(SEO Take Off www.beuniquegroup.com)

Auditing can be a healthy tool for boosting your brands online presence in competitive times. In this blog I will explain 2 key methods of auditing SEO in the airline industry in order to get a better understanding of your brands search engine positioning and to learn what is important in boosting visibility and search engine rankings.

1.Traffic overview

Websites such as SEMRush allow users to view and analyse airline carriers traffic online. The free service highlights:

• Volume and Variability of Traffic
• Top Organic Keywords
• Competing Websites
• Domain Positioning

This tool can be used to weigh up a firms position against others in search engine rankings, and give a view on their market position. It can also highlight trends with volume of traffic and now gone digital – word of mouth advertising. In 2009 Trusov, M et al highlight that ‘outbound word of mouth can be precisely tracked’ which allows firms to follow how they are being shared, who is sharing and precisely what they are saying. This can help a firm develop key words which will boost their search engine rankings. It terms of Airline Carriers this information can be crucial as it also helps them spot trends and forecast hot destinations or locations. A great video which highlights this is >>HERE<<.

Firms with high organic search rates tend to top search engines as they are likely to be what the consumer is looking for. Other than that paid searches also turn up at the top of the page when your search has keywords that may relate to the product or service. What is important for a smaller firm with low rankings is to ensure that they use key and distinctive keywords to what they are providing in order to reach a higher ranking. A great blog post with more information regarding this is Steve Webb’s How to Perform the Worlds Greatest SEO Audit.

(Internet Traffic www.lifehacker.com.au)

2.SERP Appearance

SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page which are the pages in search engines which display your search queries. A study was done in 2010 by SEO-Hacker founder Sean Patrick Si which studied the amount of click-throughs pages received throughout a search engine. He found that ‘11th to 20th results get far less clicks compared to the 1st to 10th.’ He concluded that ‘around 90% of the whole word population only look at the first page result.’ SERP Appearance is important as it can be a make or break for your business. Here are some quick ways you can audit SERP appearance from Search Engine Land in 2014:

First, do a search!

Search your Brand Name and then Brand Name and it’s Location.

-Does your domain appear? Is it in the 1st position?

-Are there site links? If so, are they suitable? How good are the -titles and descriptions that appear?

-Is there a business or knowledge graph listing in the side bar? How accurate is the information, and is there anything missing?

-Do any listings hurt the brand’s reputation?

Then search for your Site:rootdomain

-How many pages appear in the index? Is this high or low? 

(Results www.seo-hacker.com)

-Are the titles well written and contain keywords?

-Is there a lot of keyword duplication?

-Are the descriptions meaningful and attractive? Do they make you want to click them?

In 2007 Jansen, B.J. et al conducted a research into search engine brand awareness. They conducted a study with 32 participants which measured the effect of four search engine brands while controlling for the quality of search engine results. They found that on average there was a ‘25% difference between the most highly rated search engine and the lowest’ showing that there is 25% more visibility for brands which rank highly in search results.

Brand awareness is key for firms within the airline carrier industry as there isn’t much differentiation between brands however this becomes even more important in terms of low cost carriers who basically offer the same homogenous service. Brands which appear at the top of search results are exposed to a large percentage of internet traffic therefore they are more likely to convert views into sales. There is also an element of trust as brands who appear near the top of search engine results connote the idea that they are trusted and ‘the top’ brand in that category.

References

Be Unique Group (2017) Search Engine Optimization, Available at: http://www.beuniquegroup.com/ (Accessed: 30th November 2017).

SEMRush (2017) Homepage, Available at: https://www.semrush.com/ (Accessed: 30th November 2017).

Trusov, M., Bucklin, R.E. and Pauwels, K., 2009. Effects of word-of-mouth versus traditional marketing: findings from an internet social networking site. Journal of marketing, 73(5), pp.90-102.

Webb, S. (2012) How To Perform the Worlds Greatest SEO Audit, Available at: https://moz.com/blog/how-to-perform-the-worlds-greatest-seo-audit (Accessed: 30th November 2017).

Eticaret SEO (2012) Word of Mouth and the Internet – SEO Experts INC – SEO Pres.flv, Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FocBTGq2wI (Accessed: 30th November 2017).

Simpson, C (2015) Ask LH: Does A VPN App Hide All My Phone’s Internet Traffic?, Available at: https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2015/11/ask-lh-does-a-vpn-app-hide-all-my-phones-internet-traffic/ (Accessed: 30th November 2017).

Si, S.P. (2010) Lesson #28: How important is it to be on the first page of SERPs?, Available at: https://seo-hacker.com/lesson-28-important-page-serps/ (Accessed: 1st December 2017).

Schmitz, T. (2014) How To Do Your Own 5-Minute SEO Audit, Available at: https://searchengineland.com/5-minute-seo-audit-196513 (Accessed: 1st December 2017).

Jansen, B.J., Zhang, M. and Zhang, Y. (2007). The effect of brand awareness on the evaluation of search engine results.CHI’07 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 2471-2476). ACM.