How do we implement a travel SEO that actually works?

We start by setting a business goal, reverse engineering competitors, and designing realistic milestones. And we wait.

SEO is not fast; it is not easy. But it is one of the highest ROI marketing strategies in the market. Which means that you cannot avoid it if you want a successful business.

The travel industry is flooded with competition – we don’t need to tell you that. Yet those companies that market themselves properly with effective digital marketing strategies, and bring in new customers at a reasonable acquisition rate are bound to make huge profits.

Gone are the days when people would turn to brick-and-mortar travel agencies for booking trips. Instead, everyone now relies on search engines like Google, Bing, etc. Search engines have become major repositories of information that showcase every travel agency depending on a user query. This is where travel SEO plays a major role.

According to the Search Engine Journal, more than 93% of all web traffic comes through search engines. So, it is imperative to stay along with the trends and create a website that puts you on top of search engine results. Travel SEO is this process of developing your travel website that attracts both search engines and travelers.

Before developing an appropriate website, it is important to understand the purpose and interests of travelers. This will help you implement effective digital marketing strategies since search engines aim to deliver user-centric results.

Through this article, we will walk you through the relevance of SEO for your travel website. Also, we have compiled a list of specific areas that you need to focus on implementing smart and ethical digital marketing techniques.

Let’s start.

Why is Travel SEO important?

Irrespective of the size and type of a business, it is not easy to survive and gain exposure in the online space without strategic customized SEM efforts. You might have developed and designed your website with eye-catchy graphics, user-friendly navigation, attractive fonts, responsiveness, quick load time, and other features. But it is your digital marketing strategies that ensure that your brand is presented before the right audience at the right time.

As you start optimizing your website for higher SEO rankings, you will notice the following benefits in the long run:

•   Increase in website traffic
•   Improvement in brand visibility
•   Reduction in patient acquisition cost
•   Rise in ROI
•   Increase in connections with interested prospects
•   Growth in website rankings for appropriate search queries

How to implement Travel SEO?

SEO implementation for a travel website takes into account several factors to meet the demands of both the audience and the search engine. Here are some areas where you can bring improvements for the implementation of your search engine optimization strategies:

1.   Page load time

Make sure that your website loads in the least possible time duration. When the loading time goes from 1s to 10s, the probability of bounce rises by 123%. According to Google the recommended load time for an average webpage is less than 3 seconds. Regular updates and SEO maintenance of your website is important because it protects your webpages from threats like customer dissatisfaction, tarnished brand image, loss of potential customers, and decrease in search engine rankings.

Some factors that can affect your page speed and travel SEO are various types of ads, usage of unclean codes, JavaScript issues, multiple flash content, unoptimized images etc. There are several online tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, and Pingdom Website Speed Test that will help you identify your page speed. This way you can optimize the content of your pages based on SEO standards so that they load quickly and provide an engaging user experience.

2.       Keywords related to tourism

Every digital marketing strategy includes optimization of content by placing the best matching keywords on the website, social media posts, GMB profiles, etc.

However, make sure that you are not writing content just for keyword purposes. Such practices can get caught by search engines like Google and your website may be penalized for that. It can affect your SEO status drastically.

Additionally, you can use tools like Google’s Keyword Planner, Keywords Everywhere to find the most relevant keywords that your potential users are searching for.

Also, before using the keywords for your travel SEO, you need to identify the purpose behind every keyword. Search engines categorize the keywords into three types based on the search of users as informational, navigational, and transactional.

•       Informational search – to find a particular piece of information
•       Navigational search – to go to a specific webpage
•       Transactional search – to make a purchase

Choosing the right keywords for your travel SEO is a crucial aspect of your marketing. Here are some tips to get the best keyword usage in your content:

•       Think from your customer’s perspective and start researching for keywords.
•       Go to your competitors’ websites and analyze the search volume for these keywords.
•       Use online keyword research tools for SEO management.
•       Map each keyword to a particular page on your site.
•       Constant analysis of the performance of the keywords.

