1:30h duration
Certificate
4.8/5 rating
+200 students
Boost your hospitality business with a powerful online presence through our free course "Building and maintaining successful visibility online", now available on our website.
Below is the full transcription, but we recommend watching the video to get the most out of this valuable content. Learn how to leverage popular booking platforms like Booking.com, Expedia, and TripAdvisor, and discover the hidden potential of Facebook for your business. From crafting effective email signatures to building a strong brand image, this course covers everything you need to turn your digital footprint into a guest magnet.
Watch now and take your online presence to the next level!
Below is the full transcription, but we recommend watching the video to get the most out of this valuable content. Learn how to leverage popular booking platforms like Booking.com, Expedia, and TripAdvisor, and discover the hidden potential of Facebook for your business. From crafting effective email signatures to building a strong brand image, this course covers everything you need to turn your digital footprint into a guest magnet.
Watch now and take your online presence to the next level!
Module 1: Maximising your visibility through OTA’s
Our focus today is traffic, the lifeblood of your online presence. In this first module, we are going to meet the gatekeepers of your online traffic. So platforms like Booking.com, Expedia, and TripAdvisor. How do you get these platforms to notice you? How do you climb the rankings and get your business seen? Well, let's see.
First, I'm going to give you a brief introduction and then we'll talk about TripAdvisor, then Booking, and finally Expedia. After that, we'll do some tips and tricks. And then we're going to look specifically at how to respond to reviews, which is an essential thing to get right that many of you don't. So I'll lay down a few rules for you to live by, then a conclusion. Easy peasy.
So, wintertime. Let's begin. Where do your customers look for you, do you think? Hint, it's not Google. Which is exactly what the Brainbox is out there, skipping videos, might think. No, OTAs and TripAdvisor are the new search engines. And as we learned last week, the best thing to do is use a judoka strategy and use their size to your advantage in order to win in the long run.
What we want is the highest possible ranking on these sites, right? As we've already demonstrated, many potential customers visit them, search their basic criteria, and make short lists of properties whose actual websites they'll still visit with the notion of booking directly. You want to be on those short lists? Yes or yes?
If you've any hostility left in you for these big boys, let me pitch it to you straight. They're not your competition. They're the gatekeepers, and you need them working with you. Save the competitive edge for the hotel down the street or the B&B across the road because you'll need it. You'll need to put it to work on these platforms, not against them. They are the venue for the competition, not the opposition. Mike Tyson didn't pound heavy bags in preparation for a showdown against the Bellagio or Caesars Palace. No, he was out for Buster Douglas.
And if we want to continue with the metaphor—I do love a boxing metaphor—the belt in this scenario is the first page of results. You might have heard the old adage that the best place in the world to hide is in a corpse. Well, the corpse of the internet age is the second page of Google search, and the situation on OTAs and TripAdvisor is very much the same. If you're not in the first 20 results offered for a search that glances upon some of your selling points, then you may as well not be online.
Sorry if you're in that situation. One-fifth of your rooms have cockroaches, and you'd still be better off sealing them off and focusing on improving your rankings than calling an exterminator. Seriously, it's that serious. I mean, better take care of both issues, but the rankings first before the cockroaches. In fact, get the bugs party on all together until you hit the top ten.
So, to return to a hymn sheet you should all know by heart by now, you're after the **billboard effect**. So, a quick recap: About 70% of people visiting OTAs aren't actually there to buy, but to peruse and go to them fully intent on seeking the websites of the establishments listed. Which means, if you get your ducks properly in a row with a good search ranking and a functional website, you're setting the stage for yourself to gain big in terms of direct bookings.
So these big, massive companies, right? While doing their damnedest to make a buck off of you, if you play your cards right, basically, it just turns out to be them sending you customers for free. So, hell yeah, thank you very much. Poorly referenced on OTAs is the second page of a Google search. Is hiding in a corpse a dare? You might as well be, I don't know, on the side of a motorway handing out leaflets. All right? And just check out of the internet. That's what it is.
So, if there's one place to invest in advertising and communication, it's on the OTAs. You've got to spend money to make it. And I'm about to tell you where to shop. So let's talk about TripAdvisor.
