One of the easiest ways to promote your hotel to non-locals is with search engine advertising. But what happens when they click on the ad and go to your site? All too often, what they see is not what they expected, so they just click back to the search engine, wasting you money and losing potential business. How can you minimize wasted click-throughs and maximize search-inspired bookings? One key is to think carefully about your "landing pages". Jargon Alert: A landing page is the page people land on when clicking your ad.

Home May Not Be The Best Landing Page

Your home page is designed to speak to many audiences. It gives an overview of who you are and what you do, and, typically, a way to probe further to get at the details. But if someone has clicked an ad, they've got a concrete idea of what they are looking for. You want to help them get to it as quickly as possible. So for each ad you run, figure out which would be the most relevant page on your site to direct people to.

Let's say you have hotels in Atlanta, Augusta, and Savannah. If someone typed in "hotels Georgia" for ...