Search engine marketing: Transforming search engines into hotel distribution channels

Search engine marketing (SEM) is a form of online marketing whereby marketers and webmasters use a range of techniques to ensure that their webpage listing appears in a favorable location in search engines' results pages (e.g., Google, Bing, AlltheWeb, Altavista). The key strategy is to optimize webpages for the search engines, by ensuring that the company's webpages contain appropriate keywords and that the website's page hierarchy is logically arranged. An appropriate website design encourages the search engines' web crawlers or spiders to index a particular set of pages, and proper keywords promote an optimum ranking in search engines. This study aims to explore the different variables and aspects that come into play in SEM and to offer a strategy that hotel marketers can use to achieve these objectives, based on a focus group of eleven corporate-level hotel marketers and SEM consultants. The study employs the following four-stage framework for SEM strategy development: analysis, planning, implementation, and control.