SEO for Travel Companies

Seasonality and Trends

Understanding the unique ebb and flow of the travel industry is essential to the success of the business long term. Depending on your businesses particular travel offering the peak and quiet seasons will dramatically change and it is important to understand the customers information gathering and research stage as well as the peak buying times and change the strategy accordingly.

For example, for the traditional UK holiday market for family holidays will peak in January and as a result all marketing efforts should be focused on that growth.

Understanding the SERP layout is the key to success

Each different keyword variation that a customer types into Google will trigger a completely different SERP layout. For example, a search for “flights to Barcelona” will trigger a completely different layout to “things to do in Barcelona”.

One SERP displays the Google comparison tool and multiple ads above the fold whilst the other SERP displays a knowledge graph panel, information cards about various landmarks and lots of FAQs.

Understanding the SERP features that Google triggers for each of these travel terms is essential to increasing your SERP real estate, increasing your CTR and driving more clicks to your web properties.

Reviews and SERP Presentation with Schema

One core part of the travel SEO buying cycle is your customers interaction with reviews. Having reviews surface in the SERPs with the correct schema implementation as well as a robust review collection strategy is essential to achieving a high CTR in a competitive SERP.

Changing customer behaviours

With an always on news cycle and a constant flow of content from official news sources and influencers alike, customers behaviours and travel preferences will change consistently. It is important to stay on top of industry trends and build them into your travel SEO strategy so that you can capitalise on emerging travel patterns.

Information Search vs Purchasing

A high percentage of traffic in the travel industry is informational content that customers consume during the research phase of planning a trip. Although it may seem tempting to focus the strategy on building transactional pages that convert and drive the most revenue, it’s important to build a content strategy around every stage of the conversion funnel from conversational, to informational to transactional.

Not only is their more low competition traffic to be had, it gets the customer at the very start of their journey and allows you to pre-sell them on your brand and your offers through very gentle sales prompts peppered through the informational resources that you have provided.

Working with existing PPC data

In the travel industry PPC, or paid search, is one of the highest converting channels. As a result, it’s important to start with your PPC data to build out your SEO strategy.

By understanding the keyword clusters that people click on before converting, we are able to update your SEO to reflect what already works in paid search and create a synergy between the two channels.

Listings across the web and dealing with OTAs

In travel SEO, one of the biggest competitors you have is yourself. Most travel businesses will list their flights, holidays and vacation rentals on multiple websites including comparison sites and online travel agents (OTAs). By doing this you increase your reach and pull in more potential customers but you also increase the amount of websites that are competing with you in the Google search results. Effectively, you are competing with yourself. Knowing this, and building a solid SEO strategy to combat it will mean that you are able to positively leverage the OTAs instead of losing business to them.

Reliable free traffic sources in a post-pandemic world

The advent of the global pandemic has drastically changed travel habits and what it means to be a marketer in the travel sector. However, as organic search is a free, always-on, acquisitions channel, it is one of the most reliable ways to bolster your travel business even in the midst of a pandemic.