Travel Agent Marketing: Setting Up Google My Business
Google My Business is the most important first step in building out your businesses presence online. We walk you through the entire process to setup a Google My Business profile step by step, tailored specifically for travel agents and travel agencies. From claiming a listing, if your business is already listed, to starting from scratch if it's not.
Your agency’s profile on Google will be the first thing representing your business that a vast majority of your clients and potential clients come across online. Investing a little bit of time into improving your agency's online presence is one of the easiest and most cost effective ways to get discovered and bring in new clients. Think of it like this, instead of thinking about the best ways to invest your time and marketing budget to find new clients, this is about investing a little bit of time to help potential clients find you. And, it’s completely free!
We’re going to walk you through exactly how to setup your Google My Business profile with all the information and examples you’ll need to get this done. Your goal is to be to end up with a Google My Business profile that is accurate, complete, and optimized to make sure you rank at the top when Google shows more than one travel agency in their results.
The Online Landscape
First, I want to spend just a little bit of time to set the stage and outline what Google My Business is, how it fits into the broader online landscape, and why it’s the most important first step to helping new clients find you. In fact, if you’re starting from a blank slate online and you could only do one thing…. this is the one you should spend your time on. If you’re already onboard with how important this is, feel free to skip ahead to the walkthrough below.
We hear a lot of people say they don’t invest time into their online presence because that their clients aren’t online. Their clients are old school, they like printed brochures, meeting in person (obviously not ideal currently), and they don’t really use social media or the internet all that much. Their best clients are in their 40s, 50s, or 60s, etc. Ten years ago, that may have been true, but not today.
Overview of GOOGLE Search Types
Please note, we wrote our categorizations and descriptions to be practical for travel agencies, and while closely aligned, they don’t match up exactly with the categories Google uses to describe them.
There are a few different types of searches that Google handles, and it’s important to understand the differences. When someone searches on Google, the first thing that Google does is try to figure out intent, what is it exactly that the person is searching for, and what Google thinks the intent of a search is directly determines the type of results they show. There is a lot of complexity here, but for the travel world, I’m going to break it down to two main categories that we care about in relation to Google My Business.
Direct Search
This is a search specifically for your business, when someone searches Google for your name, or something very close to it (don't worry, Google is great at cutting through misspellings and words that are out of order). In this case, the person searching already knows you exist and might they be looking for information like your phone number or hours because they want to use you to book their next trip. They may also be looking for some more information, what I like to call the ‘background check’ search. They may not have used you before, but they heard about you from a friend, received an offer in the mail, or came across some of your other marketing. They want to learn more about you so they can decide if they want to use you or not. They’re doing a background check to make sure you’re legitimate before calling you to book a trip.
With this type of search, Google will often serve up your full Google My Business listing as the first result, because they’re fairly certain they know that the person searching is looking for you specifically. When someone searches for you by name, obviously they want to find you, specifically. You need to make it easy for them to do that, because if you don’t, Google has to show them something, and so they’ll just show them all the other travel agencies around you that do have their information readily available.
Discovery and Branded Search
This is a search for something in or related to your category. Unless you’re very specialized, this generally ends up being a “near me” or location based search (even if the words “near me” aren’t actually included in the search). An example would be if someone searches for things like “Travel Agents (near me)”. Note that even if the search doesn’t include the words “near me” the results are similar, Google basically assumes you mean “near me” and that you’re looking for travel agencies in your local area.
With this type of search, Google will look at where the person doing the search is physically located, take all of the travel agencies they know to exist close by, and then rank them in some order before serving them up as the results of the search. In this case, the person searching probably wants to use a travel agency, but they don’t know which one they want to use yet. This is where your ranking, according to Google, is really really important. The completeness and quality of your Google My Business profile is directly related to how you rank here (assuming you’re in the right location and nearby the person doing the searching). Things like your online reviews and consistency of the information about you online are also a factor. There are a lot of things that go into Google’s ranking system for most searches, but the ranking of searches for local businesses isn’t all that complicated to get right.
Other Searches
Then, you have everything else. This is a search for European River Cruise or something like that. They aren’t necessarily searching for travel agencies, but I’m guessing you wouldn’t mind having your name show up when someone is actively thinking about and looking for information on a river cruise… These searches are much harder to rank for organically (which just means you didn’t pay to have Google serve up your ad when someone searches for European River Cruises). The ranking algorithm used for this type of search is much more complicated and there are a bunch of other strategies you need to use to show up here. A high quality content marketing strategy, for example. Basically, unless you have something really interesting to say about European River Cruises, Google is probably going to come up with a lot of other results that it thinks are more relevant to the person searching then a travel agency that has them listed as a product they offer. We could write (but we won’t, because other people already have) a series of books about this and they’re outside the scope of this post, although we do plan on diving in to this a bit more in the future.
RESULT TYPES
Now that we’ve covered three basic types of searches, or intents, let’s take a quick look at some of the different types of search results Google shows and when they show them.
Local Result Listings
This is a listing of business that fit the search criteria and are close by the person doing the search. This is what Google serves up when someone does a “near me” type search for your category. Things like “Travel Agency” or “Travel Agent near me” or “Travel Agent in Melbourne Beach, FL”. Like I mentioned above, this is usually a result of someone searching for a category, not you specifically, so Google will return all (or at least multiple of the most relevant) results that fit. This is where you want to be at the top! The first one on the list.
Your Google My Business Profile
This is what Google serves up when someone searches for you specifically (or more accurately, when Google thinks the person is searching for you specifically), a Direct Search. Your Google My Business profile is displayed in all of it’s glory.
