the same:

Make sure to follow best practices to position your website for the greatest chance of visibility in the SERP. Provide a superior user experience that is reflected through highly relevant content, well structured navigation with easy path to book.

Search engine optimization continues to evolve. Every year the nuances of the game changes slightly with new technical developments, new announcements or hints from Google and changing competition. Only brands and websites that continue to evaluate themselves against this mission statement and evolve to meet its demands will succeed. Don’t let your competitors push past you in the SERP to capture a larger share of the market. Make sure your hotel’s website is positioned for success with these straight forward, yet complex steps for on page search engine optimization.

Step 1:  Ensure Search Engines Can Access & Index Your Hotel’s Website

1. Check your meta tags and robots.txt file to ensure you’re not blocking the search engine’s ability to crawl important content on your site. If the search engines can’t crawl and index your page content chances are you’re not going to be as visible in the SERP as you could be.
2. Make Sure Your Site is Secure  - Google announced HTTPS as a ranking signal all the way back in 2014 (per this Google webmaster blog post). Then in 2018 Google started labeling sites as “Not Secure” in search results to warn (and scare away) potential visitors. If you haven’t transitioned your site to HTTPS, do it now.
3. Submit XML Sitemaps with Valid URLs to Search Engines - Log into your Search Console & Bing Webmaster Tools accounts and submit XML sitemaps that contain valid URLs. This provides an easy, accurate outline of pages and content that are important to the search engines directly. This helps to make sure your important pages are found, crawled and indexed.
4. Structured Data/Schema Markup - It’s not new (it was actually first launched by Bing, Google & Yahoo in 2011), but it’s something Google has been hinting at and talking about more as it relates to their ability to understand the content on your webpage. That means that pages that use structured data markup are able to provide a more easy to digest way for the search engines to understand their page content and match them up with relevant searches. Hint, Hint - that’s a big piece of how Google and other search engines rank your page. You can learn more here on our blog post about “What is Structured Data? A Guide for Hotels”.

Step 2: Create A Hotel Website With Content and Media That Deliver a Valuable and Relevant Experience for Users and Search Engines

Take a look at the SERP. How does your hotel’s website page compare to the top results? Does it provide a superior experience? Is it well optimized for your priority keywords?

1. Experiential Images & Video
   • Great imagery & visual content is important for travel sites. This seems like a no-brainer, but still important to call out. Number of images ranked 3rd in SearchMetric’s 2017 Ranking Factors for Travel, behind just word count and overall content relevance. It’s also important for conversion. Make sure your hotel’s website allows the visitor to truly experience what it will be like on property before they even arrive.
   • Make Sure Your Files Are Compressed - Page Speed is important - large media files take a long time to load. Ensure your beautiful imagery isn’t causing your site to load slowing. A slow loading site means the visitor may bounce before you even get a chance to show them your beautiful hotel images.
   • Optimized Alt Text - Not new, but still important. Make sure all images on your site have Alt Text that is descriptive of the image content AND contain keyword focus. 
2. Well Optimized Key SEO Elements 
   • I like to call these the foundational elements of on-page SEO. Make sure your page titles, meta descriptions, H1s, H2s etc are optimized for your priority keywords.
3. Richly Descriptive On-Page Copy - One foundational piece of SEO that has been important for years is on-page copy. This is one area where many hotel website miss the mark. Many times during development phases of a new website, content is overlooked or not given much thought. Many hotels simply scrape content from their previous website or just throw a few sentences on a page that don’t offer much value to visitors or search engines.
   • Substantial Text & Word Count Is Still Important - Most of the time a hotel’s website copy lacks substantial text and word count. According to SearchMetrics 2017 SEO Ranking Factors for Travel, word count is actually at the top of the list for importance/correlation to higher rankings. SearchMetric’s study found the #1 ranked page for hotel san francisco had a word count of 2,074. While there are many other factors that play into this rank, it shows the continued importance of on-page copy. Oh and don’t forget to incorporate keyword & semantic keyword usage throughout your copy.
4. Optimize for Voice Search - For the most part, hotel marketers should worry about an optimization strategy that encompasses all devices. While voice search shares ranking signals with other device types, there are a few ways to ensure your site is well optimized for potentially voice dictated searches. Below are a couple ways to ensure you’re optimized for voice search. You can learn more here on our last blog post about voice search for hotel websites.
   • FAQ pages - When people search with their voices, they tend to dictate in the form of a question. One essential way to optimize your site for searches that could be voice related is to set up an FAQ page. This FAQ page could include questions and answers about your hotel but it can also include questions about the local area - opening you up for exposure at the top of the marketing funnel, during consumers’ research phase.
   • Structured Data/Markup - similar to other device types, optimization of page content with structure data markup is very helpful for exposure in the SERP.

