Take Control of Your Trip Advisor Listing

With 50 million visitors -- that's 50 million unique visitors -- a month, Trip Advisor is in control of the travel review world right now.  Whether Yelp catches up remains to be seen.  So, I'm going to focus on Trip Advisor for now.

According to an e-mail that TripAdvisor sent to us early this year, Taos' TripAdvisor.com webpage and pages related to Taos received 1.6 million hits in 2010.  That's a lot of traffic for our little town.  

Are you fully optimized to get any business results from this traffic?

First, it's important that you realize that Trip Advisor is not just for reviews of B&B's, hotels and motels.  It has now extended its reach into restaurants, tours, and other attractions that may include ANY business in our area.  Look at the Taos Page, the Taos County Page or the New Mexico Page of TripAdvisor.com to see the many types of businesses being reviewed.

For example, if you look at the Restaurant Listings on any of these pages, you'll see El Meze Restaurant.  It has been consistently ranked #1 locally and either #1 or #2 statewide for some time now.   It is my opinion that this is in part because El Meze has actively promoted the business through Trip Advisor, in particular by encouraging guests to post reviews as they leave the restaurant.

Second, it's important that you realize that Trip Advisor is not your enemy -- even if some of your reviews have been bad, wrong, unfair or just plain stupid.  There are specific ways to deal with bad reviews and I'll discuss that issue in another blog post.  My point here is that Trip Advisor is now an important business tool for you to use with as much or as little time, money and effort as you choose.

As an example, La Posada de Taos has signed up for the subscription add-on that Trip Advisor offers.  On this page alone you will see links into the many ways the site has been restructured in recent years to allow you to control a lot of the information about your company that visitors to their website actually see.

Additionally, Trip Advisor has a plethora of promotional tools that any business can use.  We recommend that you consider signing up for the Business Listing and then pick and choose one or more tools.  We currently offer a promotional package of one type or another on our TripAdvisor listing, always trying to keep interest high for our listing.

Third, there are lesser known features about TripAdvisor.com that have been generating an increasing amount of traffic to Taos, including their Travel Forum and Travel Guide sections.  I strongly encourage all businesses in Taos to get active in these aspects of the Trip Advisor pages -- in particular the Travel Guide pages.  There is outdated information, useless information, self-promotional information and there are many things that need to be written or posted on these pages for the first time.  For example, look at the "Culture" posting for Taos on TripAdvisor.com.  It's terrible!  Well, OK, it's not great.  It needs help from someone in Taos who has the energy and enthusiasm to fix it.

A little over a year ago, a well-known and respected local Innkeeper asked me to assist answering questions on the Trip Advisor Travel Forum.  Over time with lots of posts, I was lucky enough to be designated as a "Destination Expert" on TripAdvisor.  I'll talk more about this issue in another blog post as well, but suffice it to say that before we started answering Forum questions many other so-called experts for New Mexico and Santa Fe were SLAMMING Taos, telling TripAdvisor visitors to New Mexico's Travel Forum that Taos wasn't worth visiting or that it was at most a day trip.  Ouch!

We have just about stopped that nonsense being posted by New Mexico's other Destination Experts, but it's a continuing battle. 

 The last point I'd like to make on this topic is about volume.  Any Destination is ranked in part by the volume of traffic it generates on any given website.   We know Google does this.  It is believed that Trip Advisor uses some Google search results for its rankings.  Google also bases its ranking on the frequency of content updates or upgrades.  Therefore, as a community, we can substantially raise our profile nationally and internationally if we ALL spend 15 to 30 minutes a week posting or tweaking something on the Taos Pages of TripAdvisor.com -- especially the Guide section where so much more is needed. 

 TripAdvisor.com is a Social Networking site.  Larger destinations with more resources than Taos have staff members who do nothing but manage their Social Networking sites such as TripAdvisor.com, Facebook, Twitter, etc.  We're not there yet.  This means that all of us, each of us, every one of us, can help control the future of our Town on that website -- the most important tourism website in the world.  I find it very exciting, personally.

 Good, bad or ugly, Trip Advisor is here to stay and I'm hoping we can all do some work to get this working for ALL of us.  Please help our community by doing the following:

1. Claiming their Google Places Pages and keeping them updated
2. Claiming their TripAdvisor.com listing and keeping it updated
3. Visiting the TripAdvisor Forums and Guide pages and keeping them updated
4. Posting content changes to your websites, your business listing sites and TripAdvisor.com