Maps
This is similar to the local listing results, except the search results are presented in Google Maps. It is generally the result of searching with in Google Maps (with a good chance it’s someone searching on their smartphone looking to either get directions to you or find your number to call you. You don’t want to miss out on these searches!
Other
These are your standard searches for things like “European River Cruise” or “African Safari” from before, and like I mentioned, we could spend hours talking about the strategies and techniques here, so we’re going to skip them for now.
Example of Google Maps Search Results
Setting up your Google My BUsiness Profile
Ok, now that we have that background out of the way, let’s really dive into it. Our goal here is to end up with a Google My Business profile that is accurate, complete, and optimized to make sure you rank at the top when Google shows more than one travel agency in their results.
Setup a google account
The first step is to create a google account, if you don’t already have one. If you do have one, you can skip this step if you’d like and just sign in to your google account, or you could setup a separate account to use just for your business if you’d like (it’s free and you can have multiple different google accounts if you’d like to keep things separate). The next step is to find out if your business is already listed on Google. If you’ve been in business for a while, there’s a good chance that it is and Google has just filled it out with whatever information they could pull together about you from elsewhere on the internet.
CLAIM A LISTING
The first thing you’re going to do is Log in to Google My Business with that Google account. Then you are going to search for your business by name. If your agency is listed, click on it and then click on the Manage Now button. You will then need to verify that you’re the owner of the business and there are a few different ways you can do this based on what information Google already has. They all work similarly though, basically Google will get a code to you and you need to use it to prove you’re the owner. If Google already has your businesses phone number or email address, then you may be able to use that to verify your ownership quickly by calling, texting, or emailing the code to you. Otherwise, you will need to select Postcard by mail, in which case Google will mail you a postcard with a code on it that you will need to use. This can take a few days, but in the meantime you will still be able to update some basic information in your listing. If you use this method of verification, you’ll need to log back in once you receive the postcard and enter the verification code.
SETUP NEW LISTING
If your agency isn’t already listed, you’ll need to create a new one. Going back to where you searched for your agency, you’ll see an option to Create a business with this name. You’ll want to click on that and then Google will prompt you to fill in some basic information to get your profile started.
The first is, of course, your name! Make sure this is accurate to the name you do business as, this doesn’t necessarily need to be your legal name, which might include “LLC” or “Inc” or something like that. Next is the category and Travel Agency is the obvious choice here.
Location and Contact
If you have a storefront or retail location, this is important to fill out. This will let your listing show up in Google Maps based on your address, which will be published. If you do not have a storefront, you may want to be careful here. You don’t want to put your home address in here unless you want that address to be published on Google when people search for you!
Now for the contact information. Again, this will be published publicly, so keep that in mind when entering you’re phone number (especially if you use your cell phone). For your website, you can enter the address here or just select no and enter it later.
Click Finish and you’re done!
Completing your listing
Now that your listing is created and verified, it's time for the fun part, actually completing your listing. If you’ve claimed or created a listing, after you log in you will be taken straight to your dashboard. Most of what we are going to focus on first will be in the Info section.
The first step will be your business name and category, which should already be complete from the previous steps, but it's a good idea to double check these two areas now to make sure they’re correct and update if needed. The same applies for your address and service area.
The Hours section is what Google will use to tell people searching for your agency if you are open or not, and if not when you open next. Obviously this is important information for potential clients looking to contact you, but it also gives your listing a more complete look, so it is important to get this section filled out. All you need to do is switch the days you’re open to Open and then type in your hours.
The Special Hours section is also important. This is where you add any days where your hours are different then normal, usually holidays. It is best practice to add any holidays that you’re closed or have reduced hours here as Google will show those holiday hours to anyone searching for you during the week of that holiday.
Your phone number is also probably already filled out from previous steps, but if not make sure your public phone number is in here and correct. If you have multiple numbers, you can also add those as well.
This section isn’t all that important, but I still suggest adding something here that reflects your business name. This is limited to 32 characters and is what gets used to make a link to your agency Google Maps.
For your website, you want to put in your full web address including the ‘http’ part. If your website has TLS or SSL security setup, you want to use the secure version, https not http here. If you’re not sure about that, just go to your website in a new tab, copy the full address, and paste it in here.
Next up is the products section. For most travel agencies, unless you sell physical things, you’re going to just skip over this section.
The services section is very important. This tells potential clients, as well as google, what exactly you offer. For this section, you don’t need 100 things listed, but you do want to make sure that you cover all of the major categories of things that you offer, 5 to 8 is a good target. If you look at our profile, you’ll notice they are fairly broad, but if you are more specialized, let's say you really focus on cruises, you might want to make you more detailed, Maybe family cruises, group cruises, and transatlantic crossings, or something like that.
And finally, the description. This part will be the most typing you have to do… although you’re still limited to only 750 characters. This description shows up towards the bottom of your profile, but it is helpful for Google to understand what exactly you offer and they do use this section to help understand what you do and if and when the should show you as a result for a search, so you should aim to use up pretty much all of the space they give you.
Photos
This is extremely important! You want to have a lot, like at least 10, high quality photos. And Google is very clear that listings with photos see better results.
That’s It! Now, there’s a lot more in here that we can cover, Posts, messaging, reviews, and so on. But we’ve already covered a lot and I’ll save that for a future post. Google My Business really is one of the most impactful things you need to setup as you work on expanding your agencies presence online and it’s totally free, and pretty easy, to get setup. So I hope you found this helpful.