Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Internet’ Category

Over the last couple of years we’ve watched our very own French gite listings site slowly but surely climb the ranks in the search engines.

Now that it’s a middling size site, roughly comparable to the likes of VisitFrance in size it’s great to see that it’s sitting right there in the middle of all the fully commercial sites and, moreover, often towards the top of that list.

What’s confusing though is quite simply: why? After all, several of those commercial sites are spending quite serious amounts of money in promoting their site whilst we spend very little comparatively speaking. We know for a fact that at least one of the middle ranking sites (which we rank much better than) was spending around £3000 per year on marketing up to a year or so ago.

Confusing too is how come we’re not innundated with applications to list on our site in that we charge a maximum of £29 whilst comparable sites are charging around the £100 mark and, for that matter, we even offer a “free forever” listing too whereas others limit their free period to six months.

One of the more interesting things that came up when I was in discussions about buying a commercial holiday accommodation listings site a year or so ago was the level of turnover in the properties listed on it.

Would you believe that the renewal rate of property listings is around 50-70%? Think about it: that means that there is pretty much a complete change in content of the listings sites every two or three years.

The turnover is presumably at the higher end of the range of the scale for smaller sites (say around 500 entries) but even then that means that they need to attract around 250 new entries per year merely to replace those that don’t renew which in turn means around 25, 000 e-mails to do that for the small sites (assuming a 1% return on marketing). For a large country-specific site (say around 2000 entries), the dropout % is lower but the absolute number of dropouts is higher at around 700 thus requiring something like 70,000 e-mails (assuming a 1% return on marketing).

Those stats are particularly interesting to me in that my own dropout rate is made up of those getting out of the business and is therefore somewhat lower at around 1%. This in turn means that, slowly but surely, I will become one of the larger listings sites. I’ve already caught up with the scale of that listings site that I was going to buy and hope to finish the year with around twice the number that they had when I was looking at them.

With that extra scale comes extra hits on the site and I’ve needed to upgrade the hosting package I use three times since Christmas as a consequence of that jump in size since Christmas a year ago. This, of course, means extra bookings for all those listed on the sites too.

By far the most popular post on our Whole Earth Guide is the one detailing how to go about opening a bank account in America.

The reason is simple really: if you run an online business then sooner or later you generally find yourself in need of an American bank account. Unfortunately, the increased security measures in place post 9/11 mean that it’s not quite so easy to open one these days unless, of course, you’re living in America and therefore a considerable number of websites have grown up with the specific aim of selling you the required information.

Our site doesn’t charge for that information and therefore is increasingly popular as it provides exactly the same information that other sites charge anything from $5 to $250 to provide.

However, we’re sorely tempted to start charging for it too given some of the emails we’ve received demanding additional information and wanting to know why it isn’t on the site yet. What we’ll likely do is to charge for the hand-holding level of information or at least offer it for sale as the information on the above page is quite sufficient to allow anyone to open an account in America.

The number of entries from the United Kingdom on our listings sites has been growing quite rapidly over the last few months so it seemed an appropriate time to start work on a country-specific domain to represent them.

Therefore, we’ve just started running with Great British Bed and Breakfasts and Great British Self-Catering which hold all our UK properties.

One big advantage that we’ve already found is that using the new domains means that the statistics are separated out for the UK for the first time. Early days yet, of course, but it looks like the UK sites were getting a lot more traffic than we had thought they were getting which is good going since we hadn’t specifically promoted them.

On the promotion front, now that we have separate domains for the UK we can run promotion exercises on them too which we’d not been able to do before. In theory, that should mean that these new sites will become very significant for us over the course of the coming year or so.

One topic that was hotly debated up until quite recently was whether or not there was an effect on your site traffic related to where you hosted your site. It has since been confirmed by google that they use the IP address of your hosting service as a factor in prioritising the search results.

This means that one very easy way to increase the traffic on your site is to ensure that either your site is hosted in the country in which your main customers are based. So, if you target the UK then your site should ideally be hosted in the UK.

Changing hosts can be a hassle and isn’t something to be done at your busy time of year. However, one simple change that you can do in minutes is simply to tell google that the site is targetted at the appropriate country. To do this, you need to sign up for google’s webmaster tools, claim the domain, verify that it’s yours and then tell them what country it’s appropriate to. Sounds complicated, but really it’s very easy and quick.

The improvement in traffic can be very dramatic and kicks in within a week or two. In our own case, one domain had THIRTY times the site traffic when it was moved from an American host to a UK one.