TripAdvisor, like other platforms, has an algorithm. We don't know everything, but we know enough to know how to at least improve your rankings a little bit. So the first thing is the **amount of reviews**. You always need more. It's super important how many reviews you have on TripAdvisor. The more reviews you get, the better your TripAdvisor ranking will be. It's elementary.
Then there's the **quality of those reviews**. The more positive reviews you have, the better your rating will be, and your ranking will follow. Then there's the **freshness of the reviews**. It's not just about having lots of reviews, and it's not just about having good reviews. You have to have fresh reviews. If, for example, you had a lot of reviews last year, but since then you've had very few, well, unfortunately, you will go down in the rankings because TripAdvisor considers your 15 minutes are up. It's harsh but fair, in a way. After all, as Oscar Wilde said, the only thing worse than being talked about is not having any reviews on TripAdvisor for the last month or so.
Then there are the **client's photos**. You always need more. You know yourself, if you're searching for a restaurant and there's more photos, you spend more time on their page, which is more time on TripAdvisor, which TripAdvisor obviously likes. So they help you in the rankings on account of that. It's simple. There are a few ways you can increase the photos on show, but you've got to put yourself out there. Facebook competitions work well, or you could just ask happy customers or regular customers or even create a few different profiles on TripAdvisor and upload the photos yourself.
Then there's **responses to reviews**. You absolutely should respond to all the positive reviews as well as the negative ones, but your responses to the negative ones are especially important. And we'll talk about that near the end of this video.
And then there is the **availability on TripAdvisor**. Right. Make it known. Ideally, you'd hook your channel manager up with your TripAdvisor and make sure whoever looks at your page knows what's available.
A while back, TripAdvisor gained itself a justified reputation for being easily diddled with. This guy here on screen made a fake restaurant in his back garden that no one had ever been to the number one restaurant in London for a time, with just fake profiles and photos, fake reviews that he wrote on them, and a bit of gumption, quite frankly. And this is a fairly extreme example, mind. There must be 10,000 restaurants in London at the very least, but it's the tip of a fairly substantial iceberg that TripAdvisor was known for a while, namely that it was easily manipulated in one's favour or to the detriment of a competitor, if you were feeling malicious.
In order to address these shooting stars—TripAdvisor's name for establishments that quickly attain a very high volume of comments and reviews—the big boys had to alter their algorithm slightly so that **consistency of good reviews** trumps quantity. Or at least that's how it is according to them. Whether or not they actually solved it, the fact is that with sites structured like theirs, there's always going to be issues of some sort.
One obvious one, perhaps the principal one, is that anybody can write a review of any establishment at any time, regardless of whether they've actually been there or not. Whereas with sites like Booking, one can only review if one has stayed and paid. So you need to receive **frequent feedback and good feedback**. And above all, you have to respond systematically.
As we saw earlier, there's a great video on YouTube that's going to show you how you can generate more reviews from your TripAdvisor customers. The guy who made this video uses this technique for his restaurants, but it works exactly the same way for hotels and such, which is exactly why I wanted to show it to you.
Module 2: Mastering Facebook
Facebook is more than just a social media platform. It's a vast, interconnected network of potential guests. Facebook is so big that it's often synonymous with the internet itself. Its reach is vast, as is its potential for your business. Let's dig in.
So we'll start with some numbers that will show you why Facebook matters. Then we'll start you on Facebook if need be. Then we'll see how to grow more followers, likes, fans, etc., and then we'll finish off with a few golden rules and a conclusion.
First, the numbers: 2.2 billion active users worldwide, mainly concentrated in developed countries, but with plenty of growth everywhere, all the time. In Myanmar, Facebook is synonymous with the internet. To give you a clue, when people say "the internet" there, they mean Facebook. So if your target customers happen to be Earthlings, you need to be on Facebook.
1.2 billion users use the platform primarily on their smartphones. I'll just leave that there. You know the drill. Smartphones are important. The average time spent per day is 35 minutes, which is huge because that means there are plenty who spend a lot more than that. It qualifies as a pastime at that rate. For you, it's something to sneer at at your peril. You're not obliged to spill all your personal beans on there, but your hotel's page needs to give the impression of holiday snaps every day of the year.
