When a Melbourne couple plans a winter escape to Gippsland, they don’t start by searching your business name. They’ve never heard of you, that’s the whole point. They start somewhere like visitvictoria.com, or australia.com, or visitgippsland.com.au, browsing places to stay and things to do.
Here’s what a lot of operators don’t realise: those websites don’t write their own listings. Nearly everything on them comes from one national database called the Australian Tourism Data Warehouse, or ATDW. You fill in one profile and it feeds the lot. Visit Victoria’s site alone gets over ten million visits a year, and that’s before you count the national and regional sites pulling from the same well.
Better still, when someone clicks your listing, they land on your website. No commission, no booking fee, no middleman clipping the ticket. Earlier this year ATDW was sending Victorian operators more than 73,000 leads a month, and that’s only counting Visit Victoria’s site.
So where’s the catch? There are two, and both come down to neglect.
The first group of businesses never listed at all. They’re simply not there, invisible on every one of those websites, while the operator down the road quietly soaks up
the traffic.
The second group listed once, years ago, and haven’t looked at it since. Photos from three summers back. Opening hours that don’t match winter trading. A description bashed out in a hurry that reads like a council form. Some have even let the renewal lapse
without noticing and dropped off every site at once.
Which brings up the bit worth knowing: it’s not free for businesses anymore. The fee was waived through the bushfires and COVID, but it’s back, currently $295 a year, or $120 if you’re an accredited operator. Event listings and not-for-profits are still free. For accommodation, tours, attractions and food and drink spots in a tourist town, that works out to under a dollar a day to sit where every visitor starts their planning. Hard to buy advertising that cheap anywhere else.
If you do list, do it properly. Photos make or break it: real ones, recent ones, big enough to look sharp on a phone. Write the description for the visitor, not the tourism board. They want to know what they’ll see, eat and do, not your mission statement. And pick the right category, because a fishing charter listed as “general service” might as well not exist.
Here’s your two-minute job this week. Open visitgippsland.com.au and search for your own business. If you’re not there, or the photo is from 2019, or it says you’re open seven days when you dropped to five for winter, you know exactly what needs fixing. School holiday trips are being planned right now, so the sooner the better. And if you’re not sure where to even start with it, sing out.
Matt Rowlands runs Your Mate Agency, helping regional businesses get found online. Get in touch at yourmateagency.com.au or 0478 101 521.
