Checklist For Better Travel Website SEO

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Checklist For Better Travel Website SEO

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6 Tips for Travel Website SEO

More and more people are researching, comparing and booking their vacations online. Your website may be incredible but it should appear prominently in the search results for people to find it.

You should implement SEO as a part of your marketing strategy if you want to compete with other businesses.

For optimal results, you will require SEO experts but you can start by following these best practices:

1. Most customers use mobile devices to get information about their vacation destinations. More than half of mobile users are comfortable searching, booking and planning their vacations using their devices. Your travel website should be mobile-friendly as this will help you to rank higher on mobile and desktop devices. You will have a better chance of keeping people on your website longer. Your website should use a responsive design and be 100% mobile-friendly.

2. Backlinks from reputable and high-authority websites will help to improve your ranking on Google. Make sure you get backlinks from websites that are relevant to your industry. For example, you can get backlinks from travel directories, review sites, tourism bureaus, chambers of commerce and travel publishers.

Semrush

3. Review your keywords and if they are general keywords then they will be very competitive. You should find a specific keyword combination that does not have much competition. This will help to improve your visibility online. Identify your long-tail and transactional keywords.

Along with your general keywords also use your long-tail keywords which are more exact to the ones people use when looking for a specific service you are offering. Keyword research helps you to find the keywords that will best serve your SEO purposes.

The steps involved in keyword research are as follows:

  • Brainstorm depending on what you know about your target customers and the search terms they mostly use.
  • Use tools like keyword planner in Google AdWords or SEMrush to find your keywords.
  • Use a competitive analysis tool like Moz SERP to find out how challenging it will be to rank for the target keywords.
keyword planner in Google AdWords

4. If you organise tours to multiple locations, you can create dedicated pages for the individual locales where you offer tours. This will allow you to use your keywords and phrases more and build- in-depth content around them. The more value Google sees your website deliver to the users the better the search rankings you will be able to achieve.

5. A website with good photos of beautiful getaways will get more traffic if the images are optimised for SEO. Make your filename unique and descriptive and use keywords in them. Alt-text is used to describe the content of an image, use Alt-text with all your images. Alt-text also impacts the accessibility of your website to the visually impaired.

You can improve your SEO by reducing the file sizes of your images. If you use large images then this will cause your website to load slowly. This should be avoided as page load speed is a ranking factor in Google. Most visitors will leave the website if it does not load within three seconds.

SEO ElementDescriptionImplementation MethodsRelevant StatisticsSource
Mobile OptimizationEnsuring the website is responsive and provides a good user experience on mobile devices.Implement responsive design; test with Google's Mobile-Friendly Test tool.69% of tourism sales occurred online in 2023.Statista
High-Quality ContentCreating valuable, informative, and engaging content that meets user intent.Develop original, well-structured, and regularly updated content that addresses travelers' needs and interests.Websites that rank first on Google search results receive 34.36% of all clicks for a given query.The Brand Shop BW
Local SEOOptimizing the website to attract local travelers and appear in location-based searches.Create and optimize a Google My Business profile; include local keywords; ensure consistent NAP (Name, Address, Phone) information across platforms.72% of people who conduct a local search will eventually visit a physical store.The Brand Shop BW
Page Speed OptimizationImproving website load times to enhance user experience and search rankings.Compress images; minify CSS/JS files; leverage browser caching; utilize tools like Google PageSpeed Insights.A 1-second delay in page load time can lead to a 7% reduction in conversions.Forbes
Meta Tags OptimizationCrafting compelling and relevant meta titles and descriptions to improve click-through rates.Use SEO plugins to edit meta tags; include target keywords; maintain appropriate lengths for titles and descriptions.Google rewrites title tags 33.4% of the time.Ahrefs
Image OptimizationEnhancing images to improve load times and provide context to search engines.Compress images; use descriptive file names and alt text; implement responsive images.Optimized images can reduce page load times, improving user experience and SEO rankings.Forbes
Internal LinkingCreating links between pages on your site to improve navigation and distribute link equity.Use descriptive anchor text; link to relevant pages; maintain a logical site hierarchy.Websites with a strong internal linking structure are more likely to have better crawl rates and user engagement.Ahrefs
Voice Search OptimizationAdapting content to cater to voice search queries, which are often conversational and question-based.Incorporate natural language and long-tail keywords; create FAQ pages to address common questions.Half of US consumers use voice search every day.Semrush

6. According to the Moz Local Search Ranking Factors survey, online reviews are one of the top 10 factors that can influence local search results. Just having a presence on review sites like Yelp, Facebook, City search and Google My Business is not enough, you need positive reviews to stand out from the competition. The first impression can lead to someone visiting your website to learn more and explore other options.

These are the basic SEO practices, but there is more to consider. If you want to implement SEO for tourism sites then consider Supramind.com, we offer SEO services.