The average user visits the platform eight times per day. That's huge. One-fifth of the web pages visited in Europe and the USA are Facebook pages. Think of the size of the internet and just take that in. 20% of what matters is on Facebook. Another big 20%: 20% of the time you spend on your smartphone is spent on Facebook if you have it. Facebook has truly managed to capture and fix attention in a way that's inimitable. They've really shook the earth with it.
90% of travelers admit to having been influenced by their friends' holiday snaps on social media. As we covered before, turn your business into a destination and see what happens. 110 nationalities are represented on the app, which is ten less than McDonald's has restaurants in, but it's a truly global representation nonetheless.
89% of women who use the app use it daily. Technically unrelated to Shave Zuckerberg, but significant nonetheless. Women make 64% of holiday reservations. Search with your feelings, man. You know it to be true. It's significant because the content we send to either gender will be tailored to them.
We've mentioned there's 100 million hours of video consumed daily, but we've not mentioned that it's more on Facebook than YouTube, and mostly on smartphones. These numbers change all the time, but the fact that video content is crucial does not, especially on Facebook.
95.8% of marketing investors agree that Facebook is the best place to get a return on your investment when it comes to advertising, and that's without spending a dime—though you'll spend time, for sure. And as we all know, time is money. I'll do a training on web advertising at some point, but for now, take this: Facebook is close to a guaranteed return on investment.
The best time to publish something is between 1 and 3 p.m.—the most people will see it at that time. Post anything you publish on Facebook and get the most exposure at that time. You see, probably because of lunch or whatever, you need lunch too. The cool thing is you can prepare your week's posts during a less busy time, and when the time comes, all you'll have to do is publish them.
Some of the film fans out there might have heard of *The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon*. The idea is to connect any actor working in the history of film or TV to Kevin Bacon via a maximum of six films or shows. Well, following on that logic, apparently on Facebook, you're no further from anyone else than 3.5 people. Meaning if you choose the right people by way of connecting with a mere 3 to 4 people, you could find yourself friends with almost anyone on the platform.
This should be interesting to you, particularly in terms of people posting about their holidays because if the photos are good enough, they're only 3.5 people liking them away from almost anyone on Earth. Work hard, and it takes time, and you'll begin to grow an exponential fan base.
Okay, guys, let's cross that off the list now, and we're going to get to the basics. Those of you who are already on Facebook might want to fast-forward because now I'm going to break down how to get started on it, or catch up, as it were.
Okay. Game face is on. Here we go. We're going to get started. We'll probably start out by showing you how to get an actual Facebook account. Those of you who have one, you can go ahead and skip this bit if you like. So we're going to click "Create a New Account." Regular alias Andrew here. That's the first step. We're in the door. They're going to ask for some more information.
All right, I can confirm I'm not a robot. They'll have sent me a confirmation code to my alias address, which I'll go straight over to. There is my code right there. Okay, and we're in. That's just a personal page, but you'll need a personal page to keep it kosher when it comes to your business page.
Okay, so now that we've got a personal page, we're going to need to head to Facebook Business. See, they've already picked up on who I am. My business and account name, hotel age clubs, and my business email address, which is contact@oldtownex.website.com. Okay, and so here we are on Andrew's personal page. Not exactly mine, but you need a personal page to hook onto your business page.
So from there, we go over here to Pages, right? And we can create a new page. Or we can go straight for the Meta Business Suite, which is what you want to do, all right, to create a Facebook page. So page information is the name. So it's Hotel Age Clubs. All right. Category: a hotel. Here you can put in as many categories as you figure can hook onto what you're selling. So as many as possible, okay?
Right. One. You can have between 1 and 3 categories. So yes. All right. Charming boutique hotel on the banks of River Caribe, Galway, Ireland. Right. Again, just improvising here a little bit. So we're going to go ahead and create that. All right. So it's created. Excellent. Next up, I'm going to add a profile picture. So I'm going with the logo.
