I was recently invited to speak at the Hays Travel IG conference. The annual event for travel companies within the group gave each company the chance to meet, talk business and get introduced to suppliers within the industry.

I was invited to talk about SEO in travel and the importance of having a bookable website which attracts traffic through the search engines. The room was made up of a varied group of travel company owners, some knew of SEO and had worked with companies in the past, the majority had only heard of it and lacked the knowledge in this area. Therefore the presentation needed to be fairly basic but educational and informative.

During the 25 minute presentation I talked about the following:

• :: The difference between organic, ppc, news and local results
• :: How to contend in such a competitive market
• :: Click fraud and the cost of travel keywords
• :: Organic search providing a more measurable ROI.
• :: The importance of landing pages and destination guides.
• :: Targeting the right keywords
• :: Leveraging the long tail travel keywords
• :: Measuring ROI through web analytics
• :: Unique content and travel writing.
• :: User generated content and reviews in travel
• :: Web 2.0 and social media marketing.

My presentation ended with a speed dating session. The speed dating concept was new to me and I found it a great way of spending some quality time with those who were interested in what I was speaking about. Usually, at most conferences, a speaker is faced with a queue of delegates wishing to ask questions. The speed dating format enabled the speaker to finish the presentation and go to a room next door where delegates had pre-booked a 10 minute slot to ask questions and look at their own site in more detail.

It proved to be a very beneficial conference, my presentation was well received and I was busy for the rest of the afternoon talking to delegates in more detail about their websites, exchanging business cards and arranging follow up meetings. I would recommend anyone vying for new business to consider speaking at a conference within their targeted industry, the opportunity to speak at length to your target audience at such a low cost is extremely powerful and the amount of business which has come from this one event has proved this.