Tourism Talk - April 2017

upcomingeventsUpcoming Events

2017 TIANB Annual Summit Update
 May 23 & May 24

Countdown to the Summit... 

Updates:

Summit Early Bird Registration  -   Deadline - April 28
Accommodation Booking -       Book soon to ensure room availability!
TIANB Scholarship application -   Deadline April 28
Tourism Award Nomination's  -   Deadline for nominations - April 28
Marketplace opportunities -     Sign up today 6 more spaces available!

InthenewsIn the News
 
"Hotel sales transactions hit $4.1 billion last year, Colliers International Hotels said Thursday, but the company expects that figure to decline to $3 billion in 2017.
"The low Canadian dollar, the outflow of Chinese capital, hospitality assets' generally higher yield, and hotels' strong operating performance are increasing liquidity in the market," said Alam Pirani, executive managing director of hotels for Colliers."
tourismtechnologyTourism Technology

Your Definitive Guide to SEO 

What is SEO?
On August 6, 1991, the  world's first website was launched. Over the years, as more and more websites were added to the Internet, there came a need for Search Engines to collect and categorise all this content and make it easy for people to find.

From a single website in 1991 to over 1.1 billion today, the ability to be seen in this endless wave of data is challenging to say the least. And you must be seen for your business to survive.

Enter SEO. Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO for short, is the process of getting traffic from search engine results pages without the need to pay for each result. Sounds like a good notion, doesn't it? These results are also referred to as organic search results.

How does it work?

How does your website get to the search engine, which in turn displays it to the end-user? A quick explanation...

Google (or any search engine you're using) has a crawler (bot/spider) that goes out and gathers information about all the content they can find on the Internet (including your website). It does this by following links it finds to ... everywhere. The crawler then brings all this data back to the search engine to build an Index. That index is then fed through an algorithm that tries to match all that data with the search terms that the end-user has searched for.

Why is SEO important?

On average, the top 5 search results on Google receive nearly 68% of all search
traffic . Positions 6-10 receive just shy of 4% of the clicks. That's a big drop-off, and leaves the websites on all remaining search result pages to compete for just 28% of the searchers.

For example, if you search "Moncton hotels" in Google, as of this writing, there are 308,000 results. With 10 organic results on each Google page, if your website doesn't appear on page 1, you're battling with 307,990 other websites for just 28% of that search traffic. (For your information, only 2 of the top 10 results were for specific hotels in Moncton! This is an opportunity for someone...)

Quality is king on the Internet today. You won't get favourable search results unless you have quality content. However, if you've achieved this much, using SEO can help bump you up and over your competition onto page 1, or better, the top 5 results. That's why SEO is important.

What's next?

Put up a website, someone finds you in their search results, you gain a new customer. That's what we want, but it's not always that easy. You need to optimise your website so that it will be displayed at the right time, and at an optimal location.

In our next two newsletter issues, we'll be looking at ways you can optimise your website to achieve better search result rankings as well as improve your end-user experience. Stay tuned.

Jason Farris is the Technology Resource Coordinator for TIANB. He is available for questions, training, and workshops on a variety of technology-related topics. Contact him by phone (1-800-668-5313) or email ( [email protected] ).

 
trainingandprogramsTraining and Programs
About The Canada-NB Job Grant

TIANB would like to invite its members to take advantage from the Canada-NB Job Grant and increase their return on Investment (ROI) by more than 160%. The Canada-NB Job Grant is an employer driven program that invests in the skills development and employment needs of the workforce. Employers determine what training is needed, who participates and which provider will deliver the training. The Canada-NB Job Grant Program is part of the Canada Job Fund Agreement. The Canada-NB Job Grant program is an employer driven program that invests in the skills development and employment needs of the workforce. Governments' contribution is for two-thirds of the eligible training costs, up to a maximum of $10,000 per training participant, per fiscal year. The employer pays a minimum of one-third of the eligible training costs.

 
TourismtipsTourism Tips

Did you know...
that 98% of dissatisfied customers do not complain... they just leave. Dissatisfied customers will take their business elsewhere. The average company loses 10% of its customers each year. It costs at least five times more to replace an existing customer than to keep them satisfied. The failure to retain customers is a barrier to decreasing costs, increasing your customer base, increasing your market penetration and increasing revenue and profits. The primary cause of customer dissatisfaction is your failure to deliver the "Perfect Order" every time, from.....your customer's point of view. 

To learn more about TIANB's customized training programs Call 1-800-668-5313

upcomingtrainingprogramsUpcoming Training Programs
Responsible Beverage training course.
(Now available on line.)

For more details contact:
 
Phone: 506-458-5646
e-mail - j [email protected]