E-Business Manager recruitment pitfalls Hotels in Mauritius should avoid


Recently I came across a job advert that made a short list of requirements and a long list of duties for a person to practice the job of an E Business manager for a renown resort group in Mauritius. It included the terms such as SEO, Social Media, analyse Data, manage booking channels and not least to mention aggregate them with prices… Seriously! SEO?

Looking at the list I had to frown as I was reminded of past experience back in Hamburg when I worked for a media agency that hired me for SEO and later on requested me to also manage their online shop till the point of uploading all their products and writing each products description… I was overloaded to the point that I cracked and had to have a serious discussion with my bosses that I couldn’t continue with such a work load.

Hotels in Mauritius fail to understand that for certain types of jobs, various requirements that you place upon the applicant doesn’t reflect reality or just doesn’t make sense. In theory it does, but in shear reality, a human has limited capacities.
The advert in itself, if all these duties are to be practised in real life time scenarios, is prone to drain the employee if he or she gets employed and is new to this sector without any idea what is waiting ahead to negotiate with you for a better work environment. I would rather say victim to burn out. Both parties will end with deception and bad results. This fact, as hard as it sounds, needs to be raised so that Hotels in Mauritius can review their job positions in this arena. What both of you want to achieve is success for the company and the employee. You do not want to destroy your employee neither your e-marketing strategy. You will also want that person to stay long term once this person is running a successful campaign that leads to an increase in revenue. You need to strive to keep your best assets! Do things right so that you have highly motivated personnel working for you that will bring you long term results.

Let’s talk about SEO for a moment. Especially if you are a HR recruiter for a resort. You need to discern that various duties that are laid out for an E Business Manager often are several jobs of their own and cannot be compressed into just one person. Except if you want that person to oversea various persons practising these duties or collaborate with agencies and has a profound knowledge and understanding of each of these components. Thus more prone to also grasp the limitations of how much one person can handle and better manage a team while acting as a manager and coach.

Photo reference: By Abundioteca (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Photo reference: By Abundioteca (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

What does SEO mean to you?
☞ What do you know about SEO?
☞ Do you think SEO is just doing some website tweaks and making the website land on page 1?
☞ Do you think someone can just do 1hr of SEO per day and then each other hour quench in: Social Media, measure and report performance, identify trends, create and design micro-sites, manage booking engines, evaluate emerging technologies, support sales teams, evaluate distribution channels, and so on… and on top aggregate your distribution channels with prices.

☞ Do you believe your worker will bring good results when looking at that work load scheme? Are you looking for a super human!?

First of all, you cannot hire an SEO who in addition will do all that – period! I’m speaking of an SEO who masters his trade. Why?
If you are a top SEO, you do not need to be employed: you open up your own agency and sell your services or run your own websites that rank well and sell products.

So, employing an SEO is already a contradiction in itself.

SEO is big. If you were to employ an SEO, this person would be busy for the whole day! SEO isn’t only about ranking well, but also having various strategies in place for attracting the right traffic to your website and targeted.

As a Hotel in Mauritius, do you really need SEO?
Hotels, is a very competitive sector and I wouldn’t advise you targeting keywords such as hotels in Mauritius. You can do so in your ads campaigns, but we are speaking here of search engine optimisation, that is organic search results with an attempt to manipulate results…
There is no need for you to do that. You will most likely fall into the pitfalls of black hat SEO and damage your websites potential to ever rank. It is not rocket science to have the agency that makes your website to have it done with clean code which the search engines can crawl. Google will rank you anyway for hotel search queries relating to Mauritius. If you do a search you will see that major hotel brands of the island are listed. Googles ever improving algorithm in the semantic search area will figure out sooner or later through various signals that your website represents a hotel and if you are the owner or the brand owner, Google will want to include you in its rankings when people search for a hotel.

Focus on your brand. Use signals so that Google can understand that you are a hotel website. You should claim your Google+ page and also your listing on the map. With your Google+ page you can input all the data of your hotel and then link it to your hotels website by using the verification functions.

Keep your website active with fresh content. Run a blog! Inform about various aspects and events of your resort. Publish articles on tourism related platforms. Work on your brand and website, let Google take care of the ranking. Any attempt to manipulate Googles search engine results will get you penalised if you exaggerate it or push it to hard such as link building schemes.

Personally I don’t think that you need to hire an SEO for your hotel. I say this on reserve because you might still want to consider to collaborate with a professional SEO agency or freelancer SEO to work out a strategy for creating and developing some web properties which could be about various themes in relation to your website that can generate targeted traffic.
You need to redefine your strategy. Coming back to the E Business Manager, he can oversee or put into place a strategy of how to use your website to attract more users. Simply said would be by starting to run a blog! Yet, an E Business Manager will be busy with so many other sales related aspects of your company online that you should give him the tools and resources to avoid writing all the texts and have access to a professional text writer.

