Benchmark survey of Destination Websites - Part 2

In part one of this analysis (read it now if you haven't yet), I wrote about how we selected our sample of websites for the benchmark survey. We follow fifteen websites that provide visitor information for the island of St. Maarten / St. Martin in the Caribbean.

Our first observation point, which we will use as a baseline for comparison with future data, was the end of April 2009. Initially, we only meant to use the data as a way to gauge the strength of DineSXM.com versus other information providers. But, our curiosity got the better of us during the slow Summer season and we repeated the excersise: the next dataset is from the end of August, four months later. Since the second dataset revealed a lot of interesting material, it has now become our intention to repeat the survey once every quarter. Hence, we'll take our third performance snapshot of SXM tourist information sites at the end of October, and follow it up once more in January of 2010.

1st snapshot: April 2009

The graph below shows a histogram of estimated daily page views, together with a line diagram of each site's traffic rank. The figures are based on data from WebsiteOutlook, which was retrieved on or around April 25, 2009.


When we took our first comparative look, the DineSXM restaurant reservations and dining guide had only been online for 14 months. It was reassuring to see it compare well to established properties like Mr. St.Maarten and Everything St. Maarten on our left, and close enough to SXM Info - another longtime player in the market.

Other remarkable findings include the success of another newcomer, namely Discover-StMaarten, and the ability of St-Maarten dot com to maintain such a high traffic ranking after losing its affiliation with the Tourist Office. As the original developer of VisitStMaarten, I was also pleased to see my other brainchild, built as a consumer portal for the St. Maarten Hospitalty and Trade Association during my tenure as its Executive Director, do really well.

The follow-up: August 2009

The tourist season in St. Martin and St. Maarten starts after Halloween, and ends with the Easter weekend. Apart from a handful of French visitors in July and August, the island tends to quiet down rather dramatically in Summer. General interest in island travel information tends to die out somewhat as potential visitors spend less time surfing the web and aren't making plans yet for their upcoming Caribbean vacation.

We expected a general drop in traffic, but not quite the drama that is depicted in the image below...


Where did they all go? St-Maarten dot com traffic rank drops to under 2,000,000. ZebraBot is completely repurposed. StMaarten-Info changes ownership and gets a design overhaul. Discover-StMaarten ceases operations. And finally, Mr. St. Maarten loses some 30-40% of traffic, presumably due to a design change. There are also some positive developments: VacationStMaarten and VisitStMaarten seem to be growing, TravelTalkOnline and DineSXM are both holding their ground during low season.


In about a week, we'll take a renewed look at our competitive environment. The season is about to start... DineSXM underwent some minor, yet important changes over the Summer, it will be interesting to see if those changes have their intended effect.

Meanwhile, we'll be looking for two new websites to replace ZebraBot and Discover-StMaarten. One likely candidate is Best-StMartin. The second one is still up in the air. Our colleagues at Litemoon have recently launched yet another directory, maybe we'll include their MapSXM in the mix...

We're always open to ideas, please leave your comments and suggestions below!

Norbert

Benchmark survey of Destination Websites - Part 1

Part 1: Sample Selection and Preliminary Results

The DineSXM restaurant and dining guide for the island of St. Martin/St. Maarten was launched in early 2008. Now that the site is in its second year of existence, it receives a steady stream of visitors who are looking for reliable information on the best places to eat on our Caribbean island. Next to providing very extensive and detailed restaurant profiles, the site also lets visitors rate and review restaurants that they have visited, and it allows them to make guaranteed online table reservations at some 50 participating locations on both sides of the island.

Our online booking engine was built in-house and is now available for licensing in other locations through DineMonkey. It's a pretty cool piece of software that was written in Python and works with the industry-strength Zope2 application server. Features are pretty much comparable with those of major online booking services like OpenTable, LiveBookings, TopTable, DiningCity, etc. Except, better of course :)

Anyway... While visitor traffic and the number of transactions are growing at a decent pace, it's also interesting to look at how the site as a whole compares to other St. Maarten / St. Martin information websites. Most of these have been long-established, and some have the blessing of "officialdom" through the local tourist office or hotel association. Both kinds of traits tend to be important to the success of a site that purports to give visitors high quality information. DineSXM is in many ways still a new kid on the block.

