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Rise in Organic SEO as Travel Shuns PPC
The online travel sector is moving away from paid search and PPC Management in an effort to reduce Internet Advertising costs.
Digital Media monitors Hitwise have recorded the decline in paid search over the last 12 months and reported that search traffic from paid clicks has fallen by 4.7 per cent since March last year. In 2008, one in four traffic hits came from pay-per-click (PPC) whereas this year the results were closer to one in five hits.
According to Hitwise, the main decline has come from the Agencies category which includes travel agents and tour operators, a sector which traditionally relied on paid search in order to generate traffic. Agencies saw a 12.3 per cent drop in PPC as companies adopt their Internet Marketing Strategy to the current market conditions.
Areas of Transport, such as airlines, trains and car hire companies have taken less of a hit as their figures dropped by a marginal 1.5 per cent. Hitwise’s director or research, Robin Goad said that the move away from paid search was an indicator that natural organic Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) was on the rise.
The growth of organic SEO has not been able to stem the tide completely for travel agencies though according to Mr Goad. Hitwise recorded the actual upstream traffic from paid search which also showed decline: “Again, the biggest impact has been on the Agencies sector, which experienced a drop from 20.6% to 14.4%,” Mr Goad commented.
Destination websites and tourist boards focused the least on paid search this year, as just over 21 per cent of their traffic came from PPC.
Online Advertising news posted by Burt Ernstein on 01 May 2009