And then for a cover photo. Got notifications on. Excellent. We'll save that for the moment. Now, of course, you'll want to add your phone number there. You should definitely do that. Let's just say that. Okay, so plenty to do here. First of all, let's complete some page information. Normally, you would put your phone number there, which we'll put down as the hotelclub.com. You can input some hours here, okay? Which I won't go through the bother of, but you can see that. Pretty self-explanatory. And then we click Always Open.
Yeah, again. Location. City. Postcode. Let's just say there: Square Galway, Ireland. There we go. I don't think there's any real estate space available in that particular area. It's quite busy. But yeah, there we are. Specified price range: euros. And you can add in your different accounts there. Okay. Changes have been saved.
You have the option of promoting, which is a different kettle of fish altogether. I'll go back home now. This is a very important thing, which is of course the option to put in a CTA (Call to Action) button. All sorts down here to follow. Get a gift card, call contact, send a message, which you can hook up to your personal Facebook to receive messages from clients. I don't necessarily recommend that, depending on how busy your hotel is. That will just appear right up there, guys.
Okay, and after that, you can head down here to Settings, you know, templates, and tabs. You can very easily move things around. Now, this is an intelligent kind of web page. They have a review page ready for you, turned on or off depending on whether or not people wish to leave you reviews.
So, as you can see, it's simple enough to set up. I'll just show you how you can get back here. So I go back to Andrew Hill's page, post a picture of my baby or me winning a sports competition or something. There is my page right back there, which I can return to, and they're instantly telling me I should write a post or something like that. Here we go. I can boost it if I want. There's heaps to discover here, guys.
We will probably do something fuller on Facebook promotion in the future, but for the minute, this should be plenty for you. Okay, so that should get you started. Play around with it. As I said, we'll do training on more of that in the future. See you next time, guys. Bye bye.
Oh, wait. Before we go, I should 100% create my username. Okay, let's put a line through that and get to growing the page, which is ultimately what should be of interest to you. I would imagine those of you who skipped forward already had personal and professional pages. Take a minute now and go back over everything and make sure everything is accurate: some numbers, emails, links, everything.
Okay, so on to growth. All right. Once you've got your Facebook page, you'll need to bring it to life. There are objectives. Firstly, you want to gain visibility. We've covered the numbers on Facebook. In summary, it's huge, but we've not covered what can
be done on it with regard to content. Quality content, good keywords, photos, articles, etc., can boost your ranking on Facebook just like on an OTA and therefore as a knock-on for your website.
The next objective is to create customer testimonials. We've learned their importance already. Remember, more is always better. The ultimate goal is, of course, to direct traffic to your website. Have a "Book" button linked to it that'll take visitors straight to a booking engine. You should also be aiming to get your special offers out there in a completely different way from the page you've installed on your website.
The web page is for people already interested, for people who followed up from Booking or TripAdvisor. Your Facebook page, which is upstream from your booking page, can and should be aiming for a type of customer who doesn't even know they're going on a trip. When they see a friend of theirs share a photo of them relaxing by your pool, they click the link you've left there, and you've got some of your other offers front and center, ready to lure them in.
The golden rule is simple to say but can be very trying to follow up on: interact with your community on a very regular basis.
So, what are you going to post? Pictures of your rooms and your hotel? Yeah, that probably won't get old in two seconds, right? Wrong. You've got to keep it interesting. Your first posts are aimed at engagement. You'll need to have at least a couple of followers. And what do you do? Questions. Ask questions. Look at the example: they're asking, "What's the best way to relax by the pool?" I bet you want to answer that right now yourself. Or maybe you're in a dilemma with what color to paint a room. Put it in a survey and ask your followers. Who doesn't like that kind of power?
You should post plenty of photos of your hotel and mix in some of cats as well if it fits your brand. People love cat pictures. Then you've got to fill in any blanks they might have on what's happening in the destination. Maybe there's a music festival, maybe there's a cat festival. Maybe make an offer—a special free gift for anyone with a festival ticket. The goal is to keep people interested, especially people searching for guesthouses in whatever city the festival is in.
And you have to post information on your hotel regularly, of course. But like I said, put it in the form of a question if you can.
