SEO for travel websites and blogs

It used to be that your clients would walk into a travel agency, look through a catalog, select a destination, and the agency would do the rest. There was no need for travel SEO back then. Today, people sit down at a computer, tablet or smartphone to choose a country to travel to.

State of the tourism industry

With websites like Booking and AirBnB getting bigger every day, small travel agencies have an uphill battle to start ranking and, more importantly, continue selling reservations. 

Before we dive into the actual ranking factors and SEO best practices for promoting a travel business, there are a few key points to keep in mind regarding the niche itself:

•      Two types of websites compete for first place: those that offer services (travel agencies, hotels, airlines, etc.) and those that promote content (personal blogs, travel blogs, review sites, etc.). ). To a certain extent, you will be competing with both.
•      Search engines have become travelers' favorite way to do research on all things travel.
•      People will most often enter more general terms as a search term—they will rarely be looking for a specific agency or hotel—in other words, ranking for long-tail keywords is critical.
•      A visitor won't convert on their first visit and will almost never visit just one travel website - they will do a fair amount of research, explore several options, and then make their choice. Your goal is to get them to come back, not to get them to convert as quickly as possible.

Top SEO Factors in the Travel Industry 

According to SearchMetrics, the five most important ranking factors in the travel industry are:

•      Word Count – Pages that rank in the top 10 often contain more than 2,500 words.
•      Content Relevance – The information you present on the page should match the user's intent. In other words, don't try to force a sale on every page.
•      Number of images. High ranking pages will have a lot of images, but this is more due to the quality of those images than their quantity. You want to tell a story, help people imagine themselves there, and illustrate the destination, not just clutter up random images of random beaches.
•      Bullet in the list - High ranking pages will have more bullets - due to the fact that people really want to find relevant, structured and useful information, information that they can easily skim.
•      Number of Internal Links - Highly ranked pages contain more than 150 internal links (23% more than average). This is especially true for large sites with thousands of pages. In other words, make sure that your visitors can browse your website seamlessly, and that your internal linking structure is logical not only for search engine crawlers, but also for your potential customers.

While these factors are considered the most important, let's not forget that they are only a piece of a larger puzzle. 

Tourism company website audit

If you've been running a travel website for a while, you already have a lot of resources (both on and off your pages). The first step in any successful campaign is a website audit, which will tell you what to focus on to see the best results as quickly as possible. This can reveal anything from duplicate content issues to broken internal links.

In fact, these are the two factors that most often cause rankings to drop - large websites will often unintentionally have a lot of duplicate content, which is sometimes easy to fix, but can also require a fair amount of work. 

Another problem we often encounter is poor website structure that makes it difficult for the user to navigate easily. This will not only hurt your ranking, but will also cause you to lose customers. Which will lower your rating.

Technical SEO

Page speed, load times, image sizes, server issues, and anything that falls into the “technical” category is usually a one-time fix. In the era of mobile-first indexing, you need to make sure your pages are responsive. Having an SSL certificate is just as important as being GDPR compliant.

Competitor analysis

Once we know what your assets are, we'll look at what your competitors are doing. This will include everything from the keywords they rank for and don't rank for, the destinations they promote, the images they use, the stories they tell.

Keyword Research 

In parallel with the mentioned competitor check, we conduct keyword research for your website and your offer. This will tell us two things: what criteria you should rank for and what keywords you should stop chasing. You'll be surprised how driving traffic to a page that doesn't seem to be converting can increase bookings. If you have the right website structure and of course you give the right information. 

It will also be easier, and often better, to rank for more specific keywords (for example, “couples climbing vacation” instead of “adventure vacation”). It will target the visitor at a more specific stage of the buyer's journey, when they have a clearer understanding of what they need to find. These keywords may often be less competitive, but their main benefit is that they increase conversion rates. 

Pay-per-click advertising

While investing in paid advertising can often produce some quick results, we will always use our other tactics - these are more focused on the long term and will remain in effect long after your PPC ads have stopped running. 

Advertising newsletter

Email marketing is a great way to connect with existing and interested parties and perhaps inspire them to start planning their next trip. The main challenge here is to find the right combination of promoting your latest offers and showcasing the destination you are going to travel for.

Content marketing for a travel agency

We have already touched upon the importance of correct and high-quality information several times. In fact, storytelling is much more important in the travel industry than in any other online niche.

Even though we're discussing content marketing for travel, it's actually a step that needs to be taken somewhere between the research and marketing portion of your SEO journey.

Creating landing pages that are not sales-focused—pages that are detailed, informative, and engaging enough to capture the reader's imagination and that answer a specific query will have a much easier chance of ranking. While they won't convert on their own, a thoughtful internal link structure and call to action will nudge your visitors in the right direction.

Having original images is also a bonus - you can use them to add additional links, and your unique photography style will help you stand out and be remembered.