Car hire companies are using paid search campaigns to get ahead online, according to a recent survey by search engine marketing analyst Greenlight and covered by
Travolution.co.uk
Paid search is the method of paying Google to advertise your company online, usually on a cost-per-click basis.
Car hire is a very competitive market with thousands of companies, brokers and suppliers all trying to get the upper hand on the results pages.
Creating a strong Internet presence is particularly important at a time when the industry has had to reduce fleet sizes as a result of the recession.
There are numerous methods of doing so and Travelsupermarket has been trying them all.
The company has had particular success with long tail search terms such as car hire Malaga, for which it ranks number one.
Another company which is performing strongly in worldwide keyword searches is Rhinocarhire.com.
Rhino increased its marketshare for natural search by 6% moving it up to seventh position. It also recently received an award from Travolution for the best car hire company in 2010.
Although Travelsupermarket comes first for 119 long tail keywords, it is only number eight for ‘car hire’, which is the most popular generic keyword. Overall there were 1.9 million car hire related searches in July alone which is a 40 percent increase since April.
Another strong competitor is Carhire3000. In paid search terms Carhire3000 was the most visible site in the survey with 77% share of voice ahead of Auto Europe and Avis.
However the company only came in 14th place for natural search results. These are companies that get to the top of the Google rankings without having to pay for Adwords. Easycar came first while the previous number one Carrentals dropped to second place.
Greenlight concluded: “On the whole, the top car hire brands achieved greater visibility for paid search than natural search.
“This suggests that utilising targeted strategies to buy their way to market visibility can be successful.
“On the whole the study indicates fierce online marketing competition within the industry.”