Engage your clients! Interview them. Write stuff people want to read and discover about your hotel. Share it on your social media platforms, it will result in a growth of followers, people sharing your posts and increasing your traffic and exposure. Personal experiences is something people want to read about before coming to your hotel. Check your reviews online! There is so much you can do. But if you are busy working on your rankings…

Now that we have figured out that your E Business Manager doesn’t have to be an SEO or do SEO, he has more room for the other tasks in your duties list but now let’s look at one more time killer that is also not just some peanuts for an hour.

As a hotel should I do social media?
Yes you must! Social media isn’t the posting of a nice photo on your hotels page on Google+ and Facebook only. Read here about my article about Social Media for Hotels in Mauritius.


4 thoughts on “E-Business Manager recruitment pitfalls Hotels in Mauritius should avoid

  1. Sebastien Staub

    Excellent article Dietmar, I must agree on all the points you made out. SEO is not a simple job and not completed in 3 minutes or within a month either. CEO’s that employ SEO’s must understand the entire process. We are not content creators either. This is another part of the solution that must be looked at seriously. This is why there are article writers out there in the world.

     
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  2. Amaëlle Lamusse

    Nice article that depicts quite interestingly the reality of e-business management in Mauritius. Here you are specifically referring to the hospitality industry & more precisely to hotels but the grim reality you accurately portrayed in your article can unfortunately be also applied to other type of sectors & business in the country. People often tend to get confused about e-marketing and what it truly involves or simply about what it takes to do it in a most efficient way. I agree that SEOs aren’t content creators but we ought not to forget that there is a direct link between quality content (and I’m not referring only to pretty sentences here but rather to all the essential technical & non-technical aspects of an SEO oriented content) and organic search engine optimization. I’ve been dealing with it since a few years now and I can say that I’m talking out of experience here. Other than that, it is true that one IT professional only cannot combine all the skills, a truth that most companies should be ready/able to deal with in 2016.

     
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    1. Dietmar Reigber

      Greetings Amaëlle,

      thank you for sharing. You mentioned the word efficient. It is a word that has always been spinning in my head and I realised I never took notion of the other word which is efficacity!
      Efficiency is getting a lot of tasks done
      Effectiveness is getting the right tasks done.

      This is the most fundamental principle of time management, and one which is constantly misunderstood i.e. effectiveness is far more important than efficiency. Efficiency and effectiveness are often used interchangeably but they are not the same thing. So, when you are effective you will also reach efficiency.

      Yes, Google also has some evaluation methods of discerning the quality of the content you are providing. There was a time when Google rolled out that authorship function which is not active anymore where you could see posts in serps with thumbnails of authors. Some authors developed into authorities relating to the quality of their content. Google had or still has many ways of analyzing other signals that could point to or indicate the quality of the content. It is also an artificial machine, currently in its infancy learning a lot. And it is not necessarily there to help or please us but also to make $$$.

      But yet I do not believe an SEO is a or has to be a good text writer (while it might be a great attribute to have). Many people believe they are SEOs but they are not. Search engines have improved a lot these days and there are various tasks long ago that would fall under SEO I would say simply falls under the normal things a website creator needs to pay attention to. The real complex SEO stuff, this I do not believe that many people master it. I even believed myself for a while that I was an SEO until I discovered Google+ Hangout and listened to SEOs like Bill Slawski talking to other SEOs then I realised I really do not master this state of the art technique.

      Figuring out keywords, tags, sentences, titles and so on, that is pretty simple (and time consuming – alone for this area its worth it to hire someone who is good at it!). You can also do some research, look at competition, use some tools. So far this is not rocket science and is just the basics and will not make anyone stand out as an SEO. Have a look at my post here: This is what SEO talk sounds like when 5 experts meet

      When Bill Slawski reshared my tweet I got 100 retweets! They are the authorities in this segment. He analyses a lot of Patents to understand various functions of the search engine and what to look forward to in the future. I have never done that and I believe very few so called SEOs do. So for me personally, i define SEO as something technical, the rest is more part of the web designer and online marketing text writer parts.

      In many cases you can also fare well of just having a good clean coded website with good content like running on a wordpress blog CMS for example and neat template while installing an SEO plugin. After all Google doesn’t want us to bother about SEO but do our thing like a human should and not game its algorithm which if detected can have negative impacts 😉

       
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