Prepare your travel for the future of AI search
It is impossible to predict the speed and shape of how search marketing will change due to artificial intelligence. But as a marketer, of course he must understand one thing. That means Google search marketing should remain at the top of your priority list for the foreseeable future.
Google isn’t giving up its $175 billion in search ad revenue in 2023 without a fight. And even as search’s dominance slowly begins to crumble, its unbeatable crawling, indexing, and keyword matching capabilities across the World Wide Web remain a critical underlying data source for many potential AI search disruptors. It will continue to be.
In the second of two articles, let’s take a deep dive into three areas you can start focusing on today to help your travel stay ahead of the curve.
From SEO to GEO (Generative Experience Optimization)
Scrolling through a list of blue links will be a thing of the past. The new challenge is to secure a place among the referral links highlighted with AI-powered answers.
This process may cause your SEO cards to be reshuffled. As revealed in a recent Google SGE study, an average of 4.3 unique domains are included in his SGE answers, but only a few links originate from domains in the top 10 organic search results for the same query. It was 62%.
Another study of Perplexity results reported an average of 5.28 website links cited within responses. The domain link overlap between Perplexity and Google SGE was found to be 60% in the travel sector, but only 20% in the general e-commerce sector.
A report comparing the top referral links in travel between Google SGE and Perplexity reveals today’s AI search winners. 5 out of the top 10 domains are primary metasearch and OTAs.
Key Takeaway: Embracing generative search requires SEO marketers to go back to the drawing board. What are the right signals for each query for the AI engine to recognize it as the most relevant source? How can a small competitor beat the domain authority of a big brand and take the top spot? ?
Recent research papers cite adding citations, statistics, and sources as effective content strategies to increase the likelihood of being referenced in an AI answer. However, such tactics are short-sighted in a constantly evolving landscape and can vary by industry.
A successful long-term strategy focuses on providing search engines with optimized, structured data to better crawl and understand your content. This helps increase visibility of AI answers in each relevant query.
Marketers can leverage Schema.org and Google’s structured data organization to start testing this strategy today and discover its impact in Google Search’s rich results, such as carousels and “Most Asked” snippets. It can be measured.
Similar to SEO in the early 2000s, we can expect major AI engines to continue fine-tuning and optimizing search results for years to come. Keeping your finger on the pulse in this fast-paced environment and constantly adapting and testing your content accordingly will be paramount to maximizing your future organic traffic.
Blue link to multimodal ad
Current ad links will receive fewer user clicks over time as AI-powered answers take up more space at the top of results pages. Google is well aware of this risk. To ensure that the golden goose continues to lay eggs, sponsored links will be gradually inserted into his AI answers, similar to what Bing already does with Search Copilot.
In a recent blog post, Vidhya Srinivasan, vice president of advertising at Google, shared a travel-related example of a search for a trip to Hawaii with kids: In my example, you’ll see helpful ads about activities, including island descriptions and hotel options. It would allow us to better serve existing ad categories and significantly expand the categories in which our ads are useful. ”
In addition to starting to monetize AI answers, Google is also leveraging search data from top-of-funnel ad inventory to continue performance marketing spend through its highly touted P-MAX campaign. is included.
Key Takeaway: As with other placements such as Gmail ads, it’s reasonable to assume that advertisers have little control over how their ads are exposed in AI-powered search answers.
Google’s machine learning algorithms will begin to determine the type and placement of ads within its ecosystem based on the infinite wealth of user data it can collect and model.
The P-MAX campaign shows where the world of digital marketing is headed: leveraging the high user intent driven by search traffic to insert ads across a variety of touchpoints.
Travel marketers now have to put marketing dollars into these types of campaigns. Advertisers can get a head start with paid AI search marketing by learning how to optimize campaign structure and feed Google’s algorithms with enough data to optimize performance.
From advertisements to product reviews
Search engines that provide AI answers not only collect and summarize facts, but also crawl opinions and reviews available on the web when the query is related to a brand, product, or service. Google’s existing strengths and weaknesses structured data is now available as product snippets on results pages and will form the basis for informed opinions in future AI results.
The hotel chain’s pay-per-click strategy to capture search traffic with relevant hotel queries has resulted in overly expensive resort fees being highlighted in search results and consistently long check-in lines highlighted in AI answers. Otherwise, it may be a waste of effort.
Key Takeaway: In a world where AI search results not only guide users through websites but also provide informed answers about brand reputation and products, departments between search, social media, and customer experience teams Adjustments beyond this are important.
Organic and paid search optimization goes beyond traditional SEM/SEO metrics like keyword relevance, key web vitals, and quality scores. It will be equally important to measure and drive positive sentiment online through product reviews, customer ratings, and user-generated content that can be easily crawled by AI engines.
Making your brand’s unique value proposition and positive customer experience stand out in search results influences click-through rates, conversions, and ultimately a travel agency’s success in search marketing.
conclusion
Jeff Bezos said that in business, it’s more important to think about what will stay the same over the next 10 years than what will change.
The current form factor search is ripe for significant change in the coming years. But travelers’ fundamental need to browse the World Wide Web for information when researching, planning, and booking travel plans will continue for decades to come.
Travel stakeholders would be wise to start creating a forward-looking search marketing roadmap now to stay relevant to travelers in this wonderful world of AI search.
Mario Gavira is Kiwi.com’s vice president of growth and brand and an angel investor.
This article originally appeared on PhocusWire.