One original way of showcasing the establishment is to give them a peek backstage. Show a table of the day's key cards ready to go or a breakfast shift mid-prep, for example. Also, and this goes for all humanity: Do a quiz. Everyone loves quizzes.
You've also got to aim for putting a bit of life into the whole thing. Yes, talk about the events around you, but also post photos of your team doing their jobs, or maybe on a night out or paintballing or something. If there is any mention of you anywhere—a newspaper, TV, or a blog—make sure to repost it.
Same story with any renovations or changes. If there's anything you've done for charity or any charitable organization you're aligned with, jot that down too. But keep it broad. The rules of Facebook promotion are much the same as those of bartending: leave religion and politics at the door.
Then there's fan-generated content, which we've mentioned a little in terms of what it is, but that was to say nothing of the activity it represents. Sure, you can have guests leaving good reviews and photos and so forth, whether of their own accord or at your request. But there are plenty of other ways to get them to generate content on your behalf.
Have a photo competition: best one of your establishment or locale wins a prize. Make a poll to name the new dog or cat or whatever. Hosting an event? Ask if they can tag you in all the photos they put online. Let it tag the establishment. Whatever keeps things moving is good.
Ask your followers their favorite movies associated with hotels or guesthouses. There are lists of things people have tried, and by all means, have a look at them. But it's best to figure out some things that work for you, rather than completely copying what others have done.
Then there's video content—super important and fun to do. You can start with a tour of your establishment. Do it in accordance with the customer journey first, and you can repost it every so often. If you get a noticeable boost in followers, then do a tour of the facilities—anything you have that's not your rooms.
Interview your staff. Maybe your chef has a nice recipe to share, or your barman has a new cocktail. Have housekeeping demo how to make a bed. It might seem redundant, but in actuality, it puts a human face on your business, which people love. It makes your hotel into something like a handmade product. If it's just you working there, interview yourself. Interview guests, of course, and tag them when you post it. That way, their friends see it. Boost exposure, kick off the snowball effect. It's all very doable. Just try to keep it under two minutes per video.
I've mentioned pets, which are a gold mine on the internet and no different for hospitality. If you're not capitalizing on them, you're missing out. People will literally book with you to meet your pet.
There's also behind-the-scenes stuff, which you can do live if you want to. A 30-second clip of a big kitchen rush might be nothing to you, but it's the stuff of some of the most popular shows on TV, and yours is more authentic than anything on the Gogglebox. So get it out there.
Then, of course, there's the general information, which you can put a fun spin on easily. Remember: video crushes. If you want to get some of the best things on your menu out there, why not do a text over a video of a chef putting the final touches on something? Or maybe you have a room with a nice view. Same deal: the housekeeper finishes the bed, and you pan over to look out the window, and the text fades in to reveal a special offer.
You might think all of that is beyond you, but take it from me, a one-time technophobe: this stuff has never been easier, and it's only getting more so.
Then there's competition, which I'll now mention for the 10th time today. But hey, never underestimate the competitive spirit in humans. If you build it, they will come. Put up a contest for a free meal for the best video of such-and-such a monument in your town. You'll be blown away by the response. Maybe the only caveat for entry is that they have to share it and tag five friends. Job done. And don't even judge it—make the competition for the most likes and give a deadline. That kind of thing catches on like a forest fire.
Selfies are a thing. Have a "likes" contest for the best one in front of your establishment or somewhere local. Have a contest to name a new dish. Likes, again, as a gauge to see who wins, where they share the photo, their name for it, and tag five friends. Whoever gets the most likes wins. Facebook is your oyster in terms of this kind of stuff.
Okay, that'll do for that. I've given you some ideas, as well as ideas on how to have ideas. It's up to you to put them into practice. Remember, just keep it regular.
Now, some of the golden rules for this kind of thing. First, I've said it before and here it comes again: you've got to be authentic. If you're just throwing your weight around with other people's ideas and nothing of you in them, it comes across. You might think that internet communication isn't for you to begin with, but the fact is, it's just a different language. And if you take the tips I'm giving you on board, it's up to you to bring some of yourself to the table and abide.
Next, interact with your followers all the time. Like what they post about you, follow them on Facebook, and like what they post about anything.
