Did you know that around 40% of adults use google voice search on their mobile every day (and the younger demographic even more)? 

Google also recognises where you are. So, if I do a voice search: "Where can I find a Mexican restaurant?", Google gives me the Mexican restaurants in Queenstown (as this is where I'm based).
Or: "What are the local walks?", Google gives me a list of websites where walks are listed. 

Voice search is growing at a fast pace and it's important and easy to optimise your website content for voice search.

Here are a few tips:

• Ask yourself: What would my customers ask google to find my business or want to know about my business?
• Add a FAQ page (frequently asked questions) to your site with the types of questions your customers would ask
• Use a conversational tone in your website content
• Longer phrases or questions are common, compared with the shorter searches in text search.
• People use voice search mainly for local content and information, so make sure your Google listing is up to date (opening hours too!) 
• Try out voice search to find similar businesses as yours and see what comes up!

Till next fortnight, Marijke

Do you use Google Images? I do! All the time.

As you know, images are a very powerful way to get your message across, especially if you sell a physical product or work in the tourism industry. Great images and fresh new images will keep your website or social media posts interesting to your audience.

Here are 3 ways to improve your Google ranking through images:
1. Optimise images for your website by:

• Reducing the file size to around 100kb – this way it loads fast. If you have very large image files, you’ll lose a lot of traffic. And Google will put you to the back of the queue too!
• Save the image with a description (rather than a number), for example a photo of the outside of a hotel should could have a description: Hotel ABC, Queenstown New Zealand.
  

First of all, I’d like to wish you a very happy, successful and healthy 2017! I hope you’ve had a great Christmas and New Year’s with friends and family. Many of you will be flat out with the tourist season and little time to do anything about marketing or planning for the new year, that will come a bit later.

For me, the start of the year is always about reviewing the past year and set my business and personal goals for the new year. I love doing this as it gives me direction for what I want to achieve.
In my opinion New Year’s resolutions are very much about changing your habits. Once something becomes a habit, it’s easy to stick to it.

My yearly planning week at the start of the year has been a habit for years now and it works for me and my business. It makes me feel in control about what I want to do this year and excited too!
I’m currently developing two new courses: ‘Starting your tourism business’ and ‘Growing your tourism business’. More info about these soon!

If you work in tourism, have a great summer season and take a little break every now and then!

Here’s this week’s tip:
Improve your search engine rankings by linking – and a nifty little tool!
Inbound links -these are other sites linking to your website- remain important your search engine optimisation. It’s important that these links are relevant. In other words, they need to be on websites that are relevant to your audience. Ideas for relevant websites:
-    Reciprocal links with related businesses (such as other tourism operators)
-    Industry directories
-    www.newzealand.com
-    Regional Tourism Organisation
etc.
Do you want to know which sites link to yours? You will probably know of most of them, but not all. Here’s a nifty little tool that will tell you exactly which websites link to yours: go to: https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/

Till next week and enjoy summer! (if you live in the Southern Hemisphere :), Marijke

Well, after doing some further research into Bing, this is what I've found out.

Here in NZ, search engine Bing is hardly used. As mentioned in last week’s article, it is however important to list your business so people in other countries can find you.

For example, in the United States, Bing has a market share of 22%! So if people are searching your business on Bing, you want to be there so they can find you!

Bing also has “Bing Places for Business”  (see: www.bingplaces.com) where you can list your business, its location on the map etc. Similar to “Google my Business”, which includes Google Places/Maps.

This service on Bing is however not available everywhere, and unfortunately not in New Zealand. Currently, Bing Places is used in United States, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, India, Italy, Mexico, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

Bing is however working on growing Bing Places to more countries, and their market share is slowly increasing too.

So, if the US is a large market for you, do ensure your business is listed on Bing - see last week’s article.

I’ll keep an eye on Bing Places and if it becomes available in New Zealand, I’ll let you know!

Till next week, Marijke

 Bing is a web search engine owned and operated by Microsoft. Bing also powers Yahoo! search.

Even though Bing isn’t as big as Google, it’s still very important your website can be found on Bing as a significant percentage of people use Bing as their search engine.  It’s is the default search engine when you use Microsoft software.

Who uses Bing?

Well, more people than you may think! I’ve researched statistics, and the most reliable ones were the US statistics. To give you an idea, in the US, around 30% of people use Bing and Yahoo, the remaining majority use Google.

Bing searchers are for the most part 35+ in age and commonly within the 55-64 age bracket. Bing users generally less tech savvy.

Some people get really annoyed with the tracking that Google does (with ads following you everywhere) and therefore use Bing. In China, people can’t use Google but they can use Bing!
So, you need to make sure your website appears on Bing.

It will only take a few seconds to submit your domain name (website address) to Bing, and it’s free. Click on the link below to register:
http://www.bing.com/toolbox/submit-site-url 

Next week, we'll look at how to make the most of Bing for your business.

Marijke