The Cost of Not Being Found in Paradise
By Sage Peterson
May 2004
One of my favorite search-enabled dreams is a vacation to some exotic resort, an island, the Caribbean, a hammock, a breeze, a cocktail with
maraschino cherry and a little drink umbrella.
I subscribe to Conde Nast Traveler, and they publish a list of the top-100 "readers choice" destinations. Several months ago, when I read
that issue, I read about the top rated Caribbean resorts.
I spotted one that looked interesting. It was called Le Guanhani. So sitting at my computer I put a "www" in front and a dot-com at the end
and up popped their Web site.
The Web site revealed a resort hotel with elegant rooms, some with their own private pools. The beaches and views were fantastical. It was
love at first site...
The problem was that six months later (yesterday) when I was finally planning my vacation, I could not remember the hotel's name. Was it the
Gunamaka hotel? Galamati hotel? Guacamole hotel?
I began performing searches: "Hotels in St. Barts." The first few listings were travel sites but no listing of for my hotel. I searched for
"resort hotels St. Barts," still nothing.
Finally, I searched for "hotel Guana st. barts." I knew "Guana" was wrong, but I was hoping that the first few letters of my guess would be
close enough for a match.
A travel Web site with the full name of the hotel in the title of the search listing appeared - but not the hotel's actual Web site - and no
link to the hotel's site! I copied and pasted the hotel name into the search box, and viola, I found the actual Web site:
www.leguanahani.com.
During the course of my search, I encountered many of Le Guanahani's competitors. Icould have easily been lured away!
When I visited the hotel's Web site I instantly discovered why this world-class resort was so difficult to find. They had built a new site
that was not search engine friendly. They had an elegant Web site describing a tropical paradise, but without any consideration of how it
would be found by someone using a search engine!
When the site loaded, a splash-screen appeared and several pictures in a slide show moved slowly across the screen like a movie. What do the
search engines see? Nothing. Search engines cannot interpret any of the code or the text contained in the graphics. Search engines need text
to index a Web site.
Next, when it finally resolved to the home page, I was able to view a beautiful layout complete with some choice pictures of rooms, views,
restaurants, and scenery. But all of the text was contained in graphics, and all of the site navigation was in graphics. Search engine
crawler's cannot optically character recognize text! So once again what do the search engines see? Nothing.
Next, just out of curiosity (and because I work for a search engine marketing firm), I performed another search: "le guanahani resort st.
barts" -- a search that included the correct spelling of the hotel's name. Nothing. A lot of their resellers appeared, not their actual Web
site.
The only query I could construct that returned their Web site in any search engine was a search for their correctly spelled hotel name by
itself without the island name of "St. Barts."
Solution: Work with an SEM firm to redesign the Web site to contain text that search engines can index and other search engine friendly
content. If you have no readable HTML text on your site (text that you can highlight with your curser), most search engines can only determine
the subject matter of your Web site by the text in the links that point at your site.
The less text your site contains, the fewer keywords and phrase searches will return your site in the first three pages of search results!
Though some people will search for you on your brand name, more people will search for you by keywords related to your category without
including a branded term. Le Guanahani is missing out on everyone who searches for "resorts in St. Barts" or "st. barts resort hotels," etc.
I may still stay at the Le Guanahani when I vacation... but in searching for them, I discovered so many other islands, other resorts - other
options. Their to failure to build a search engine friendly Web site and their lack of a complete search engine marketing strategy may have
cost them $5,000 of my vacation dollars and perhaps the vacation dollars of many others.
If you have not paid attention to how people search your website - what are you risking?
