As you know, internet marketing strategies are constantly changing. Two of the largest players in the industry, Google and Facebook, have recently announced some changes that may impact your Vacation Rental business.
First, Google has put some focus around changes and things that they consider important. Recently at SMX Advanced Talk, Google’s Gary Illyes who is a Web Trend Analyst, provided some indication of Google’s key initiatives:
- First, remember back in the day that authorship could still add rank for content, especially for longer, more complex articles or blog posts? That has ended. You can and should remove authorship markup tabs from your website. If this doesn’t mean anything to you, then you probably don’t need to worry about it.
- Google is very focused on AMP or Accelerated Mobile Project. This is an open source project whose primary goal is to streamline the speed and accessibility of content through mobile devices. There is a short video here that explains their intent. Illyes specifically said that this is something that webmasters should be doing something about in the next year and it is going to be big. So time to have a conversation with your internet marketing provider.
- Google is going create its own smart phone mobile-only index. So mobile phone indexing will be different than the current shared index for desktop and mobile devices. The best thing to do here is to make sure that your company’s internet marketing strategy is completely mobile friendly. Last warning on this!
- Finally, have you heard of RankBrain? It is the third most important ranking tool that Google uses. It is a machine learning, artificial intelligence system that Google confirmed late last year. This intelligence system will actually spend its offline hours “learning” about the possible searches that you or I could have entered and the possible content that Google could have offered up. Other than suggesting you go and watch the Terminator movies, I don’t have much to add here.
What’s happening then with our trusted friend Facebook? Well, a couple of weeks ago while you were all ramping up for the busy season, Facebook made an announcement that essentially means that the Facebook user will see less promotional content (even if they Like your business page) and more videos of puppies doing cute things. Users rejoice! For you business owners out there, things with Facebook just got a bit more complicated. Facebook specifically mentions these examples of being too “pushy”:
- Posts that push people to buy something or download an app
- Posts that ask people to enter a promotion or giveaway with no context
- Posts that reuse the same content as an Ad
Facebook offers lots of suggestions for how business owners can use Facebook more effectively here.
Having said all of the above, what really continues to be important is to create engaging and relevant content on your blog and in your Facebook posts that will connect with your best customers.
