Posts Tagged ‘Google Maps’
Google, Not sure why They need to Advertise on the Superbowl
You would think Google has already won. Why advertise?
But, perhaps they feel nervous with Microsoft’s Bing being advertised so much as an alternative search engine. So far, Bing has seemed pretty flat to me. What do you think?
At any rate, I liked the ad. You would have to wonder what you would say in an ad about Google. This one is really touching on function, emotion, tells a story and all the time make the product clear. It might even educate people about new features such as translation. Hard to believe, but many people may not yet know how to find things with Map Search…. is that possible.
Here’s Google’s Ad – ‘Parisian Love’
I liked it! Well done Google.
Tags: Google Maps
Central Motel in Port Fairy gets a Website Makeover
Peter and Linda from the Central Motel in Port Fairy recently engaged us to give their old website a makeover. The usual goals:
- Make a Good Presentation of their Accommodation, Central Motel is an attractive accommodation with a great location in Port Fairy. It was easy to make improvements to the old website simply using new images and layout.
- Improve Search Engine Results, keywords like Great Ocean Road and Port Fairy have been emphasized along with basic terms like accommodation and motel.
- A Flexible Website that can be easily Managed, we’ve used BurgundySky again to make this website as it consistently provides great results. We’ve used Google Maps, embedded video hosted on YouTube and Online Booking to simplify sales.
At the same time we updated their website, we also looked at inbound links, additional sales channels and opportunities to improve online bookings.
Tags: accommodation, BurgundySky CMS, Google Maps, motel, SEO, websites, YouTube
New Website for Bear Gully Coastal Cottages
I’ve been working with Jill Butterfield, owner of Bear Gully Coastal Cottages in Walkerville Victoria for many years. I’ve always been fascinated by her business because it looks like such a nice place to stay. Recently Jill mentioned that she was feeling the impact of the ‘economic slowdown’.
Jill went to a Travel Show in Sydney and had the devil of a time with agents because none of them knew the geography of Victoria well enough to understand where she’s located. If I wasn’t in this business, I wouldn’t know either. Bear Gully Coastal Cottages are located between Walkerville and Cape Liptrap. They are beach front on the Waratah Bay looking across the water to Wilsons Promontory. The Region is known as Gippsland.
In fact, Wilsons Promontory is an amazing National Park on a peninsula that is Australia’s Southern Most Point (not including Tasmania or other islands). It is about 2 1/2 hours by car from Melbourne. It is one of those Australian Destinations that is spectacular, amazingly beautiful, pristine nature, etc, etc. But, few people know about it.
Finding one of these great places can make for a very rewarding holiday. Figuring out how to do the marketing to get found is a nightmare. Jill has done all the right things: featured in travel shows like Getaways, spreads in newspapers and travel magazines and she’s won Victorian Tourism Awards for excellence.
So, our mission is to build a website and Internet Marketing process that will attract people to this little known destination and make them aware of Bear Gully and all that it has to offer. That will include a new website, linking and marketing strategies and a Pay-per-Click campaign with a small budget.
Tags: accommodation, BurgundySky CMS, Google Maps, holiday houses, Victoria
Google Favourite Places and User Reviews
Google…. these guys never stop coming up with new stuff. Now, they have something new called Google Favourite Places. In fact, this could have a really big impact on business as it places easy to reach user reviews at the door step of every business.
It ties together being in a physical location, smart mobile phones and user reviews. Naturally, it loops into Google Maps and Local Business Centre as well with a liberal does on general net-connectivity in your pocket.
The video does a pretty good job of explaining. You’ll apply for a placard through Google Local Business Centre. The placard will have a barcode and manual code to make it fast and simple for the smart phone to bring up your reviews. You will (hopefully) read favourable things about the business and want to enter.
One could also assume that Coupons that can be added to your Local Business Listing would also be accessible. Therefore, someone standing on a corn with 4 restaurants would not only be able to see reviews, menus, pricing – they would also be able to access a coupon that would offer them special advantages such as discounts or extra services.
