The Ultimate Guide On How To SEO Your Travel Website
Guide to Travel Website SEO
Search engines have become one of the most important online travel planning sources. In the ever-increasing competition, it is important to rank in the top 10 results across search engines. To achieve this you should implement SEO strategies.
SEO is the process of optimising your travel website to rank higher in the search results. The higher you rank the more traffic you will receive. Leisure travellers use search engines more than any other channels to plan their travel. And search engines are the second highest source of information that contributes to travel planning.
SEO is a long-term and cost-effective marketing strategy and you get many major advantages when you implement the SEO strategies correctly. When you implement SEO you can showcase your website to the right audience at the right time.
SEO for your travel website
You should begin your SEO strategy with keyword research. You can use tools like KW Finder and SEMrush to find the keywords you need to compete for. Your chosen keywords should be highly relevant to your business. Find keywords that have low competitiveness as they are easier to compete for.
The tool will also suggest additional keywords which you can use. You should also find long-tail keywords. In the travel industry seasonality is a big thing. The keyword research tool will also give information about the trends.
You should also identify the intention behind the keywords. Search engines divide the keyword into three categories: Informational search, Navigational search and Transactional search. Informational is when the user wants to find a specific piece of information. Navigation is when the user wants to navigate to a page. Transactional is when the user wants to make a purchase.
In SEO content is king. You will need high-quality, relevant and engaging content for the search engines to place your website at the top of the search results. The content should draw the attention of the users and get them to take action.
Another way to get traffic that is relevant to your niche is to create blogs. You can demonstrate your knowledge through blogs and instill confidence in your website visitors. You can offer visitors free information during the early stages of the travel process as research is one of the early steps in travel planning.
For example, if your business operates tours to multiple locations then you can add some of the target keywords on the home page like ‘Tours to London’. You can then use subpages to target keywords specific to individual destinations to operate tours to.
Google has created quality-rated guidelines where E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness & Trustworthiness) are a must for content creation. The sites with content that does not help the users and deceives or harms the users will be given the lowest rating. The E-A-T content will be given leading positions in SERPs.
Blogging can help you to educate your customers, get quality links, keep your social media pages fresh and index your new pages regularly. It is also a great way to convince your customers to visit a destination.
After you have created your content you will have to promote your content to highly authoritative websites to build your website’s credibility. Link building involves getting other highly authoritative websites to link to your website to increase your website’s authority.
You can use tools like Moz Open Site Explorer or Mangool’s Site Profiler to know if a website is authoritative. You can check the domain authority and the page authority of the websites.
Never use block-hat marketing techniques to acquire links as it can result in your website being punished. You should not get links from low-quality websites because it can damage your reputation. You can build links through guest posting, creating amazing content, getting great images, link roundups, press releases, mentions and broken link building.
Internal linking is one of the easiest forms of link building. Google uses intent links to discover pages and understand them better. The users should be able to easily find out about any topic or visit another page. When you create internal links you can use keywords as link anchor text.
The average time to load your website is set by Google as less than three seconds. If your website does not load quickly then you will experience problems like loss of customers, customer dissatisfaction, tarnished brand image and lower rankings. Your website should load quickly.
You can use tools like GTmetrix, Website Speed Test and Google PageSpeed Insights to optimise your website for speed.
People now use voice search for things rather than typing in the query. This is a win-win situation for travel websites. You should optimise your website for voice search by doing voice-based keyword research, optimising your website for mobile, structured data optimisation and Google Home and Amazon Alexa-friendly optimisation.
The structure of your website is important too. A well-structured website should have dedicated landing pages for each city/state the properties. And for each property, there should be an optimised page. The destination pages should be optimised and they should use the destination in the URLs.
One of the important SEO elements is page titles. Use a unique page title for every page, avoid duplicate content in titles and do not stuff keywords in page titles.
The property pages on a travel website give more information about the property to the customers. The property pages should have unique and informative titles and unique content. Use Breadcrumbs to allow the users and the search engines to reach the property pages. If you use TABS on your pages to organise them better then try not to add important content in the TABS.
People click on a result based on the meta description. Google suggests the maximum length of the meta description should be up to 275 characters long. Use targeted keywords in the meta description, the meta description should be relevant to the content on the page and it should communicate the benefits of the content to the users.
Schema markup is one of the ways your website will show up on local SERPs. Schema markup tells the difference in the content to the search engines. If you are a small travel company then you should maintain profiles on Google My Business, local directories, social media platforms and more.
To get your website listed in the local SEO you should add schema markup, get good quality links from local websites, add the local address to your homepage and more.
One of the factors that can affect the conversion of a travel website is the reviews and the ratings. You can add schema markup to your reviews and ratings and display them in the search results. Good reviews can make a difference.
One of the important pages is the homepage and it should have your most popular content, special offers and deals, nice photos of your properties, how your business is different and offer an easy way for visitors to search for properties. It should be eye-catching and SEO-friendly.
You should implement technical SEO to take care of mobile-friendliness, website security, the 404 page, optimization of images and videos, sitemaps, canonical URLs and more.
You should maintain a social media presence as it can help in many ways indirectly. The majority of potential customers spend time on social media. Travel is a visual topic and is most suited to networks like Pinterest and Instagram.
Social media is a good way to connect with other bloggers in the industry. Potential customers may read your Facebook page before making a booking to read the reviews and get an idea of the experience of the existing customers.
You should measure your SEO results by using tools like Google Analytics, Moz’s Rank Tracker and more. Google Analytics will provide you with information about the website visitors, sessions, bounce rate, page views and more. Moz’s Rank Tracker helps you with tracing and rankings. Use Google Data Studio to create reports about your SEO progress.
To offer a better user experience search engines bring regular algorithm updates and therefore you should alter your content accordingly. To keep your website optimised you can consider Supramind.com, we do SEO for travel websites.
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