Local Search By Abby Heft September 12, 2012 Tags: Apple Maps, Mobile, Mobile Travel, local search, Google Maps, online marketing, hotel online marketing

The New Apple Maps is Coming! Is Your Hotel Ready?

This Fall, Apple is kicking Google Maps to the curb and replacing it with the new Apple Maps. Currently, Apple mobile products (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch) use Google Maps, but with limited functionality (no turn-by-turn directions!). Google Maps has always worked best on Android devices, so Apple has decided to develop their own maps program to take full advantage of their mobile devices. So take that Google!

Apple Maps will be launched on its mobile devices later this Fall with the next iOS 6 software update and your hotel needs to be prepared! The map will soon be integrated into every Apple mobile device and if your hotel listing doesn't show up in local searches, you'll be missing out on a large segment of potential guests. Considering iPads and iPhones are the top devices for mobile browsing in 2012, according to NetApplications, this mobile search platform cannot be ignored for local businesses.

According to Apple, the new maps and local search includes information for over 100 million businesses with info cards that offer Yelp ratings, reviews, available deals and photos. With that in mind, not only should we be paying attention to our Yelp listings in preparation of this launch, but there are a few other places to check as well.

Here is how to optimize your business listing on Apple Maps

Time to pay attention to Yelp

Yelp has been a major player with Apple since the launch of Siri. For example, when an iPhone user asks Siri to find a sushi restaurant nearby, Siri typically shows results based on number of reviews and star rating on Yelp. This will still be the case with Siri, but these ratings and reviews will also be integrated into searches on Apple Maps. Your Yelp ratings and information will populate your business listing on these maps, so be sure your hotel looks great! Make sure your business name, address and phone number are correct and be sure to respond to any recent negative reviews. Business information and business owner responses can be updated through Yelp for Business Owners.

Check your business listing on Acxiom

Apple Maps will be pulling business listing information from Acxiom as well. You can check your listing on Acxiom for free, but there is currently a fee to make any updates. To check your listing on Acxiom, go to mybusinesslistingmanager.com, click through Learn More, click Get Started and search for your hotel by the phone number.

This will bring up your business listing information:

Update Acxiom Listings

If your business listing is correct, you're done! If your business name, address or phone number is incorrect, you can claim your listing and make updates through the Acxiom Business Listings service.

Check your Business Listing on Localeze

Localeze supplies business information to a wide range of local search sites, including Yahoo!, Bing, MapQuest and soon...Apple Maps. Updating a business listing in Localeze is similar to Acxiom. You can search for your Localeze listing by business name of phone number here.

Update your business on Localeze

From here, you can View Listing and you will have the option to claim your business listing to make any necessary updates

Updating businesses on Localeze

In Summary

To ensure your hotel is optimized on Apple Maps and for local search across the web, your NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) needs to be identical across all online channels. These three items should be identical down to the letter. For example, if you have "Street" spelled out in your address in half your listings, don't have it abbreviated as "St" in the remaining half. This will not only prepare your business for Apple Maps, but will ultimately benefit your hotel's overall online marketing campaign.

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Local Search By Kim Leveque September 29, 2011 Tags: local search, Google Maps

Boost Your Google Places Page

Google is the Search Engine King

Either you live under a rock or don’t own a computer if you’ve never heard of Google. Since you are reading this blog it is safe to assume you know and probably use Google daily. Google Places is a primary resource for local searches, and Places pages are key to helping hotels (and local businesses in general) rank better on Google. Everyone wants to be at the top of the search results for keywords in their industry; it’s where all the action is! Over 50% of all clicks go to the first four organic results on a page, and nearly 70% of searchers don’t even click on the second page.

How to Optimize Your Google Places Page

Every local business has the opportunity to create or claim a Place Page, and there are several factors that influence ranking. From our experience, and the general consensus among various other experts, is that the following factors can have some of the greatest impact on local search rankings:

Physical address of the business in the city that's being searched
Has the Google Places listing been claimed and verified by the business owner?
Is the business associated with relevant categories?
Volume of traditional structured citations (Internet Yellow Pages, Data Aggregators, etc.)
Crawlable business name and address match info on Google Places listing

Is Your Business Name the Same?

