Leveraging Google for Adventure Travel and Ecotourism Providers

If you’re an adventure travel company providing specialty trips and destinations, or offering sustainable eco-tourism deals, you don’t need me to tell you that you’re in a highly competitive, low-margin market.

That’s why it’s critical that you make a real effort to focus on marketing your travel as well as offering world-class travel deals. But most of the businesses we see in the field are “mom and pop” operations with few full-time staff members and owner/operators who would rather be in the field than manage a marketing effort.

How can you overcome this problem? Google to the rescue!

Google offers a wide variety of great tools that you can use for marketing intelligence and viral marketing. I’ll review some of the easiest to use and hopefully help you get ahead of your competition.

First, check out the simple and easy to use Google Alerts. With Alerts, you can set up automated search agents that will email you daily updates on any blog posts, website updates, news articles, or videos that contain keywords. The obvious choices are your business name, the names of your competitors, and your niche destinations or tour types. This will allow you to stay on top of the web as it relates to your business, and will allow you to stay on top of your competition’s marketing efforts and successes. You can also find great new places to spread your own messages, such as new forums, blogs, and web magazines that cover your specialties.

Next, upload your stuff to YouTube. It’s not just for bad guitarists and kids who fall off skateboards: you can post all kinds of great pictures from your travels and tours, and by judiciously writing keywords in descriptions and titles, find a whole new audience to listen to. may never have arrived. Create a YouTube home page with links to your website, information about your business, and build a community around your videos. Monitor and keep any comments on your videos in the topic, and answer any questions that come up.

Google Groups is another great place to see and be seen. You can start a group around your company, your destinations, or your unique travel deals. Or you can simply join groups of like-minded hobbyists who also enjoy “extreme beekeeping” (or whatever you’re into!) and become known as an expert on the subject. Use links to your website within your signature, without being nasty about it, and you’ll increase your credibility while associating your name with great keyword-driven content on a site that’s well-indexed by Google.

Google Local Business Center is a great tool that allows you to post information about your business in a yellow pages type format. You’d be surprised how much traffic these can generate for you, and it’s just common sense: why wouldn’t you list in this directory? It is easy, fast and free. You can also create coupon offers for those who find you on Local Business Center, so you can get a gauge of how well your web advertising is performing based on the number of coupons redeemed.

Finally, consider signing up for a Google Base account and adding your trips to the Events data type. You can upload a simple text file that you can create in Microsoft Excel or Notepad, and get all your trips indexed quickly. It might also help if, using Google APIs, any adventure travel partner sites or aggregators can display your listings and drive traffic to you.

These are just a few quick tips to help you make the most of Google’s powerful online marketing offerings. By harnessing the power of Google with your adventure travel website, you can watch your traffic (and business!) grow while you focus on what’s important to you: providing world-class travel and tourism opportunities for your customers.