Hidden Jewel 2009 – win a tailored tourism website

The stakes are higher than ever for this year’s OM4Tourism Hidden Jewel Awards, with one national winner set to take out one major prize.

The winner of the national Hidden Jewel Awards 2009 will receive a five-star website created by online tourism specialists, OM4Tourism.com

The judging panel will choose the winning entry based on answers to four questions submitted by small tourism operators from around the country.

This year’s entries will be subject to the scrutiny of five peer judges drawn from a cross-section of travel businesses and regions:

• Daniel Hackett won the national 2008 Hidden Jewel Award for his Tasmanian fly-fishing tours, Riverfly.
• Drew Bernhardt is General Manager of Cape Lodge, a hotel in the Margaret River region that was awarded Luxury Travel Magazine’s Best Boutique Hotel in Australia for 2009.
• Pip Chalk is Chair of Wildlife Tourism Australia, based in New South Wales.
• Phil Walcott manages the multi-award-winning Rainbow Connection – a resort hotel in Alice Springs, which took out the Northern Territory Hidden Jewel Award 2008. He is also Northern Territory Director of GALTA (Gay and Lesbian Tourism Australia).
• Liz Hatherley is Marketing Manager of the Great Escape Charter Company, which runs small-boat luxury cruises around the stunning Kimberley Coast and to the Rowley Shoals.

This year’s lucky Hidden Jewel winner will be able to choose to set up a brand new site, or have their existing one completely revamped and restructured for greater success.

Either way, they will get everything a small tourism business dreams of – a dedicated team to create an attention-grabbing site tailored to suit their unique needs.

Demand for OM4Tourism’s websites is growing rapidly among tourism operators looking for detailed attention to design, functionality and optimisation.

“Switching to an OM4 website has been the best business decision I’ve made over my five years of operating guided Tasmanian fly fishing trips,” said 2008 winner, Daniel Hackett.

“In 18 months, my OM4 website has generated five times the visitation rates of my previous website, which has been the key catalyst for substantial business growth in a competitive industry.”

The Hidden Jewel winner will also have access to OM4Tourism’s online education and resource centre, to enable them to maintain complete control over their own website.

The OM4Tourism Hidden Jewel Awards is now in its third year, and has provided recognition to smaller businesses that don’t have the resources to submit entries to state tourism awards.

“One of the benefits of these awards are the many jewels in the Australian tourism industry that otherwise remain hidden from the limelight,” said OM4Tourism Director, Glenn Nicholas.

“Yet it is often boutique accommodation or guided tours that visitors treasure most about their holiday. At OM4Tourism we believe in helping these important little gems compete in one of Australia’s largest and most exciting industries.”

To enter the Awards, tourism businesses simply answer four questions in less than 100 words each, and provide relevant links to pages on their existing website, or other websites that represent their business.

Timeline

The Awards are now open. Tourism businesses can find out more and register to enter the awards at this link: Hidden Jewel Registration

Entries must be received by midnight EST on Saturday 14 November 2009.

The Hidden Jewel winner for 2009 will be announced on Monday 30 November on the OM4Tourism website.

For more information, please contact:
Jane Hammond jane@om4.com.au
Glenn Nicholas glenn@om4.com.au

Announcing OM4Tourism Hidden Jewel Awards 2009

Judith said:

I am really happy to tell you that the majority of our business is coming in via the web site right now (plus most people are happy to pre-pay on the PayPal button) this is great!

This kind of message is music to my ears. Judith has a good search engine profile, and her strong reputation in Trip Advisor means she gets a steady stream of qualified visitors to her site. The addition of PayPal buttons to allow people to pay for tickets in advance was a simple but logical extension for her business.

Getting Business From Your Website

The Great Escape Charter Company - Kimberley and Rowley Shoals Cruises

Great Escape are a luxury cruise operator. If you haven’t seen the itinerary for cruises in this region, I suggest you check out two in particular:

• Great Escape’s Kimberley Cruises
• Great Escape’s Rowley Shoals Cruise and Dive Tours

I see these cruises and want to go on them!

For a tour operator like this, the website is a powerful tool for generating leads. And the way the website is structured has a powerful influence on how many website visitors convert to leads.

One of the most important elements of a lead generation website is that it needs to be very easy for someone to get in touch with you when they want to. You might think it is very easy to find the Contact page and fill out the contact form – but do your visitors see it the same way?