Google’s goal is to provide searchers with the most relevant and trusted results. An important best practice in optimizing for Google Places listings is to ensure the business name, address and telephone number are correct on the Places page and match what's listed on the business's website verbatim. This means that if your address on your website spells out the word "Street" you should not list your address as "St" on Google Places. Providing a link to the actual business website is necessary. As search engine spiders crawl the Places page and read the link to the business page it will pull the meta-description into the blended organic search results. The listing on the search results page will then display even more information: the title tag, link, meta description, address/phone number and even reviews.

Fill in the Blanks

Optimize the Google Places page by filling in as much information as possible. A more complete page will help it rank higher than lesser-filled Places pages. When filling in descriptions be sure to use specialized keywords a searcher may be entering to find your business. The categories are just as important. For example, with a hotel you would want to enter all facets of the hospitality industry beyond being a hotel/motel. Categories such as wedding venue, meeting space, and conference venue are extremely relevant and will help your business appear in the search results of those targeted keywords.

Review Your Reviews

Another important section of Google’s local search-blended results page is the reviews. Google will pull in reviews from several other local search sites in addition to reviews left on the Google Place Page. On the results page at the bottom of the listing, reviews from sites like TripAdvisor, Priceline and Yelp (just to name a few) will appear along with the number of reviews per site. It is extremely crucial to have your business listed on these local search sites. The more reviews a business has, the higher it tends to rank on the results page (particularly if the majority are positive reviews).

The Evolution of Google’s Local Search

Just a year ago the 7-Pack (local listings next to a map on Google's organic listings) was replaced by the Places page and a floating map to the right of the results page. Now Google Places "local" results blend in with the organic listings when conducting geocentric searches (ie, "New York hotels"). By claiming and optimizing the Places page, more information is able to pull into the results and thus help the business rank higher on the page.

It will be interesting to see what Google does next with Local Search. Now that Google+ has been released, it will definitely be a game changer. Searchers will soon find their own networks recommending businesses within the results page; creating yet another factor that will influence the rankings of results on a more personalized level. Plus, Google is crafting another opportunity for a business to create a brand page on the Google+ social network. Local search is ever evolving, so make sure you are staying current on the trends and continually optimizing your listing to boost it to the top of the results page.

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Local Search By Dustin Caromano July 29, 2011 Tags: Google Maps, OTAs, hotel online marketing, Google, SEO

The New Google Hotel Finder Breaks Boundaries or Creates New Ones

That’s right folks – Google released a new product on July 28th that specifically targets the travel industry! Once upon a time, if you were looking to find a hotel for your business travel or family vacation, you might have used Google Maps in order to research your most ideal destination or hotel room rates.

Google Hotel Finder helps users find their perfect hotel

With the release of Google’s Hotel Finder, it looks like those days are over since it has so many great features that are simply not available when using Google Maps. Not to mention, it’s only in Google's “experiment” stage and I’m sure they will be improving and adding to this worthwhile tool very soon.

What makes this tool more useful than a previous site used by consumers?

Define your ideal location – View the map and draw shapes around neighborhoods or large areas in which you are considering your stay.
Easy comparison – View numerous hotels in one tab without having to navigate back and forth across multiple pages.
Narrow down your choices – Easy one-click access allows you to add desirable hotels to a shortlist.
Compare rates – Current price is compared against the average price the hotel offers and against other hotels.

Want to begin narrowing down your search? It all starts with the filter.

On the upper left corner of the tool is the filter section where you can:

Search by U.S. city or zipcode - You can filter even further by drawing a shape (the best feature in my honest opinion)
Dates
Price
Hotel Class & User Rating

When you enter a city into the location filter, a map with a boundary shape is created to target hotels in this area.

If you wish to edit this shape to target a smaller or larger area, simply click on the edit shape button and a larger map image will appear to the right of the filter.

From here, I can drag any of the 4 points to create an entirely new shape that may more closely fit my desired area.

All the hotels within this area are shown with a blue dot. Iif a hotel has been added to your shortlist it will turn into a red dot.

Alright, so you’ve narrowed down your area – now it’s time to compare hotels!

Once you’ve specified the exact location you are wishing to stay in, you can start comparing hotels. A list of hotels within this area is created featuring information about:

Hotel name and short description
Hotel class
Hotel rating
Price per night
Compared to typical

From here a user can click on a hotel and discover even more information about the hotel including:

A longer description from the owner
More hotel images
Address, telephone and hotel website
Review information - Ability to view all reviews by clinking link
Ability to add to your shortlist
Option to book your stay at the hotel - Drop down will display link to hotel website and any OTA’s where hotel is offering room nights.

