Fuel Hotel Marketing Podcast: Episode 36 – The Best FREE Hotel Marketing Tools for 2017

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The Fuel team are big fans of being efficient and productive with our time. We are always looking for new tools that help us market our hotels smarter and more effectively. When we can’t find a tool that satisfies our specific needs, sometimes we create one ourselves. In this episode, we have compiled a list of some of our favorite tools that we use on a frequent basis and unveil a new tool created by our resident Analytics guru, Melissa Kavanagh.

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Show Notes:

Melissa’s Handy-Dandy Google Analytics Campaign URL Generator

The inspiration for this episode was this neat tool that helps hotel marketers create consistent Google Analytics Campaign URLs. Google has a similar tool, but this one is way better because it prevent you from making mistakes related to case-sensitivity and/or unwanted variants of your campaigns. At the end of the day, we all want clean data. This tool helps ensure that your campaign data is clean and usable. This downloadable tool can be found here: Google Analytics URL Builder

Google Tools

  • Google Search Console – Google Search Console (previously Google Webmaster Tools) is a no-charge web service by Google for webmasters. It allows webmasters to check indexing status and optimize visibility of their websites. www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
  • Google Trends  – Google Trends is a public web facility of Google Inc., based on Google Search, that shows how often a particular search-term is entered relative to the total search-volume across various regions of the world, and in various languages. www.google.com/trends/
  • Google AdWords Keyword Planner – Free AdWords tool that can be used to search for keyword and ad group ideas, see how a list of keywords might perform, and even create a new keyword list by multiplying several lists of keywords together. Keyword Planner can also help you choose competitive bids and budgets to use with your campaigns.
  • Google Pagespeed Insights – Page Speed Insights measures the performance of a page for mobile devices and desktop devices. It fetches the url twice, once with a mobile user-agent, and once with a desktop-user agent. The PageSpeed Score ranges from 0 to 100 points. https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
  • Test My Site With Google – Find out how well your site works across mobile and desktop devices. https://testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com/
  • Google Analytics – Google Analytics is a freemium web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic & many other KPIs. www.google.com/analytics/
  • Google for Work – Gmail, Calendar, Hangouts, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Google Sites and Vault. Google for Work is a service from Google that provides customizable enterprise versions of several Google products using a domain name provided by the customer.
  • Google Structured Data Testing Tool – Simple tool to validate and test structured data in websites. https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/u/0/

SEO & PPC Tools

    • Keyword Toolwww.Keywordtool.io
      Handy keyword tool that not only makes suggestions, but also provides search volume, CPC and completion.
    • Uber Suggesthttps://ubersuggest.io/
      Gives you suggestions for additional keywords and provides handy links to see search volume.
    • Moz Open Site Explorerhttps://moz.com/researchtools/ose/
      Research backlinks, find link-building opportunities and discover potentially damaging links with Open Site Explorer.
    • Moz Title Tag guideline & Preview Toolhttps://moz.com/blog/new-title-tag-guidelines-preview-tool
      This shows you what your title tag will look like and will let you test how various queries and bolding of those keywords affect what’s being displayed
    • MozCast – http://mozcast.com/
      Mozcast is essentially a report on how much fluctuation is occurring for search results on any given day. If you noticed lots of ranking changes for your site you can look at Mozcast to see if these fall in line with changes happening on sites across the web
    • XML Sitemaps- https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
      Simply enter your site’s URL and some optional parameters, and XML Sitemaps will create a sitemap that you can upload to Google Webmaster Tools.
    • Acquisio Broad Match Modified KW Converter http://tools.acquisio.com/AdwordsBroadKwConverter/
      Allows you to take your keyword list directly from a spreadsheet and will add the necessary + signs to make each keyword broad modified. You would have to add each one individually otherwise. Saves tons of time.

Check out a more extensive list of SEO tools, courtesy of Moz: https://moz.com/blog/100-free-seo-tools

Other Tools

Wayback Machinewww.archive.org
Go back in time and look at old versions of any website. This is really helpful if you want to see what your site looked like, or what content your site used to have but don’t have a backup.

Coschedule Headline Analyzer www.coschedule.com/headline-analyzer
You wrote the awesome content, now you want people to read it. Use this tool to help you decide the perfect click-baity title for your blog or article.

Omnibug – http://omnibug.rosssimpson.com/
Plugin for the Firefox Firebug add on to ease developing and debugging web metrics implementations. Each outgoing request (sent by the browser) is checked for a pattern; if a match occurs, the URL is displayed in a Firebug panel, and decoded to show the details of the request. In addition, requests can be logged to the filesystem.

Website Traffic Estimator – http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo
Get a relative idea of how much traffic your site gets compared to the competition.

Infogr.amhttps://infogr.am
Use your existing data to make awesome infographics

GtMetrix https://gtmetrix.com/
Another Page speed testing tool. Gives the pages of your site various letter grades based on the page’s load times. Offers detailed reports on what can be fixed and how important those items are to load times.

Shameless Plug Tool

Fuel Gauge Marketing Dashboard https://www.travelboommarketing.com/fuel-gauge-analytics-dashboard/

Truly, the Holy Grail of digital marketing. Get all of your data in a single dashboard, from SEO, website, PPC, social, PMS and much more. This is an essential tool for every hotel marketer who wants to save time but still make data-driven decisions.

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Download the Fuel Leisure Travel Study at www.fueltravel.com/study

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Follow Us on Twitter:

@_travelboom
@stuartbutler
@makavanagh
@marketingmeisha


Submit your questions and topic ideas on Twitter to @_travelboom. Download our leisure travel study at www.fueltravel.com/study/.

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