TripAdvisor and other Reviews:
At the moment, it would appear that Google likes a few review services. For Accommodation, they always include TripAdvisor reviews. ATDW has also created a document called ‘Tutorial 29 – Customer Reviews And TripAdvisor‘. So, more than ever – we need to start following what people are saying about us. It’s not always easy and it’s not always fair, but like it or not User Reviews will begin to affect your business.
How will Google Favourite Places affect Australian Accommodation?
Clearly Google is not moving as fast locally here in Australia as they are in California. Do we have the smart phones and connectivity to do all that – I would say yes. The number of Smart Phone users will only increase (dramatically).
Still, we need to get the Placards and we might find that Google does not issue them outside of select regions.
Are you safe from bad reviews if you don’t display a placard??? Of course not. Anyone can make reviews now. Anyone can find these reviews now. The placard just makes it easy and by logically assumption the confidence to display a placard must also mean the business is confident that their customers are getting good value.
Hmmm…. Good Service is important.
Tags: Google Favourite Places, Google Local Business Centre, Google Maps, internet enabled mobile phones, Mobile Search, TripAdvisor
Convergence of Moblie Phones, Car Navigation and Internet
Clearly, when you get total convergence of Mobile Phones, GPS, Highspeed Internet, quality Internet knowledge databases that link together with real time information – you’ll have a very powerful device. Something that will truly change the way we do things. As you might guess – Google is busy setting the stage with their new Android development platform.
Already, it’s pretty unusual to look for a pay phone to make a call or to look for services and phone numbers in the Yellow Page paper directory. All of a sudden, things just slip out of use without much fanfare until you hear an announcement like Kodak will stop making film for cameras.
Living in Australia, we get a glimpse of changes happening in other places thru the Internet. Unfortunately, we don’t always get to use these cool new services because the infrastructure and demographics of Australia don’t always support change. But, sometimes it does and sometimes by watching development unfold in other places we can get prepared ahead of the competition.
Google’s Android Phone System will lead to some interesting new phones with amazing convergence. Looks like Google will give a lot of technology away for free as they always do and that Android more of an operating system and open source style network than a specific product.
Here’s an example of what it will do:
Our focus is Accommodation Marketing. As you can see this Android phone will have a big impact upon how people find accommodation as these phones replace maps, guide books like Lonely Planet and NRMA.
I can easily imagine driving from Melbourne to Adelaide and asking the car computer to suggest places I can stop in a 1/2 an hour. The phone would look at my location, travel direction and speed to judge where I could stop for food, and a night’s sleep. How do service providers develop or optimise their presentation to get maximum results?
It all sounds so ‘Star Trek’, but at the same time as networks get faster and the organization of information gets better – it is a progression that make sense and will arrive.
Of course, Apple’s iPhone will offer options, and Microsoft will try to develop something off the back of Bing. But, Google looks like a juggernaut that will be hard to stop. The fact that Android is being developed as an Open Source project that will feed into phones from suppliers like Nokia, Samsung and all the others is very compelling. That should lead to an amazing array of products and services coming from a broad community.
So far so good. Google has brought me so many really cool new services and features. Looking forward to Android and all the changes.
Beam Me Up Scotty!
Tags: Android Phones, Google Maps, Mobile Search
How to create a “My Map” in Google Maps
I came across this today while looking for something else – How to create a “My Map” in Google Maps. The purpose of MyMaps is to make it easy to create personal content related to Google Maps. In the video, they show examples of making a walking tour of San Francisco.
In the accommodation industry there would be a lot of ways a map could be useful – walking trails, tourism features, pictures of the area, recommended restaurants, etc. The possibilities are limitless.
But, what’s the point? Why bother doing that when you could do other things? Is it better to create things that are made public, or keep them private for our own personal use?
- Better Ranking in Regular Google Maps – Recently, I uploaded a MyMap for Golden Chain Motels. I uploaded the location of every Member with some images, links to the Member’s Page on Golden Chain Motels website and a link to make a booking with a source id to tell us when the booking came from Google Maps. The result was surprising. We started getting bookings and we noticed the Motels seemed to show up higher in ranking for their individual search results.