Hotel’s that have their price per night listed will also have information about how their current rate compares to its typical price. In the case of the Four Seasons Hotel Chicago, their current price is 50% higher than normal.

How are hotels ranked in Google Hotel Finder?

It appears that the hotels are naturally ranked based on their user rating score. Those with a higher rating are located at the top of the search regardless of star rating, price or value. You do have the ability to filter your results by hotel class, price or value if you wish.

What does this mean for hotels?

This application allows users to do all of their hotel research from one site. They can narrow down their search based on location, price, value, reviews, hotel description and imagery all from Google Hotel Finder, saving travelers both time and energy.

Because the search results naturally favor user rating, it is important for hotels to push consumers who have had a great guest experience at their hotel to review their property, as it will help boost their ranking in Google Hotel Finder.

Currently, Google does not offer any sort of sponsored or advertising options for those hotels who wish to pay to rank higher, but I expect this to come in the near future, so keep your eyes peeled!

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Local Search By Matt Bitzer February 22, 2011 Tags: Google Maps, OTAs, hotel online marketing, Google, local search

Hotel Rates Now Featured in Google Maps and What It Means for Hoteliers

If you are a hotelier then you may be aware of Google's recent experiment listing hotel rates in Google Maps. Many a General Manager has lost sleep thinking about how price-conscious customers can easily scan the room rates presented by major OTAs in each hotel's listing within Google Maps. Not only can consumers compare prices across all hotels in a given region, but within each hotel listing they can easily compare room rates for a single hotel offered across different sites, including OTAs.

Hotel listings in Google Maps

Here's an example of how the new feature works in Google:

Conduct a search in Google for hotels in a specific geographic region (for example, I chose "hotels in Chicago").
All Google searches that have a specific geographic modifier (ie, Chicago) should display the familiar Google Map box in the upper-right corner of the results.
Clicking the map box will take you to the Google Places listings, the new source of online marketing panic for hoteliers. At the very least, by now hotel owners should have claimed and fully optimized their local business listing to capture customers conducting these kinds of local searches.
From here you will notice a few things. First, above the left column of hotel listings is a check-in/check-out field that allows the user to modify the dates of their stay. This allows for greater convenience once the users click on a specific rate as I'll explain later. Second, you will discover that to the right of the bold, underlined hotel name in each listing is a price with a drop-down arrow. That displayed price is the cheapest price Google was able to pull from its list of hotel rate providers as identified in the next bullet point. As usual, clicking on the hotel name itself opens a speech bubble on the Google map itself, presenting both the location of the selected hotel and additional Google Places information for that property.
Click the price link and you'll see a list of 5 total sites, composed of 4 OTAs and--at the bottom--the hotel's official website. Hotelier heart attack #1 comes from the realization that their hotel's official website is listed at the very bottom of the list of OTAs. Hotelier heart attack #2 comes from the fact that their official brand listing doesn't even offer the room rate.
Clicking any of the OTAs in the price drop-down takes the user straight to that hotel's specific page within the OTA website. Fortunately for consumers, by adding the check-in/check-out fields at the top of the listings, Google makes it easy to purchase at each site by passing the selected dates over to the selected OTA. Unfortunately for hotels, these selected dates are not currently passed through to the hotel's official website.
Once the consumer has made their decision on which site to book, they simply click the price/site they want, get taken to their selected site and begin the booking process.

Why are hotels concerned about the new Google Maps hotel pricing feature?