Also, with regard to interaction, one advantage of Facebook is that it puts you in the driving seat when it comes to your publicity. You don't need to be polite around negative reviews—you can simply delete them, and you should. You have enough to worry about with Booking and TripAdvisor. Don't let some grump who's had a bad week graffiti your picket fence.
All right. Use humor, your humor, your brand of humor. Whatever makes you laugh, spin it around and make it about your business, your locale, and anything you can think of that will get your business out there on Facebook, to be honest.
Then there's the frequency of posting. Daily, if you can. Every second day, at least. No exceptions. And alternate the content types—photos one day, video another, competition, then poll. You might think it's a lot, but it needn't be. Like I said before, set some time aside every week and put together all your posts for that week. Then it becomes a two-minute job, right? On the day when you're posting.
Also, keep up to date with the news in your content. If there's an Olympics, make content around that. If the Queen is visiting, same thing. It forges a connection between you and your followers, and anyone who likes it is likely one of your avatars. And those are exactly who you're looking to reel in. So pay attention to what they like.
All right. Them's the rules. Get an appointment with a tattoo artist pronto.
Each person engrossed in their phone is a potential guest. With the right content and strategies, you can transform Facebook from a social media platform into a powerful marketing tool for your hospitality business.
Module 3: The Gmail Guide for Hotels
First impressions are made through email. An email signature is the digital equivalent of your business card. Crafting a captivating email signature is not only easy, but absolutely free. In this module, we will walk you through the process of creating an effective and professional-looking email signature.
The most valuable thing in terms of how your guests see you is that you get to have an email address that's hooked up to your own domain name. This first email address you see on the screen here—anybody could set that up. It would seem to the public, or it could indicate, that the hotel is in fact owned by Google. Who wants to stay in a hotel owned by Google? They're software specialists. They don't know anything about hospitality.
Whereas this second one here has your domain name or whatever domain name you choose. This is just obviously a generic fake domain name, but it's professional-looking—that’s the point. You know what I mean? Like, it's got you where you are contacting directly the page on which you're looking to maybe book a room. That means something. It conveys a level of trustworthiness that you just don't get from the gmail.com one.
Besides all of that, you get unlimited storage with all these fantastic tools right here, basically making your Google account an all-inclusive platform for anything you might want to do. You can store documents, you can arrange your day on the calendar, spreadsheets, emails, etc. And guys, you might think I'm just here shilling for Google, but let me tell you this: I'm not seeing a dime of money from them. They don't need me to shill for them. They’ve become a giant in the industry for a reason. It’s really, really good stuff.
And that's just the stuff the general public gets. When you double down on your dimes, you get this stuff with unlimited storage. You also get great access to Google Analytics, which helps you track how your website is performing, Google My Business (basically your business presence online), and Maps. We all know what Maps is. It's just a fantastic resource that you should all get involved with. And don’t be shy about spending the little money, guys, because the old adage is true: if you don't invest in your business, who do you expect will?
Okay, that's enough of that. Next, I’m going to show you the cherry on top of the professional sheen we’re going to give you with your online presence: we’re going to get you an email signature. All right, buckle up.
In the Google account I set up for my domain name, I’m going to head over to the email account. As you can see here, that’s my email address for my hotel. But let’s say I go to send an email. Nothing special there. Nothing special at all. Insert a signature? What? There’s no signature there. We need to set up a signature.
So, what do you do? You click this handy button here. Otherwise, you can go to General Settings. In General Settings, you scroll down and keep scrolling. There we are—Signature: no signatures. Oh no, better do something about that.
Okay, so this will be the contact signature, for somebody who emails that contact web address. Let’s say it’s from me, right? So I have my name, skip a line, my position, where, maybe an address, my phone number, and your email address alongside that. It’s all very good.
Then, if you like (and I do like), you can add an image. I’ll take the smaller one of that. That’s how it fits in underneath it. I like it. I’d like all of my stuff to be signed like that. And is it done? Hello? Click to sign contact. And it appears automatically. Look at that. Now tell me that doesn’t look professional, guys.
Congratulations on completing your email signature. Next, it's over to Google.