I’m in favour of making the enquiry form on a lead generation website very easy to find. Sometimes even to the point of having a few different options on the same page. Some people worry that duplicating contact options on a page might look odd to some visitors. Me, I worry that visitors might not find it easy enough.

Helitour launching from the MV Great Escape

With 5 active clients in the Kimberley now, I’m going to have to get my act together and head up there again. I was last in Broome back in 2000, when the Olympic torch relay went through town. And that is nearly a decade ago now, way too long between visits.

Converting Website Visitors to Leads

Lunch's Blog Post on Lake Eyre

In between organising tours on the Eyre Peninsula, Lunch arranged a trip up to Lake Eyre for some of his guests.

More importantly, he blogged about it on his site – you can read his post: Lake Eyre Tours and Safaris.

While Lunch’s post doesn’t rank #1 with Google, it is ranking on page 2 and sends a good stream of visitors to his website.

This example illustrates how useful a blog is for a tourism website – a short blog post might take only 15 to 30 minutes to publish (including photos), and can start attracting relevant visitors rapidly. And once you have blog-enabled website, it doesn’t cost you anything.

Consider the time and effort required to run an ad … and how well targetted it can be. The people that are searching for lake eyre tours, finding his post and coming to his site – they are pretty relevant visitors, you would have to say.

When you publish to your blog on a reasonably frequent basis, Google will index new posts very soon after you post them. So it is a great tool for getting your story out on a particular topic.

What events are coming up in your region that people will be searching for? When they are searching, do you want them to find you?

Time to do some more blog posts!

Visitors Flock to Lake Eyre

Many graphic designers outsource their web work to web developers who get that website up and running. The result is often stunning. Stunning, but if the web developer has not built the site to be search engine friendly it will not bring visitors to the site and won’t generate paying clients.

The most beautiful of websites can still be becalmed if the thinking behind the website is not informed by a clear understanding of how search engines work.

Online marketing requires more than a beautiful design. Effective web marketing starts at the very beginning of framing an online business and involves the architecture of the website itself. You need to understand your audience, how they search for you online and how to place yourself squarely in front of them.

Online marketing is not guess work. It is work, but it is the deliberate building of a product that is placed directly in front of a known market.

Web Designers Are Not Web Marketers

Geoff and Helen Turner wanted to launch a website that would help holiday home owners present their homes in a more personalised way.  They were also keen to show off the fabulous local attractions.

Ningaloo Reef Holidays - Ningaloo.net

Exmouth is right next to Ningaloo Reef. Visitors can snorkel on one of the world’s finest coral reefs, swim with whale sharks and relax looking over the sparkling waters of Turquoise Beach.

The site design is by Tracy Graffin – we love working with her designs, very fresh and accessible, and very responsive to Helen’s brief.

We got lucky with the domain name. While preparing the quote for Geoff and Helen I noticed that ningaloo.net had become available – a gem by the roadside – so I scooped it up just in case they wanted to use it …

I’m looking forward to hearing Helen and and Geoff’s stories about Exmouth via their blog.  If you are in the mood for a holiday or thinking about a redesign for your own website this is a site well worth the visit.

Reaching the Holiday Home Market

Steve and Anja Toms: Kakadu Tours

Two other posts talk about the Aboriginal seasons of Kakadu in a really informative way. Her most recent talks about Yegge and Aboriginal fire management.

This kind of blog post is powerfully effective for a tourism website. Anja is answering questions that are commonly raised by customers on her tours. By answering these questions using her blog, Anja is immediately tapping into topics of interest to her prospective customers. If someone is researching the Aboriginal seasons of Kakadu, there is a good chance they will find Anja’s post, and if they are doing this research because they are interested in visiting Kakadu … there you have it.

The search term ‘kakadu tours’ is a very competitive one. I think that with the approach Anja is taking her website could earn a strong ranking in this area over time. However, it is worth pointing out that you don’t have to get the #1 ranking on the key search term to have a very effective website. More and more searches involve 3, 4, 5 and more search terms. While ‘kakadu tours’ might be the single most popular term in this area, collectively there are a very large number of searches about kakadu tours that don’t use that term – instead they might use ‘kakadu tours families’ or ‘kakadu national parks tours’. Both of these are search terms that have led searchers to Anja’s site.

Time and again I’ve seen websites flourish when they use their blog to write broadly about their subject, and earn visits from an extraordinarily wide range of search terms. With focus some of those sites can go on to rank highly for the most competitive search terms in their field.

So have a look at Anja’s blog. For your own tourism blog, consider writing blog posts that answer the most common questions your visitors ask, and provide useful background information.