Step 3: Optimize Your Hotel Website for User Experience Across Devices

• [Page Speed] - Consider page speed the new “mobile” in terms of SEO focus. For years Google pushed marketers to be ready for mobile, then it transitioned to a mobile first index. This mobile first index includes page speed as a ranking signal as we reported in our last blost post about page speed for hotel websites. If you’re not making this a priority you’re website is going to fall behind. Fact is, if you’re not trying to improve your website speed you’re already losing out on conversions and revenue.
• [Device/Mobile Responsive] - Gone are the days of mobile specific websites. Google and other search engines recommend responsive design for smartphone-optimized websites. You want to optimize performance for the user’s journey across all devices, whether they are using a phone, tablet or desktop device.
• Clear & easy path to find important information and to book [Clear Path To Book] - well structured website navigation and a clear path to book for users is essential if you want to optimize for conversions. If visitors can’t find the information they are looking for they are going to leave your site and look elsewhere, like competitors sites and OTAs. Make their experience easy with well thought out linking, expansive and quality content and clear calls to action.

This roadmap for successful on-page SEO in 2019 is only a piece of the larger SEO puzzle. To be successful in the search engines your hotel has to establish a strong brand reputation that search engines can pick up on through a variety of ranking signals. These include other domains linking to your site (think local or national partners, events, community sites), social mentions and signals, and growing brand recognition through advertising on a variety of channels (social, paid search, TV and offline channels). To be successful in search engine results your job with SEO is never done. You must continue to update your site, expand your reach and grow your business’s reputation as a unique, valuable brand.

Was Your Hotel’s Website Impacted By Google’s April 2019 Indexing Bug?

What Was The Google Indexing Bug?

Announced by Search Engine Land, on April 4th, 2019, “Google dropped pages inadvertently pages from its search index”.  This means website pages that were previously displaying in Google’s search results were completely removed through no fault of the website’s. On April 7th Google confirmed they were aware of the issue and were actively working to resolve them.

As of April 10th Google confirmed that the indexing issue has now been fully resolved and pages that were affected had been returned to the index and were once again displaying in the search results.  

Why Does It Matter To My Hotel?

For most hotel websites, organic search engine traffic accounts for the majority of sessions and revenue produced through a hotel’s website. If your hotel’s website pages are completely removed from Google’s search results this can mean a loss in website traffic and revenue from your top online channel.

Was My Hotel’s Website Impacted?

According to Moz’s Dr. Pete Meyers, 4% of the URLs tracked by Moz’s platform were impacted from Google’s indexing bug. Google has not commented on what caused the error or exactly how many pages were impacted. Search Engine Land’s article further clarifies:

“Not every site was impacted by this de-indexing bug. So the 4% figure does not mean your site saw 4% of its pages drop out of the Google index. It can mean you saw zero pages drop out of the Google Index or it can mean you saw 50% of your pages drop out of the Google index. Each site is unique and each site can be impacted differently by this bug”.

GCommerce analyzed our clients’ website data and found that 53% of clients experienced a decline or drop in keyword ranking data during the indexing bug but only 19% of clients experienced an impact on organic sessions. The impact in organic sessions varied by client but in general were minimal declines.

What Can I Do If My Hotel’s Website Was Impacted?

At this point there’s not much that can be done through Google directly. Google has announced that they have resolved the issue and the index is accurate. Work with your hotel’s digital marketing agency to understand the impact and devise strategies to make up for lost traffic or exposure through other channels such as social, email or display campaigns to meet your revenue goals.

Please reach out to us if you have questions about Google’s April 2019 indexing bug and if it impacted your hotel’s website.

Why You Should Make Video Advertising a Priority in 2019

Video advertising is no longer an up and coming trend in the marketing world: it’s here and it’s already making a massive impact on consumer behavior.

What is video advertising?

Video advertising at a basic level is comprised of online display ads that use video instead of or alongside static images. However, in recent time video advertising has become more synonymous with video ads that play before, during, or after a video stream, such as on YouTube or Facebook.

