The travel industry is extremely competitive when it comes to SEO. Big brands often take up a large share of the organic searches. For small to medium enterprises, it is possible to compete the major travel brands, if they follow the below 5 technical SEO hacks.
A) Identify and optimize with popular “Searched with” keyword terms
For other keyword suggestions you can use:
WordStream: Just type in the keyword you want suggestion for in the “get keyword ideas” box and you can find every keyword suggestion that is being used by travellers to look up for services. Submit your e-mail address to get hold of the data and arrange it in a nice spreadsheet for reference.
Soovle: The search results are produced by looking into the search engine queries of several search engines and not only of Google. By typing in your keywords at slower pace, it can auto generate keyword ideas.
Ubersuggest: This one is bit unreal as it provides with immediate and unlimited alphabetized and numerical keyword suggestions. Also, you can uncover more keyword suggestion which you can use to optimize your content with “searched for” keyword terms.
B) Use Content Marketing to Acquire Back Links
Online users look for validated information in the form of reviews, informative articles or blogs. Amongst many challenges SEO professionals face providing regular fresh content to acquire back links has its own share of complexity. Every user scouting for next holiday destination relies on information provided. You can attract their attention by content marketing in the form of:
Article Marketing: Provide information around the zeroed in keyword phrases in the form of high-quality informative articles. Use anchor text to direct readers to the respective travelling web page which is of their interest.
FAQ’s: In this, travellers queries preceded with “how to”, “which is” etc. need to be answered and added to the FAQ page on the travelling website.
Guest Blogging: Be consistent with blogs that you post on travel directories. Do not waste resources by writing for websites with low Domain Authority rather go with the reputed ones that can drive quality traffic to your website?
Social media outreach: Promote and influence traveller choices by marketing your content on social platforms in the form of posts, video, ads.
Some of the most influential travel directories for content marketing are:
- Lonely Planet
- Conde Nast Traveler
- The Guardian Travel
- Money Saving Expert Travel Advice
Every back link obtained with above mentioned practices goes in website favor. Greater the number of back links greater is your chance to rank amongst top search engine results.
Use link baiting tactics in your content marketing strategy to lure in rival or other websites to link to you. Link baiting is effective to establish Brand authority of your travel website.
You need not ask websites to link to you rather the quality of information provided makes them link to you. To make other websites link to you:
- Use info graphics to make content more interesting and easy to grasp
- Add videos to attract travellers who might find reading a bit cumbersome.
- Award freebies in the form of deals or discounts to make it shareable.
- Write quality content with rich information.
C) Focus on Site Structure and Page Speed
The attributes of ideal site structure are:
- Optimize title tags by placing the targeted keywords close to the title.
- Compelling titles to drive user attention.
- Add brand name at the end to give brand exposure.
Heading Tags for better organization: Highlight prominent parts of a travelling web page with HTML title tags.
URL optimization: Optimize URL to add value to the keyword. For every organic result the “ad” displayed in search engine results have URL with them.
Image Optimization: Add keyword rich descriptions to ALT tags, appropriate title elements and add short description regarding images.
Website structure and respective categories: Use keywords to name the respective categories and place relevant content in each category.
Address canonicalization issues: Get rid of duplicate content to improve user experience.
Use Inter-linking: For better navigation, reduction in bounce rate and to build relevancy amongst web pages to provide ease of navigation.
Validate HTML content: Use W3C validator tool to check correctness of HTML, XHTML, SMIL, and MathML documents, among other.
Get rid of broken links: Fix 404 errors and use IP re-direct such as 301’s to stay in search engine good books.
For Speed optimization:
Website load time: Use Google PageSpeed insights to assess website performance and what can be done to improve page speed.
AMP pages for Mobile users: AMP HTML pages rank high on mobile search results and improve user experience.
Besides these, be prepared to handle any sort of technical glitch that may result in website downtime and provide with round the clock assistance for any travelling inquiries.
D) Adopt a Proactive Content Marketing Strategy
Proactive content strategy takes in future aspirations and goals of a travelling website. Design and provide with tailored content to evoke traveller interests.
For proactive content strategy you need to ponder upon:
- Your target audience.
- What action would you like travellers to take?
- What sort of content will you publish?
- Events and places global/local travellers might be interested in.
- Frequency of content publication.
- How effective the content is?
Say, is there any festival or holiday season coming up or is there an event which brings in global community to a particular region. Optimize and market travelling features that may interest the targeted audience.
You can see below in the screenshot how travelling companies have used proactive content marketing tactic for an event that is organized in October. It drives traffic to a travelling website and also improves conversion rate.
A random search for “Oktoberfest+Munich+Flights” yields top results on search engine shown belo
With proactive content marketing convert travellers who have advance plans by creating buzz for the services on social platforms and accordingly optimize website content.
E) Mobile Optimization for Better Reach and To Improve Conversion Rate
To optimize your travelling website for mobile users you have to:
Provide with prompt results/information without compromising with quality.
- A precise CTA to guide to next phase.
- Filter the content to provide with precise information.
- Add quality images and videos to make it interesting.
- Make the content shareable across social platforms
- Develop an interactive mobile website for better relations
- How to optimize for mobile users?
Accelerated Mobile Pages have become the latest fad for the search engine as well as for mobile users. You can easily convert your travelling web page in to AMP HTML page and give your website that extra boost on search engine results.
With AMP pages your travelling website caters to user query with precise set of information that concerns the travellers
How does AMP work?
AMP has been divided into three components which are:
AMP HTML: It consists of custom tags and properties along with restrictions. People used to with regular HTML might find it easy to transform existing Webpages into AMP HTML pages.
AMP JS: Its main functionality is to handle is to manage resources handling and asynchronous loading.
AMP CDN: It is for performance optimization.
With mobile optimization you can cash in on the minute touch points of traveller’s journey to look for information. The number of travellers who rely on their smart phones to access travelling information is significantly high.
If you are yet to optimize, you’re travelling website for mobile users you are losing out on business prospects which negatively impacts the conversion rate.
Once you optimize travelling website with the above-mentioned tips you can experience a great deal of improvement in website traffic. Monitor these changes to see what works for your website and accordingly make tweaks to better the existing strategy.
