With the industry of travel and tourism, it can be easy to get lost with thousands of agents for clients to choose from. Often times, potential clients will receive a thousand flyers that tend to stack up on their desk and starts to look like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. So, how can YOU stand out from all the others? It is simple, focus on online advertising.

Get Found Online
Younger generations are looking for travel online and are often booking directly. Agents need to start to become competitive within SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEO is used by websites, such as Google and Bing. When anyone types something into Google, such as “local travel agent” or “travel discounts”, these are noted as “keywords”. Google or Bing then loads websites associated with these keywords. The top performing websites (websites with the most site visits) will appear at the top of the search page. So, what does this mean for you?
Go ahead and take a minute to walk through a quick exercise:

• Visit Google and Bing
• Type in your agency name. Look at what comes up. Where are you located on the page? Are there other agencies listed that are not related to yours?
• Next, type in “travel agents in (insert city)”. What comes up now? Is your agency anywhere on there? How far down on the page are you?

After doing this exercise, you will be able to see where your company’s website is located within these search platforms. If you notice a lot of other agency websites, then it is possible that potential clients are clicking on their website as opposed to yours or they are not even seeing your website. So, how do you fix this?

One thing that you can do to fix this is by placing search ads. You can allocate money towards specific keywords that potential clients are searching. Although this requires money to place the ads, the ads provide statistics that will let you see the ROI (return on investment). For instance, you can place money towards the keyword “travel agents located in…”. This will increase the likelihood of a client clicking on your website, as opposed to others.

In order to buy search ads, you need to setup a Google Ads account or Bing Ads account.
This is the basic first step to standing out as an agent online. If there are any other topics about search ads or online advertising that you want us to talk about, then please feel free to send an email to us@agentworld.com