- Interesting User Content – it seems pretty clear that we can upload some interesting material that can later be linked to our websites. That’s always good. While we want to rank high and sell more – we also want to create a good impression.
Have a look at the video to see how easy it is>
Let me know if you make anything with this because it would be interesting to highlight examples.
Tags: Google Local Business Centre, Google Maps, SEO
Google Maps and Google Real Estate
I recently came across a new development in Local Search from Google to highlight Real Estate Searches where you can see both Houses for Sale and Houses for Rent. It is a very powerful tool and it has the potential to change the way people look for Real Estate.
Google has something called Google Base where they are developing general and vertical search markets to sell products. They have a vertical called Google Base for Real Estate. Thru Google Base, you can upload listings to their maps. Many big databases like HomeHound and RealEstate.com are already uploading content to Google now; so many Real Estate agents are displayed in results today and probably don’t even realize it.
What’s this got to do with Accommodation?
Well, I would guess that there are a number of vertical markets that Google will target and Travel is very obviously of interest. Microsoft’s search engine Bing targets travel with suggestions for flights and accommodation – all linked to their travel services and others that pay for placement in results.
Access to sell through Bing will probably go through channels that many small accommodation providers won’t typically use such as Expedia. Perhaps Wotif or others will also make deals to display their content.
Will Google maintain it’s unbiased results? Are search results meant to display the most relevant content or the content that makes the search engine money? I suspect Google will not blatantly get into sales – at least I hope not.
Google Base and Google’s Local Business Center give small businesses tools add their content to results. So they won’t be excluded if they don’t use listing services, but naturally this means business owners need to stay on top of what is happening.
There are options now to add Travel Packages to Google Base. Packages are different than a general accommodation listing because they have an expiry date and must be constantly updated. There are a number of ways to maintain updates. I haven’t seen them show up in general search results, but it will happen. For now, I’m waiting to see results.
I’ll keep a look out for anything new with Google Base. It is a sleeper that may pop up with new challenges that we should watch carefully.
Tags: Google Base, Google Local Business Centre, Google Maps, Real Estate
Accommodation Search on a BlackBerry Mobile Phone
More and more, our customers carry phones with powerful Internet capability with Google Search, Google Maps and the ability to view websites. Match that with GPS and you have the ability to quickly and easily find services around you, or at any specified destination, in the palm of your hand.
Accommodation Search on my BlackBerry phone
In my case, I have a BlackBerry, but you’ll get the same capability with an IPhone, and many other web enabled mobile phones. I would expect you’ll see the same linkage from car navigation systems soon, but to my knowledge it’s not available in Australia yet.
With my BlackBerry, I open a Google Maps application and set it to ‘my location’. Then, I see a blinking dot that shows my position to within a couple of metres. My Location moves as I move.
Next, I Search for “Motel”, or “Pizza”, and all businesses normally found in Google Maps are displayed with red dots on my phone screen. Like any Google Locality Search, there are 10 dots displayed; each has an info bubble with address, phone number, reviews, links to website. I can zoom in and out and I can click to view the next 10 results. In this case, I’ve searched generally for ‘Motels in Murwillumbah‘ and found Poinciana Motel in Murwillumbah.
Mobile Phones have an added feature because any phone number is like a hyper link – just click it and the phone rings the business.
So, you can quickly find what you want, see the location, read a review and then click to call.
How Can You Optomize Your Website to Display on Mobile Search Results?
Google gives businesses powerful tools to manage their listing on Google Maps via the Local Business Centre. If you have a locality based business, you should immediately update your listing in Google’s Local Business Centre. It is a very powerful tool to improve search results.
-
- Accommodation Search on my BlackBerry phone
-
- Display Phone Numbers, Website Links and More
-
- Google Maps Search for “Motels in Murwillumbah”
Tags: BlackBerry, Google Local Business Centre, Google Maps, internet enabled mobile phones, Iphones, Mobile Search