Why is this important?

Video advertising has become the digital marketing trend in recent years, and it’s only expected to gain in popularity in 2019. According to a recent report by Wyzowl on video usage, 87% of businesses are now using video as a marketing tool, which is up from 81% in 2018 and 63% in 2017. Based on statistics alone, if you’re not using video in some form of marketing yet, you’re already behind.

So why is video advertising important, and more importantly, why should you be making this your priority for 2019? First and foremost, video is engaging. It draws in the attention of your audiences, sparks an emotion, and creates connection. Nowadays our apps and online experiences are clogged with static images advertising anything and everything causing the user to scroll monotonously past your ad without taking a second look. Seriously, think back to the last time you were scrolling through Instagram and Facebook. How many ads did you come across, and better yet, how many did you pause on? Could you recall the ads you saw? My guess is not very many if at all.

Enter video advertising, a disruption to our marketplace and re-engaging the user with entertaining content that is versatile and easy to digest. In fact, 96% of people say they’ve watched an informational video to learn more about a product or service, with 68% of people saying that it’s their preferred method of product and service learning. On top of that, 80% of users are able to recall a video ad they’ve viewed online in the past month.

Videos help explain products to consumers, and in a world full of choice, our consumers no longer need a sales pitch; that’s what a quick Google search is for. Instead our target audiences need to perceive value; why your hotel will provide a better experience than your competitor. And the easiest way to do this is through a sleek and compelling video.

How can your hotel start video advertising?

Earlier I said if you haven’t started using video you are already behind, however, it’s not too late to start! 74% of marketers not currently using video said they expect to start this year, and why not be part of that number? Video advertising doesn’t need to be complicated or take a lot of time.

There are many ways for your hotel to get started with video advertising. Whether you’re using video to tell your brand’s story, share a promotion, or showcase your beautiful property, there is a perfect way to utilize that. With Facebook and Instagram’s new live stream capabilities, you can easily start engaging with your social media followers by sharing the latest news at your property or even a weekend promotion. Uploading videos to YouTube is another way to capture an audience and will also give you the opportunity to create longer and more informational videos.

When you’re ready to start really advertising with video, the GCommerce team can help. Using video instead of static images in Facebook advertising will help catapult your ad reach and increase your impressions and clicks, thus leading to an increase in ROI. In fact, 96% say a video can help them make a purchasing decision. We can also serve your video ads programmatically, which is a type of advertising you probably see every day; think those video advertisements that play before or after any video content you are watching online. If your brand has a strong YouTube presence, you might consider running TrueView video ads, which targets people who have already interacted with your YouTube videos or are subscribed to your channel.

If you’re wondering how long your videos should be, here are some general guidelines:

• Instagram: 30 seconds
• Twitter: 45 seconds
• Facebook: 1 minute
• YouTube: 2 minutes

What we’ve learned so far at GCommerce.

At GCommerce we’ve been testing video ads with our clients in the forms of Facebook paid advertising, programmatic video advertising, and TrueView YouTube advertising, and we’ve learned some pretty compelling things.

First, when using video advertising on Facebook vs. a regular static ad, impressions tend to jump and overall site traffic increases. For example, let’s look at one of our clients, Sunset Marquis, who started running video ads with us on Facebook and programmatic display in mid-December. Using Google Analytics, we were able to see some impressive statistics. 70% of the Facebook sessions came from those video ads, as well as 90% of new users. To put that in perspective, that’s 3,946 new users to the website in just a few months! This not only increases site traffic, but also boosts our retargeting lists, which means we can then serve ads to those users, thus increasing their chance of booking at your hotel.

Second, we’ve seen click through rates soar! In the month of March alone, click through rate for Sunset Marquis video on Facebook was 133% higher than its regular, static prospecting campaign. For reference, the video campaign had a CTR of 3.03% vs 0.60%. On programmatic display, we see the same thing. Over the span of a few months our HTML 5 campaigns generated a CTR ranging from 0.079% - 0.136%, compared to the video ads that have received CTRs with a range of 0.25% - 0.32%, which is incredible!

So, what does this all mean for you and your hotel? Simply put, if you want to create more engagement and emotional attachment with your users, increase traffic to your site, and raise your click through rate, then you need to start video advertising. Video advertising allows your hotel to really showcase its values and brand to the consumer in a new and exciting way. Don’t get left behind and start utilizing video ads today!