Written for the Occupancy Marketing blog

When we started discussing the March newsletter I realised that two of the newsletter ideas were quite closely tied together – the idea of marketing a niche term and the other side of that, the odd terms that sites unintentionally show up for. Whenever we look into an analytics account we start to find unrelated terms that people have used to get to the site that make almost no sense – sometimes they are funny, sometimes they are just odd. Here are a few from Occupancy Marketing’s own Analytics account

– “a slide show icon” – weird.
– “automatically turn it off for very slow connections” – turn what off?!
– “is mark jenkins the hotel single” – pass.
– “disgruntled employee writes on tripadvisor” – seen it.
– “graph of gym membership” – probably peaks in January, right?
– “hat” – ?!
– “how to cheat tripadvisor” and “how to influence the rating tripadvisor hotel” – best try a different site for those kinds of shady searches!

That was fun… but there’s a point to this too. After the main brand, target and client names are removed from your Analytics account you begin to see “long tail” terms that may be worthwhile including in your site; these terms are potentially helping you to identify a niche for your site to expand into. Here are a few from our site:

Technical terms, especially users looking for definitions ranging from “what is look to book” all the way to “links what are they” and “can you link one website to another”. The new Occupancy site will have a definitions area designed to instruct users on what these terms mean.

SOS searches and tips, especially “how to increase occupancy in hotel”,”how to increase guest house occupancy”, “marketing tips to get a hotel out of recession”, “how hotels respond on recession” and “hotel marketing tips”. Many of these terms are already covered on our site but the number of searches has definitely brought to our attention the need for tips and solutions for smaller hotels.

Archaic terms, e.g. “web 2.0 for hotels” – almost by design this site tries not to use older, “untrendy” terms but we shouldn’t forget terms that our users might still be using, even if they’re “so last year”!

Augmented Reality (AR) terms – this one was a bit of a surprise as 40+ visits to the site last year were about augmented reality marketing despite there being only one page on the site about the Blipp AR tool . The level of traffic suggests we need to revisit this old blog post and expand on other AR marketing methods.

Most people Google themselves so a review of our site’s Analytics keywords wouldn’t be complete without checking out who the most popular members of our team are. In rank order:

– Mark: Managing Director
– Chris: Head of Account Management
– Murdo: Head of Internet Marketing
– Hester: Account Manager
– Mark’s brother: weird!
– Lynne: Account Manager
– Craig: Head of Team 3
– Willa: Internet Marketing Analyst
– Rich: Senior Internet Marketing Analyst
– Benji: Account Manager
– Dougie (spelt incorrectly): Head of Team 3