Module 4: Navigating the Google Ecosystem
Google is a multifaceted platform. It's a toolkit waiting to be used. If wielded correctly, it can turn into your hospitality business's best friend. Let's see how.
We will first see how to install Google Analytics, then how to submit your website to the Google Search Console, how to create and customize your Google My Business listing, and finally how to start using a listing on Google Maps. To simplify, Google Analytics gives you detailed statistics on your website traffic. First interesting thing altogether, conversion rate shows how many visitors you can turn into customers via your website.
It's pretty simple mathematics: take your total reservations over a certain period via your website, divide by the total of site visits (you'll find this on Google Analytics), and multiply by 100. Google Analytics doesn't do this automatically; you have to install it on your website. It's very easily done. You create an account and you get an identifier tag to insert into your website. Depending on what CMS (content management system) you're using right now, you might need to look up how to do it.
I'm going to show you how to do it with amenities. One reminder though: you need a pro Google account to do this. If you followed the instructions in the previous video, you have one. If not, I recommend going back and doing it, guys, and just signing up for a pro account. It's well worth your while.
Okay, so without further ado, Google Analytics. So here we are, guys, in Google Analytics. Set up your property: create a Google Analytics for property to measure your web or app data. So your property name...again. I live in Spain. Let's say I want it all except "other." That'll force me to be creative. Give me the Spanish terms and conditions, please. Okay. And I accept.
Your homepage provides a glance at your most important metrics. Yes, that's right. To navigate, you click on reports. Now, we're going to choose a platform here rather quickly, and I'm going to put the name of my website. Okay, guys, there we have it. That's all set up. Okay, so this is what you need: your stream ID and your measurement ID. Let's continue this over in amenities.
Now, here we are in amenities. What you want to do next is head down to marketplace. You can scroll and scroll, and look, they've got something right here waiting for you. We want to activate it. Yes, I've copied that. It's ready to go. And that's it—successfully updated. Google Analytics is officially tracking your website.
Okay, guys, that's Google Analytics. You should definitely get on it if you're planning to have a functional website. We'll probably do something more on that suite in the future because it's quite vast. But there are plenty of tutorials for the specific needs of the whole game plan that you can find very easily online. I'd recommend, if you're curious, that you check them out.
Now, the next thing we're going to scan set is Google Search Console. So what is it? It's another tool in the Google suite, and it's super important. It allows you to rank better in Google search results by using data gained through analytics. Google Search Console allows you to submit your website to Google so its robots can read your website and reference it.
Now, this is a huge time saver because if you don't do it, it's impossible to know when Google's robots will eventually find your website. All the while, it will be relatively impossible for you to optimize your SEO. The other important thing about Search Console is that it allows you to learn more about your natural SEO with four key pieces of information: the position (where your site ranks in Google rankings), the views (the number of times your website has been displayed in a Google results page), the clicks (the number of visitors who came to your website from a Google search page), and the click rate (the ratio between the number of displays and the number of clicks).
Let's have a quick look at how to get set up on that. They really do make it easy for us. We can type in our domain name here and it's verified. That's it, guys. Then, you've got to wait a few days, and you start getting emails from Google with this data. You can start to interact with that data. You have to wait a few days because they need time to collect the data and see who's visiting what. The basic stuff is very easy to access and read. The more complex information, you can dive into if needed, but we're covering the basics for now.
You should get on that as soon as possible because you're going to want that data.
Next, you create and customize your Google My Business. Basic as it sounds, it's very important. It's essentially your web presence in a Google search—your details, location, address, opening hours, etc.—all pop up immediately. That's a Google My Business profile.
Let’s look at how to set one up immediately. Simple as anything. Just Google "Google My Business," and it takes you to set up your profile. You log in and get as much information out there as possible. Then, you receive email verification from Google, and your business is online and searchable.
The amazing news is that once you get your Google My Business sorted out, it automatically puts you on the map. If someone is lost on their way to your property, they can search it on Google Maps and, sure enough, find it. You’ve successfully completed our final module, where we discovered the potential of Google as a traffic-boosting toolkit for your hospitality business.
Thanks very much for following this course until the end. Bye-bye now.
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