A good SEO strategy is an essential part of any successful travel website. If your site doesn’t show up in the search results, then you won’t be able to generate leads or traffic from search engines like Google and Bing.
This article will teach you how to create an effective SEO strategy for your travel website so that it shows up higher than your competitors’ sites when people perform searches.
Travel SEO Strategy
1. Market Research
- Market research: Who is your target audience?
- Analyze your competitors: What are their strengths and weaknesses?
- Research your niche: What keywords should you use to optimize for different types of searches?
- Research the market: Which search terms are most popular, and how much traffic do they generate? How much competition does each keyword have from other websites in the travel industry, as well as from Google itself (for example, if you search for “best hotels,” Google will show some results from its own database)? What topics related to travel are gaining more popularity over time (for example, “sustainable tourism”), so that you can focus your efforts on them later when they become more important.
2. Keyword Research
To get started, we recommend using Google Keyword Planner. This is because it offers an easy way to find and understand the popularity of search terms that are relevant to your business.
Google also provides a variety of other keyword research tools that can give you insights into how people are searching for information about your niche:
- Google Trends – tells you which terms people searched for the most in a given time period (past year, past week). It also shows you trending topics based on search volume over time.
- Autocomplete – A great resource for finding new keywords related to your brand or product with little work required from you! Just type in some seed keywords and see what pops up.
- Search Console – Offers detailed information about traffic trends from various social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter) as well as SEO factors such as backlinks and indexed URLs (the number of pages listed under each URL). You can also use this tool to find out how many times each page on your site has been viewed over the past month or so.
3. Content Creation
The content of your website is the most important thing to consider when creating an SEO strategy for your travel website. It’s what will drive traffic and generate revenue, so you need to make sure that it’s appropriate for users and search engines. Here are some tips:
- Content should be easy to read and understand
- Content should be unique, original, or at least not duplicated verbatim from other sources
- The search engines will reward you with higher rankings if they think that your site has unique content on it (i.e., they won’t reward you if they see that your site has a lot of duplicate content)
- Content should be optimized for user experience as well as SEO
4. Link Building
Link building is one of the most important parts of SEO and is a long-term strategy. It does take time, but it can be a crucial part of your marketing campaign.
Link building refers to creating backlinks to your website or blog from other sites on the internet. These links can come from social media profiles, forum posts or comments, guest blog posts, and many more types of linkable assets on other websites.
If you want more people to visit your site and stay there longer (aka increased engagement), then building a strong online presence through link building should be at the top of your priority list.
5. Local Search Optimization
You can also use a few other tools to help you with local SEO. Google My Business is available in many countries and allows you to add your business information, including a customized page for your website, address, contact details, and more. If you’re not already signed up for Google My Business, we highly recommend doing so.
Google Maps is another useful free tool that assists in local SEO.
You can add pins to specific locations on the map (such as airports) or let users create their own pins based on where they live or work using GPS tracking data from their phones or public transit systems.
While there are some limitations on what can be included in the maps listing – such as review counts – having an accurate location will still be helpful in helping customers find your site from search results pages like Google Maps’ “Local” tab.
You should also use Google Search Console (aka Webmaster Tools), Bing Webmaster Tools and Twitter Card Validator if possible since these all have ways of helping increase visibility among users who may otherwise miss out due to poor indexing practices.
6. Increase your Domain Authority
The Domain Authority (DA) is a score created by Moz that measures the strength of a domain based on link metrics. It is a measure of the authority of a website, and it ranges from 1 to 100.
The higher your domain’s DA, the more authoritative Google views your site as being.
This means that high DA sites rank higher in search results than low DA sites. In other words, if you have great content but no internal links or external links pointing back to it, you won’t get as much organic traffic as someone who has less content but better backlinking practices (i.e., they’re getting more external links).
7. Monitor Results
Once your SEO strategy is in place, it’s important to track your results. You can do this by using Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
Google Analytics will give you information on what keywords visitors are using when they search for the kinds of things you offer, while Google Search Console will tell you how often those keywords appear on the first page of search results (or not).
In addition to these tools, there are a few others that can be useful for monitoring your progress:
- Google Trends will help you determine which search terms people are most interested in at any given time
- Google Keyword Planner helps predict how popular certain keywords will become over time (which is good news if those terms relate to what you offer)
Conclusion
SEO is something you should definitely prioritize if the majority of your leads comes from people looking online for information about traveling.
If you have time and resources available, try adding some more keywords into your article text or headings so that visitors can find new content quickly. Keywords also inform the search engines what the page is about.
Another key part of SEO is link building. If you don’t have the time or expertise to do it in-house, you can always outsource the task to a third-party link building company. Link building will help increase your overall domain authority, which will help you outrank your competitors.
