Bronze Medal Winners

Review: Lanierbb.com

This site, although not particularly eye catching, seems to get decent traffic and create a modest return. A long established directory, Pam Lanier’s is one of the few remaining print directories promoting bed and breakfasts. Membership in the site includes the print listing. Also includes membership via the travelguides.com URL. Recently added “featured” listings seem to be mostly a way of increasing the monetization of the site, especially since their own FAQ page states “Do I have to pay for a better listing, additional placements, etc? - Never! Pamela Lanier insists on a level playing field for all members.”. Interestingly as well, the statistics provided by their innkeeper “check traffic” pages are nearly double those that we collected through our own (multiple) methods.

The Good: Reasonable price for a strong reach. Long time travel guide has great consumer credibility. Search is fast and concise. Most prominent links are to inn website directly.

The Bad: Odd page layout gives a lot of screen real estate to their logo/header. Wordy home page stuffed with keywords. Few internal pages (Inn pages) have pagerank. Bland result pages. Photo gallery is old school and forces open in a new window. Reservation Inquiry form is unnecessary for most inns and confusing for users and innkeepers (emails innkeeper a request).

Our Inn Results: We advertise on lanierbb.com. We are in a mildly competitive area on their site, there are about a half dozen inns listed in our region. In the last 6 months we received 211 click throughs to our website from this one. The visitors viewed an average of 5 pages and spent an average of 4 minutes on our site. Of those there were 2 who followed our preset conversion path and became a reservation. (This does not account for others that may have become a reservation through alternate paths i.e. phone sale, return visit to our site or booking directly via an alternate channel). Overall, lanierbb.com ranked 12th in our paid directory click through and conversions in the last 6 months.

My Ratings:

Overall Average:
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The Stats:
Age of Domain: 7 years
Main Page Pagerank: 5
Number of Inbound Links: 34,907
AlexaRank: 220,361
Quantcast Monthly Uniques: 45,575
Alternate Domain Names: No
Direct Links to Your Website: Yes
Least Expensive Membership (annual): $159
Most Expensive Membership (annual): $159
Notes about Packages and Membership: Only one package, setup fee of $40. Includes listing in print editions. $89 introductory rate on “Priority Placement” which lists you on a rotating basis on your state, region and city pages for 3 months (for $125).
Quantcast Summary: This site reaches approximately 49,051 U.S. monthly uniques. The site attracts a mostly Caucasian, more female, primarily older, more educated, more affluent audience.The typical visitor books lodging at bedandbreakfast.com, visits cooksrecipes.com, and subscribes to Food & Wine.

The Site:www.lanierbb.com
Review Date: January 27, 2008

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