Competing with OTAs - As if hotels didn't already have enough of a love/hate relationship with online travel agencies, now Google has placed the major OTAs and the official hotel on the same playing field, with price being the only factor differentiating the listings from one another. This is great for budget-conscious, brand-agnostic travelers, but reduces the hotel's competitive advantage down to a price-based one.
Pay to play with Google - Regardless of whether you are a Hilton, Marriott, Starwood or independent hotel, chances are your official brand pricing isn't being displayed like they are for the OTAs. Google hasn't revealed their full plans for how hotels will be able to list their official website's room rates, but most likely this advertising will come at an additional cost to hotels.
No pass-through dates for official hotel website - Unlike the OTA listings within Google Maps, which pass the selected check-in/check-out dates through to the OTA site, this data is not passed through should users decide to select the official hotel website. In this instance, even if a customer entered data into the check-in fields on the Google Maps page, they will then have to reenter the dates again on the official hotel website. It's a small inconvenience, but the online world is measured in microseconds and even the smallest conveniences can make or break an online purchase. It's unclear if this will be available as a paid feature for hotel listings, but it's unclear if this will even be possible considering each brand's reservation systems likely require unique Google to pass the date information through in a different way. For Google to accommodate each brand's unique reservations system may simply be to cumbersome to execute.
Brand-Agnostic Deal Shoppers - Google's new feature has effectively reduced the initial hotel purchasing decision down to a price-based one. In a list of potential accommodations, hoteliers fear the budget-conscious traveler will happily sway from one brand to the next in search of the better deal; And Google is more than happy to accommodate. Hoteliers see the new pricing feature as a means of placing all hotels on the same, level playing field, differentiated only by the rate of their rooms.

What does this mean for hotels?

No impact on organic SEO rankings - The good news is that regardless of whether or not hotels pay to have their official website rates listed, this decision will have no impact on the organic search rankings of hotel within Google. In fact, earlier this year Google made the following statement about the new hotel pricing feature, allaying some concerns from hoteliers that all their organic SEO efforts were for naught:
"This new feature will not change the way that hotels are ranked in Google Maps. Google Maps ranks business listings based on their relevance to the search terms entered, along with geographic distance (where indicated) and other factors, regardless of whether there is an associated price."
Deja Vu 2.0? - Hotels have already see this price comparison feature before in Kayak and Bing Travel, both of which make it easy for customers to enter specific cities and dates and compare rates across many different sites, including OTAs and the official hotel websites. These sites may not have generated the amount of traffic hotels typically see from Google, but they are major players in the travel world, particularly when consumers are conducting their travel research. Yet despite these travel aggregator sites, hotels have survived. These sites are part of the ever-evolving online travel world and they are not going away. Hotels can either complain that things aren't the way they used to be when everyone booked directly through the hotel website, or discover other marketing channels (like social media) and provide greater value through their official hotel website.
Price vs Value - While Google's new feature does make it incredibly easy to compare hotels to competitor hotels (as well as compare pricing offered between different OTAs for a single hotel), it assumes that all travelers are brand-agnostic, price-driven shoppers, with no interest in value. Sure, it's difficult to overlook a lower priced offering, but most travelers won't simply book a hotel room based on price without first doing some due diligence. In competing with other hotels in the area, things like value-driven specials and offers, compelling professional photography, inviting website copy and brand loyalty programs all help to sway the potential guest in your favor, often in spite of a higher room rate. In competing with OTAs, hotels should offer special packages on their official websites that add value to the guest's stay, above what the OTA can provide.
Explore other channels - No business should ever be too reliant on a single marketing channel for all its revenue. Sure, Google provides a wealth of revenue for many hotels, but a comprehensive marketing plan should include more than just search traffic. Is you hotel expanding its influence through social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Yelp and others? Are you participating in email marketing? What other ways is your online marketing campaign generating revenue for your hotel? Google's new hotel rate feature will indeed change the way hotels compete for their customers' business on Google. But other strategies should be in place to ensure that this one channel won't make or break your business's online revenue stream.

Hotels need to be aware of this new Google Maps room rate feature and how it will impact their business. While hotels aren't happy to have to pay to play in Google's expanding advertising game, it's the same game that everyone has to play. And considering hotels have benefited from the revenue generated through Google's free organic listings for years, it seems a small price to pay for that benefit. Google has integrated this feature as a way of helping consumers navigate the cumbersome process of conducting online travel research and it will change the way consumers plan their travels. Hotels need to ensure that they are providing a real value that differentiates them from their competitors beyond price, and should continue to look to other channels, such as social networking, as a way to diversify their online revenue channels. The online travel world is always in a state of flux, and Google's new feature is just one in an ongoing list of new technologies and sites that will change the way hotels interact with consumers online. Hoteliers need to be prepared for these changes and should know how to use these new technologies to their benefit, rather than simply lamenting about the good ol' days when everyone booked through the official hotel websites.

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