SEO Misakes That Travel Brands Should Avoid

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SEO Misakes That Travel Brands Should Avoid

By Rohit Vedantwar on Mon, 03/27/2023 - 10:16
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Consumers use the search option when they research flights, accommodations and other information. They research details, consider the reviews and compare the prices before making a booking. Online search is the main touch point for holiday planning.

As search plays a major role in the travel and tourism industry it is important to implement SEO for all travel businesses. Many SEO pitfalls are unique to the travel industry and must be stopped.





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SEO mistakes and their solutions

  • Travel websites are E-commerce websites and you can create stunning product pages to engage visitors. But when these are shown on mobile it is harder to showcase your efforts.

    You should simplify your product pages and cover product titles, images, call-to-action, product descriptions, travel information, testimonials and more.



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  • Large-scale travel websites have millions of product pages, content, blogs and backlink profiles which gives them a competitive advantage. They dominate the high-volume search queries. Competing with them will not get you anywhere.

    You can find alternative variations of keywords with lower competition and try to rank for them. Once you start to rank for them and get traffic then you can start to rank for more competitive keywords. Your content strategy should target high-volume keywords, mid-funnel keywords and long-tail keywords.


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  • Filling your home page with pictures and videos of luxury villas, vibrant sunsets and more. By doing this travel websites are missing out on big SEO opportunities.

    You should fill your home page with rich text and keywords to get the advantage of the page’s link equity. The home page is the most linked page on your website. There is no need to remove the visuals but it should be accompanied by text which is optimised with relevant keywords.



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  • Mobile-friendliness is one of the ranking factors and decides if your page can appear in the search results. A bad mobile UX can lead to losing out on customers. Nearly 48% of people use mobiles to search for and book their travel. The main reason why they switch to desktops is mobile limitations.

    You should make sure that your website is mobile responsive and loads quickly to encourage the users to complete their booking on mobile.

  • Your website should be technically sound and you should evaluate how your website performs.

    You should avoid technical mistakes like not using Hreflang tags and canonical tags and not blocking the booking engine or additional URL parameters and not creating an information architecture. You should avoid duplicating sites on the main domain or subdomains.


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  • Travel websites often ignore the standard design and focus on looking pretty. This way they lose out on the value the markups can bring.

    You should use markups like schema markups, HTML markups, H1 - 3 tags and Alt-text for images.

  • Creating content for the website blindly without looking into the potential search terms the travellers are using. When users type in a search query they should find answers to their questions. You need the information to satisfy the query.

    You should do some form of keyword research before you create any content. If you find a trend then find the different variations of that keyword and use it in your content. You can create 2 - 3 compelling articles on topics around the trending keywords.




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  • Interlinking is the process of finding keywords in your content and linking them to relevant content pages. Interlinking is often ignored in the travel industry.

    From your articles, you should build links to previous articles, contact pages, the sign-up page and other travel-related businesses.

  • When you create articles of high quality you should also fine-tune them. Travel website lag is using optimisation tactics.

    You should optimise your articles and make sure you use content tags, and multiple categories in blogs, optimize the URL slug, use author mention with the blogs and more.



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  • Google constantly updates its algorithms and you should keep up with these updates. The techniques that worked once may not work anymore.

    You should perform regular audits of your website’s performance, content and backlink profile.

  • Spending your marketing budget on Pay-Per-Click (PPC) rather than SEO. Pay-per-click advertising is only useful till you are paying for it.

    SEO may take longer to give results but it helps to build a stronger foundation for your website. Even if you take a break from SEO your improved domain authority will continue to bring in traffic.




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  • For implementing a successful SEO strategy you will need a good SEO team. Travel website owners do not maintain a dedicated SEO team.

    You can approach travel SEO services to optimise your website and reach its full potential.

  • Creating content without checking what is working and what is not.

    You should repurpose old content and also create fresh content regularly. Google favours fresh content and updating your content and keeping it relevant will help to improve your rankings.

    You should provide social share buttons on your blogs to drive referral traffic and improve the chances of going viral. You should allow your users to comment on your blogs and provide a comment section.


Once you have created a website with a seamless user experience and formatted content you should give it a boost through outreach. You can look for off-site opportunities like guest posting, content collaboration, syndicated content pieces or make a backlink request.