Why small accommodation businesses don’t use Adwords

30. May, 2010 0 Comments

I was speaking to a friend yesterday about making a website for a motel. I was saying that of all mum/pop type businesses, motels have got the most to gain from a good website and search engine marketing, but that a lot of them have shitty websites that are not SEO’d. While I would say a decent portion of them do have websites, almost none use Adwords. When pressed, I couldn’t think of why, just that they don’t.

That shitty logic didn’t sit well in my mind, so I’ve now thought about it and come up with some reasons why motels and other small accommodation businesses don’t use Adwords to drive traffic.

Not educated about Adwords

When these companies go see a web designer, generally they go with those cheap web designers that offer affordable websites. They buy a 5 page package, get their website done, and thats the end of the story. The companies that sell affordable websites aren’t experts in driving traffic, and even if they were, the small ones don’t know how to sell that service and the bigger “affordable website” companies are big because they’re specialised and streamlined their process of making websites, and don’t mess with anything else.

So motel owners are never educated about Adwords, and most probably don’t realise it exists.

It isn’t sold to them

There are a couple of reasons that Adwords consultant’s don’t go after motels.

Firstly, the projects aren’t very big. There isn’t a lot of money in selling Adwords services to a motel.

Secondly, it’s hard to sell web services to motel owners. Partly because they get sold to A LOT from companies that can profit off them (see below), and partly because, motel owners seem to be tight with their money. (I don’t have evidence for that, but they’re small businesses with relatively small profits. It seems to me that they guard them closely).

Because of those reasons, it’s not appealing to try to sell Adwords to motels.

They get sold lies instead

Instead, what is sold to motels are listings in tourism directories. These are sites that have listings of things to do, places to stay, places to eat, etc.

These directories sell themselves as a solution to getting online. They sell rhetoric about showing up in Google.

I don’t believe these directories represent good value for motel owners. Firstly, they’re listed with tons of their competition, and secondly, the directory generally doesn’t do push marketing – they’re just relying on search volume that’s coming in because of their listings.

I have done some telemarketing to motels in the past. One of the most common objections I heard was “we already have a website”. Upon further investigation, they didn’t have a website at all, but these directories sell themselves as a solution to not having a website.

Bring it all together

So the reasons I think Adwords isn’t so prevalent amongst small accommodation places are:

Motel owners aren’t aware of Adwords, and the way they get their websites built doesn’t help them discover it
It isn’t profitable enough for companies to sell Adwords services to motel owners
They’re taught they don’t need it by directories that are taking advantage of them

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