Several months ago, as the site had just reached its first anniversary, we decided to do a bit of comparative analisys. We pretended to be a potential visitor of our beautiful island, and trying to get an idea of what it's like to spend our next vacation in the Caribbean. In other words: we asked our magic crystal ball (which goes by the name of Googahoo Yaglebing) to give us a general idea of the types of websites that our visitors might also be interested in viewing when looking for general St. Maarten and St. Martin destination information.

With Googahoo's help we compiled a list of about 100 potential sources of information on the destination. Then we removed the obvious corporate spam (Tripadvisor, Expedia, Fodor, Tripit, etc.) and sites that are primarily geared to "sell" accommodation. Specific activity sites would also be taken out: sailing and boating, cruises, and so on. Our preference went out to sites that have a distinct local focus. They must have varied types of destination information (activities, restaurants, beaches, nightlife) but should not be directly geared to selling trips or roomnights...

General Caribbean info sites, out. Hobby sites, albeit sometimes a great source of information, were also weeded out for our purposes.

After we ran out of red ink (read: the delete key broke), we were left with about 20-25 websites that were somewhat homogenous in their format, with the exception of a travel forum website that gets a decent amount of traffic (see graphs in the upcoming blog post) - of which most is related to general SXM vacation information.

At some point, we had come across WebsiteOutlook. A site which lets you type in a domain name and then spits out some general traffic and ranking results. It's one of many that offers such a service, but in our case it had given us verifiably accurate (within margins of course) data in the past. So, we decided to use it again and fed it our initial selection of domains. From those results, we took the top 15 traffic websites. Our magic sample size ended up at 15, only because most sites turned out to receive very few visitors. We set the minimum daily number of visitors to be that of the "official" tourist board website - the lowest ranking site in our sample (let's just not open that can of worms).

Between April 23 and 25, we fed the traffic ranking service the following domains:

For each domain, we noted the estimated number of daily pageviews, traffic rank, number of backlinks and Google Pagerank (just for the hell of it, as the information it gives is known not to be actionable). Next, we plotted the numbers in a very exciting Excel graph, wich resulted in the following candy-colored image:

As you can see, none of these sites are actually very busy Click the graph to enlarge the image. They range from approximately 100 to a little less than 10,000 daily pageviews each. The busiest website with information relating to St. Maarten had a traffic rank of 192,000 as of April 2009. In the next part of this article, I will dissect this preliminary ranking a bit more and try to draw some conclusions.

In the meantime, why not visit the DineSXM restaurant guide yourself and get the latest info on what St. Maarten & St. Martin Restaurants have to offer.

Analyzing search engine ranking results

Since our launch of DineSXM.com in February 2008, search engine traffic has contributed significantly to the site's growth. In the 3 month period from March 1st until May 31st 2009, approximately 63% of visitors came to our restaurant reservations and dining guide by following a link from a search engine. This number is up from 25% in the same period in 2008.

In the 16 months that the site has been online, we have been able to determine what the types of keywords are that:

1. bring visitors to DineSXM,
2. result in conversion activities

Conversion activities include actions such as registering with the site, adding user generated content such as restaurant ratings and reviews, and -most importantly- making online reservations.

Our main finding is that two separate groups of visitors are most likely to convert. The largest of the two segments consists of persons who search for a specific restaurant by including its name in the query term - these visitors have reached the end of their decision making process and are ready to finalize their transaction. DineSXM is able to successfully answer the user's query by providing them with the ability to make their restaurant reservation online.

In contrast, the second sizable group is still in an exploratory phase: their search is focused enough to specify their intended activity (dining / visiting a restaurant) on St. Maarten or St. Martin, but their decision as to which restaurant to visit has yet to be made. In similar fashion, the latter group hasn't quite made up their mind yet as to which types of cuisine, environment, or neighborhood they are going to visit.

Today's analysis of DineSXM's search engine performance will focus on the keywords that are used by people who are looking to find assistance on our website in order to help them make a decision. In this situation, DineSXM is able to add significant value as a service - both to our participating restaurants, and also to potential guests who are browsing the site. Rather than just serving as a transaction platform (by facilitating the booking), the website's quality content and consistent presentation is what drives the visitor to conclude their search process and become a paying restaurant guest.

The terms that have been identified as strong drivers are keyword phrases that specify the geographic location: (St. Maarten / St. Martin, SXM) in combination with the activity that a visitor intends to research (dine / dining / restaurant / restaurants).

