Interesting and initially unbelievable study by Clickscene, to determine the amount of traffic travel sites get from search engines, has found 39% get a depressing zero.
Of course, a survey coming from a digital marketing company needs to be taken with a healthy dose of scepticism, but UK-Clickscene has developed a patent pending application which measures website content and levels of traffic hitting such pages.
The study of 1,185 UK-registered travel websites found that 39% do not get any visitors to pages from natural search results or paid-for advertising in search engines.
Furthermore, only 13% (155) of the travel websites monitored had used PPC techniques such as Google AdWords.
Clickscene managing directo Andrew Willis claims that a million new domain names were registered in the UK in 2010 (the survey didn't outline how many were travel sites) but very few push forward with a concerted marketing plan.
Interestingly, Willis says that its system found almost 2,100 travel-related business that had registered web addresses, but only 1,185 had actually put the site live on the web.
This, he argues, is because many companies buy domain names to stop others using them or may have folded since registering the URL.