3.       Meta Tags and Page Title

The title tag of a page is one of the most important elements in SEO management. Also, according to a study by HubSpot, page titles that contain 6-13 words generate the maximum traffic. So, make sure you follow suit and keep them short. Here are some more tips to create a killer page title for your travel SEO:

•       Provide a unique title to every page
•       Avoid duplicate content in the title tag
•       Do not stuff keywords in your page titles

In the same manner, the meta description of your web page plays a relevant role in the success of your digital marketing. Google recommends that the maximum character length of your meta description should be 275; and also, it should be an organic ad text. So how do you achieve that? Here are a few tips:

•       Use well-researched and targeted keywords appropriate for your travel SEO.
•       Effectively communicate the benefits of the content to the readers.
•       Make sure that the meta tags are relevant to the content on the webpage.
•       Do not use the same meta description across your entire site.

Do not overlook the meta descriptions and page titles of your web pages. They not only enhance the SEO but also create the first impression on your audience and increase their curiosity to explore the content on your site.

4.       Develop E-A-T content

Digital marketing experts will tell you why it is important to focus on Expertise, Authoritative and Trustworthy content on your website. If you want people to show interest in your content and respond to it, you must ensure that your content is worth talking about.

Most search engines follow a pattern wherein they ensure that these factors are maintained in content creation mandatorily.

However, they do not rank your content solely depending on the SEO keywords and links. The pages or sites that have a purpose, or content that does not help users, has misinforming and deceiving content will be ranked lowest while content that follows the E-A-T pattern will lead in the results.

Google’s SEO parameters refer to duplicate content as substantive blocks of content across domains that are either completely similar to other content or are appreciably the same. Users prefer unique content from their search results and therefore Google filters and showcase only the original version.

So, how do you create quality content for your travel SEO? Let’s help you out. Here are some tips to enhance rankings through effective content marketing.

•       Do research and analysis before developing content
•       Focus on your target SEO audience
•       Align the content to fit your individual business goals
•       Maintain consistency across all channels – including social media pages
•       Design the content with appealing images, videos, and infographics
•       Understand the basics of HTML, SEO, and CSS

5.       Voice search

Voice searches allow your users to initiate their query while cooking, jogging, cleaning, etc. It will let them multitask without interrupting their activities.

A survey by PWC mentions that around 71% of their respondents preferred using a voice assistant to search for something than physically typing the query. Integrating this technology into your SEM strategy is undoubtedly a win-win situation for your website.

6.       Link Building

External/ outbound links lead users from your website to other sites for additional references. Internal/inbound links are the other ones that drive users from other sites to your websites. For effective SEM, it is necessary to implement both in your web pages. However, overuse or misuse of these links might end up in you losing your visibility on the search results pages. Here are some strategies you can implement in your travel SEO planning while adding links to your content.

•       Inbound links on multiple pages of notable domains with higher page rank.
•       Inbound links on reputable domains
•       Relevant outbound links to appropriate web pages
•       Number of no-follow and do-follow links.

Search engines consider negative links as the intention of building an artificial depiction of reputation and relevance. With the help of effective technologies and SEO tools, you can easily assess the quality of domain links on your pages and reject all the negative links.

7.       Schema Markup

Schema markup is one of the most effective local SEO marketing that presents your brand on the local search results. It bridges the gap between search engines and your content. It is not easy to rank higher if search engines cannot identify your content.

Schema markup and local SEO were introduced to resolve this issue. You need both of these techniques for the effective implementation of your travel SEO strategies. Applying schema without local SEO or vice-versa, will not drive expected results.

When implemented in the correct way, many local opportunities can be easily accomplished for your business. It is particularly important for small business owners to attract local customers. To implement correctly in your SEM, you need to maintain an impressive profile on different platforms including local directories, Google My Business (GMB) listing, social media platforms, and others.

Schema markup will effectively convey the differences in all this content to respective search engines. This is the main reason why it is imperative to use a schema in your SEM strategies.

Tying it all together: Strategies to improve travel SEO

In order to provide a better user experience and avoid spamming practices, most search engines keep updating their algorithm. If you fail to keep up with the trends and change your travel SEO content accordingly, then you will lose the race.  

You can avoid this by relying on the services of a competent SEO service agency. Get My Sites is a specialized Digital Marketing Company delivering out of the box solutions to multiple industry verticals.

Just give us a shout out in the comments below or contact us to start a discussion about effective SEO implementation for your business. We would love to talk to you!