How to Use Search Marketing to Maximize Your Direct Booking Revenue [Video Series]

In Part 3 of our video series, Growing Revenue Through Direct Bookings, we take the research strategies from Part 2 on consumer demand, the competitive landscape, and your performance to date, and apply them to these 3 areas:

1. How to prioritize opportunities 
2. Paid search direct booking strategy 
3. Organic search direct booking strategy

The Economics to Unlock Acquisition to Gain that Direct Booking

There are 3 economics that have to work for any business to acquire customers.

These include:

1. The quality of the gross profit margin
2. The average order value 
3. The conversion rate on the business’s website.

The business that pays the most to acquire the customer will win, and it will be determined by these 3 above economics.

What Channels Should You Focus on to Reach Customers through Direct Bookings?

Whether it’s Youtube, Facebook, Tiktok, Instagram, or any other medium, you need to prioritize.

Ben share’s that you need to prioritize which channels to use using I-C-E as the way to decide where to focus.

1. Impact
2. Confidence
3. Ease

Assigning a score from 1-10 is a great way to sort these opportunities to find the best channels to utilize.

Paid Search Direct Booking Strategies

Three strategies to maximize spend on high intent targeting include:

1. Increase daily budgets
2. More aggressive bidding
3. Maximize impression share

Widen the Net

1. New keyword targets
2. New audiences
3. New campaign types

Local Ads

1. Drive map pack visibility
2. Optimize for calls and direction requests
3. Early adopter phase

See the example of local results to get a full understanding of how this looks.

Organic Search Direct Booking Strategies

1. Get into the Local Pack

Typically the Google My Business result is top ranking on Google.

• 46% of the searches are local 
• OTA’s can’t compete here so your business has an advantage! 
• Local Traffic Converts in this section of Google search   
• Often Impression #1 – Stack up your results by showing in both the paid and organic search results which can get you to #1 in search.

2. Find the Low Hanging SEO Fruit

You can rank for keywords, and you don’t have to compete with the top keywords in the Search Engine Results Pages to do so.

• Find high intent positions 5-11 and are high for intent to book.
• Find high volume, low competition keywords 
• Top Landing Page CTR improvements

See how tools like SEMRush can find these kinds of keyword opportunities for you.

Here are some ways you can find these low hanging fruit options:

 A. Map Queries to Landing Pages

Look for keyword opportunities that are relevant keywords for your product and category.

B. Find your Top Organic Pages

Data from Google Analytics is golden!

• Visit Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages
• Use a longer term (90 days) date range
• Add an advanced segment for “Organic Traffic”

C. Find Search Queries you are Visible for

Use Google Search Console to find this information.

• Visit Performance > Pages
• Use a longer term (90 days) date range
• Filter for the landing page URLs from Google Analytics
•  Look at the queries for this page

D. Optimize for Organic Clicks

Improve Title Tags for CTR. To do this, ensure you use:

• Natural Language
• USP
• Primary Keyword Theme 
• 65 Characters or Less

This video has given you a number of opportunities to maximize your direct bookings through using search marketing. 

Watch All The Videos In The Series

Part 1: Why Direct Bookings Fail and How to Change That

Part 2: Building a Search Marketing Plan Grounded in Real Data

Part 3: How to Use Search Marketing to Maximize Your Direct Booking Revenue

Part 4: Building an Actionable Social Media Plan

Part 5: Executing Your Social Media Direct Bookings Strategy

Part 6: Uncovering Opportunities on Your Website to Drive More Direct Bookings

Part 7: Top Tips For a Higher Converting Website 

See all of the Growing Revenue Through Direct Bookings series here.