You’ll reap huge benefits from this simple strategy.

Blogging and Kakadu

Moombaki Wines, Denmark

The Moombaki winery is located in one of the most beautiful areas in the world (in my humble opinion). They also produce some of the finest wine in the country, with their Moombaki Reserve being rated a 95/100 by James Halliday and landing a coveted place in the Wine Companion’s Best of the Best 2009 in the Cabernet category.

The new website was designed by graphic designer Tracy Graffin. The design is elegantly simple (and if you’ve been involved in web design you’ll know that delivering to this standard is anything but simple).

A winery website has several important objectives:

• contribute to building the brand
• help find new visitors searching for regional and varietal wines
• allow visitors to buy wine (whether that be via the telephone, mail or online)

The Moombaki brand is beautifully presented and makes use of strong images – for example, each variety of wine has its own signature image which is presented on the wine label. To allow Tracy to implement the new design for Moombaki’s website, we introduced a new custom header feature allowing a custom header image to be assigned to specific pages, and also the ability to present custom images in the sidebar for certain pages. These features are now available to all OM4 websites.

Online Shop

If you look at the way wines are presented on the Moombaki site, you will first of all see the wine and be presented with information, reviews and awards. Simple Add to Cart buttons can be placed anywhere in the page (or in a blog post), which means it is possible to present the buying opportunity after the wine itself has been presented. Once the Add to Cart option is used, a small checkout appears in the sidebar, and stays with the visitor until they decide to check out. If you try the Moombaki shopping cart you will also notice the new Assurance Centre facility, introduced to help assure potential buyers that issues such as security, privacy and delivery have been considered and addressed.

Using the integrated shopping cart means the website retains a simple and elegant design for first time visitors without creating an impression that the website is primarily about selling. Naturally if the visitor expresses an interest in buying, then it is easy to do just that.

Consider the experience you have when you visit a cellar door – the first thing you are presented with is the wines. It is usually the case that only after the wine has been experienced that you are presented (discreetly) with an opportunity to buy the wines.

Selling a product or service online very much about engaging attention, building interest, generating desire and facilitating action. But taking away the barriers to action is of critical importance. Indeed where buying online is involved you should focus on this before anything else. I really like the way the Moombaki site has come together in this respect – the website clearly presents the wines, and when visitors are ready to buy, it is easy to select and purchase the wine. I’ll be keeping a close interest in how the website performs in terms of online sales.

Melissa Boughey and David Britten are not only good with grapes and wines, they are good with words. So it is going to be particularly interesting to watch what happens when the wonderful content they produce is presented to the world in a manner that is also search engine friendly.

A Winery Website with Distinctive Design

Araucaria Ecotours - Wildlife Tours ex Brisbane

Tour enquiry forms are at their best when they make it easy for visitors. Easy to understand what tour options are available, and easy to fill out the form.

Asking for too much information is not only unnecessary, you can easily turn people away. If the information isn’t essential, don’t ask for it until after you have the booking!

Your website should make it clear what tours are available, and your tour enquiry form can help reinforce that. Ronda has used two drop down lists to make it clear there are Day Tour options as well as Extended Tour options.

We’ve also found that adding enquiry forms to additional web pages (either customised tour enquiry forms like Ronda’s or even simple Contact Forms) can increase the number of enquiries. If people have a question forming in their mind, if you give them the opportunity to ask a question, they just might do it.

Increasing the number of tour enquiries from your website

Sunset Holiday Villas - Accommodation in Arthur River

For a tourism operator, a blog is a brilliant tool for building search engine profile. I use the analogy of a sailing ship, with each new blog post acting like a new sail, catching more wind and helping the ship sail faster.

If you would like to see a great tourism blog in action, have a look at some of these posts:

• Abalone Recipe from the Edge of the World
• Crayfish and Scuba Diving at Arthur River
• Arthur River Fly Fishing

The posts are short and to the point. They share something about the experiences on offer in Arthur River that is hard to find out elsewhere. I don’t know about you, but I want to try that Abalone!

And while the posts are great for people considering a visit to Arthur River, each post is a new web page in the eyes of the search engines, each attracting its own share of search engine visitors and building on the strength of the website as a whole.

If these seem like modest goals, they are. It is a gradual process building the profile of a website, and you don’t need to write like a rock star blogger to be effective in building your tourism business online.

Write regular posts like Dan and Sally are writing and the number of relevant visitors to your website will steadily improve. Blogs really work for tourism websites.

Great example of a tourism blog in action