Cruise Geek

If your website were a store, would it be located on a dead end street or in a major mall?  The way you promote your site has everything to do with how many people visit your site each month.  This week's topic is building traffic to your individual website. 
Each month we post traffic reports to the BC telling you how many unique visitors have come to your site and how many pages they have viewed. A separate report outlines the website traffic generated from CruiseClick. If you haven't seen these reports lately, it's time to revisit the stats and get a handle on how many people know you exist online. Find these BC reports by searching on the term Website Traffic on the BC.

Now when looking at these reports, think about how many people are visiting your site month and then divide by 4 to break that down by weekly or divide by 30 to get a daily number. When analyzing the number of visitors each day, you’re probably feeling like you should do more to drive more business to your site. Here are 4 simple things that will help you increase your traffic to your site :

1. Collect email addresses from everyone you speak to over the phone or in person. Even most seniors have email addresses – and collecting emails and asking to add them to your weekly esaver list is the top way to build a loyal base of clients who visit your website regularly.

2. Make sure you’re listed on Local search engines. Google Local, Yahoo Local and Bing Local all are leading sources of local business – insure you’re listed using your subdomained CruiseOne or Cruises Inc web address in order to be indexed by these search engines. Please note, this is one place an alternate domain name actually hurts you – so don’t list it here…use your subdomained address in local search submission forms. So for example http://Jdoe.cruiseone.dot com is the way your address should be listed and indexed in local search engines. Submission forms for local search engines and online yellow page sites are on the BC under Marketing > Ecommerce > Advertising > Free Listings.

3. Consumer Reviews of your business help your relevancy in local search – get positive reviews and your position will move up the page and your listing will be displayed in a wider area…have happy customers? Send them to Insider Pages to rate your business and you’ll benefit on multiple search engines…one word of advice – don’t rate your own site – your IP address is recorded and search sites penalize those who submit their own reviews.

4. Want another way to drive relevant traffic to your site? Consider a local search ad campaign on Google Adwords. We have more info on doing this under Marketing > Ecommerce > Advertising.

Evidently iPhone is feeling the heat.... After Google's recent release of the Droid operating system for mobile phones and it's recent announcement that it was getting into the mobile phone business with it's new Nexus One phone. These moves have Apple investigating a new search relationship with Microsoft in order to use Bing as the default search partner on the iPhone (Apple currently defaults to Google).

Apple has stated that they feel somewhat uncomfortable with the type of competitive info Google has from iPhone users who are using Google search, and I can understand their concern, but I never imagined that concern would lead to Apple and Microsoft co-operating. Kind of makes you wonder if the Mac vs PC commercials will continue.

Seeing two major giants like Apple and Google slug it out in the mobile search market should help any marketer realize the growing role of both mobile and local search marketing in the future of online marketing. Mobile is where it's at....and getting listed in local search has never been more important.

Here are a few important links for those engaged is getting their business listed locally :

Google Local Business Center
Bing Local Search Center
Yahoo Local Listings

CruiseOne and Cruises Inc Franchisees can get a a complete list of important local links on the Business Center - just use the BC Search Term "Free Listings"