In order for a search result to be among the ones being followed -clicked on - by a potential site visitor, at least three conditions have to be met. Two are under the control of a webmaster, and one is determined by the search engine's algorithm. The latter one is something a welll organized website can be optimized for, and thus can be influenced in part.

1. Title of the resource
   Search engines utilize the title of a resource (page) as the heading of the search result and as a link to the item that is shown. Furthermore, that text is often bolded and underlined. It acts as the first visible cue to a user, as to what they will find if they click on the link that is presented to them.
   
   DineSXM utilizes titles that include what the site is about, and the section of the website that is about to be visited. The second part of the title is capitalized, to stand out from other results. A user's decision as to which of the results to explore further is made in a fraction of a second. Predictably, clear and descriptive titles, such as the ones provided by the DineSXM website, will usually be the deciding factor.
   
   
2. Excerpt of the resource
   In general, while search engines decide which exact text to use when displaying a descriptive text for the resource, webmasters can influence this by providing a relevant snippet.
   
   In our experience, search engines will prefer to show what is supplied to them. DineSXM supplies the search engines with clear, concise, and descriptive text that can be used as an excerpt - thus leading even more visitors to click-through and visit our dining guide.
   
   
3. Position amongst the results displayed to the user
   Complete books have been written about the ever-changing algorithms that search engines employ to decide the sequence of results that is presented for a certain keyword phrase. Suffice it to say that we carefully monitor a large basket of common keyphrases that are important in guiding visitors to DineSXM. The graphics presented here are based on our daily observations of ranking changes.
   
   Since ranking results are known to fluctuate, it is important to determine which factors are most likely to affect a page's position among other possible results shown to a user. One of the primary indicators that determine the relevance of a particular resource for a certain combination of keywords is the quality of content that will be provided to a visitor, both on the to be visited page itself, and in a more general sense on the website as a whole.
   
   That is exactly why we continue to build out the restaurant guide with clearly written, reliable, quality information. The website's restaurant updates, user reviews, articles, and even the recipe section serve to complement and increase the value of DineSXM to our users. We also try to make it easy for search engines to understand what we're all about: one of our most recent enhancements was to include additional hints that make it possible to parse address information and reviews directly from DineSXM pages.
   
   Looking at Bing and Google Squared, our crystal ball tells us that the major search engines will utilize these types of enhancements, in order to present their visitors with useful, actionable results. DineSXM is fully planning to leverage the engines' presentation changes to our advantage.

The data presented here serves to highlight that DineSXM is doing a great, and fairly consistent, job in ranking for its money keywords. There is still some room for improvement, I'd like to see us in the top 3 for all these combinations. The trend is that our ranking positions are still improving, which leads me to think that our goal is very much attainable.

For most phrases we now rank in Google's top 5 results: above the fold and in some cases with an extended or double listings. Not too bad for a new site, I'd say. For searches that have to do with "dining" the graphics show a relative advantage overall compared to "restaurants" in the search term.

Some new questions are also raised, like what is causing "st martin restaurants" and "st maarten dining" to be such outliers? I'm lacking a logical explanation for this. Looking at the source data, I am less worried about the former because it has not been fluctuating as much as "st maarten dining" and I can understand that "restaurants" is more competitive than "dining." I could envision the phrase dropping down to where it belongs as the site grows larger and gains more trust.

Google clearly sees SXM, St. Maarten and St. Martin as synonyms and I'm tempted to believe that the domain name is of importance in explaining our performance with regard to Dining vs Restaurants. A factor could be the relative search frequency of various terms.

Some major changes to DineSXM have been made since these graphs were created. In the past month, we have started adding more content, nearly duplicating the number of restaurants for which we have information available.

This marks a big departure from our initial goal, which was to profile only venues that can be booked online. Time will tell if we made the right decision: insofar that summary, or teaser, descriptions of -all- restaurants on the island will lead to more transactions for our featured (and paying) restaurants.

Every restaurant on the island should be on DineSXM. As a restaurant owner, you stand to gain with a featured listing. The price is right, and among St. Maarten / St. Martin websites, we're the only ones that give you regular feedback and updates on your online performance. It's time for everyone to stop complaining about the recession and instead start doing something about it. Our best performing restaurants are on top of things -and it definitely shows!

Get on top of things: join DineSXM. Read the listing information on our website and give us a call - you'll be glad you did!