Travel SEO

The past few years have seen a significant shift in client behaviour when it comes to searching for and booking travel plans. Apart from the obvious move to digital, the ways to look for a service online has also evolved. More often than not, customers come to the web looking for discounts, deals and offers, without affiliating to a particular brand or service provider. As a result, the internet witnesses more category searches, for example - luxury hotels in Ladakh, or the best tour packages for Assam. This pattern is a massive opportunity for you as a travel business. You can leverage from the agnostic behaviour of consumers to engage with their needs and educate them about your brand.

This however requires your marketing partner to be deeply invested in your niche of travel, so that your marketing strategies smartly utilize the ongoing market conditions for your benefit.

The flip side of this search pattern is the fact that you have a world full of service providers who compete with you on your service categories. This challenging market atmosphere, for the travel business especially, limits the room for trial and error. It is both unwise and wasteful to generate content for your brand based on guesswork. This is where specialized SEO for the travel industry becomes crucial. Having a trusted SEO partner on board lets your content do the work of getting customers to you, while you do what you do best - seep fun and adventure into their travel.

The benefits of SEO for your travel business can be immense. In a day and age where your online identity is pretty much perceived to be who you are, leveraging Travel SEO Services can help your brand in a multitude of ways. Some of them are –

1. Your online reputation is directly linked with your trustworthiness
   Ranking high up on search engines, which is the end, if not only, the motive of every SEO campaign, helps a customer associate your brand with quality.


2. It makes your marketing mix more wholesome
   You can utilize SEO to improve all your marketing efforts. For example – your content marketing initiatives, filled with text, photographs, and videos, become all the more insightful, and thereby effective, if you have a sense of the keywords that are being most looked for and customer queries that are most recurring.


3. They are long-lasting and cost-effective
   If your website is up to date with interesting information around travel, it is likely that search engines will organically lead prospects to your website. The investment in getting the strategy and execution right for a search-engine-optimized website is much lesser than other alternatives like PPC marketing and social advertising.


4. You can measure the impact
   After you action your SEO strategy through your content, you can easily keep a track of the impact it causes. You can track the performance of webpages and social media the content is live on, including rankings, conversions, and overall traffic. These findings can be used to tweak and improve your SEO approach.

Before approaching the question of how to choose the right SEO partner for your travel business, let’s spend some time understanding the travel industry in general, with a focus on the purchase behaviour of travellers today.

1. All travellers use search engines to explore their options, but no one ever buys on their first visit. They almost always look around, research harder, and come back to purchase the most lucrative offer. This makes first impressions crucial and underlines the importance of nudging the customer through repeat advertising.


2. The needs of a traveller are as diverse as their travel itinerary. What may have been essential for one trip, may not be so for their next one. Also so what they may be looking for at different stages of their purchase cycle is different. They may be looking for information when they are yet to make up their mind on the city they plan to visit, credibility when they are to finalize the hotel they want to stay in, and security when they choose to travel with a group.


3. Travel listing pages need to be elaborate and comprehensive so that no matter what a client is looking for, they know you as a solution provider. Bombarding content with keywords that sell without painting a full picture leads to neither leads nor conversions. Your website needs to be smartly structured so that visitors can find all information they need and are steered in the direction of purchase through creative internal links and intelligent call to action placement.


4. In the travel industry, images play a really important role. No one picks a destination based on stock photos. They need to know exactly what a site, a lane, a hotel room looks like before making the booking. Assuming that only content on your website needs work may lead you to missing the opportunity to stun with pictures.

A good SEO agency will check all of the above boxes in their approach to SEO for Travel, or otherwise. Additionally, you must keep the following in mind before you freeze the agency you want to work with to secure and broaden your online presence.

1. They should give you a clear picture of the marketing goals and must steer away from abstractions.


2. A good SEO agency is agile in its approach, especially when it comes to finances. They work around your budget and help you create strategies that are best suited for the kind of services you provide.


3. The best SEO agency might be futile for you if they do not have hands-on experience with the niche of travel and tourism. With the tourism industry being as saturated as it is, you cannot afford experimenting and being stuck with a provider who has teething issues.


4. Check up on their previous work portfolio. The good thing about a reliable travel SEO agency is that they will almost always have data to back their claim.

While hacks and tips may draw a map for you, it is always wise to trust your instincts when it comes to building professional associations. So our number one advice to you will be to go with your gut.

You have put in the effort to create a high-quality brand, but now want to ensure a seamless journey for the search engines to reach your website. Don’t worry, we are here to help.

1. Content. Content. Content
   You need to make sure your content strategically plugs in keywords you want to rank for, and keep it fresh by updating it on a regular basis, but search engines prize more than just this in content. Relevance is key. Only when users are interested in and spend time on what you put up on your website, will search-engines believe that your website is worth jumping up the ranks.


2. Technical competence
   Only the links specified in your sitemap and accessible from your homepage are available to search engine crawlers. This emphasizes the need of interlinking accurately. The second most important factor that is key to a seamless user experience is security, especially for websites that involve financial transactions. Apart from this, clean URLs help save crawl budgets and increase your user experience.


3. Optimization for Mobile
   Google's principal ranking index is now the mobile-first index. And so, having a crisp mobile-friendly site, in terms of both speed and design is non-negotiable.

Even apart from the aspects mentioned above, there are many aspects that may seem unimportant to a layman, but can be extremely important when it comes to search engine optimization. Hiring a reliable Travel SEO partner can take the load off from your side, so that you focus on your core competencies.

Although the name "content marketing" is new, the concept has been around for a long time. It is essentially putting out information that may relevant to prospects. Once you look at content marketing with this simplified lens, it is easy to conclude that SEO is impossible without engaging content. Whether you put out ideas in the form of interesting infographics, noteworthy image-based creatives, graphic videos, blog articles or simple call-to-action taglines, content is an inevitable part of what you stand for as a brand. Search engines can’t track you if you don’t have anything to hold client attention on your website. This is especially true if your niche is as interactive as travel, because inspiration is the first step in the purchase funnel for the tourism industry.

One of the most interesting things about content marketing however is that it is not necessary to re-invent the wheel with every content piece. You can use the same USPs and information to update them with relevant perspectives that are contextual to the contemporary world. The aim is to identify opportunities where content can be plugged in and then following that lead with spicing up what is existing or cooking up something new.

Getting the strategy and keywords right is the most sure-shot way of identifying these content gaps. Ranking for the incorrect keywords or using too many of them are rookie mistakes that can make your content difficult to load and cluttered to look at. Having a travel SEO partner by your side is a great start to benefiting from content marketing that gears up your website to be found easily on the internet.

Link building can be regarded as a great way to increase the awareness of your brand. However, it's an uphill battle for travel brands to build links as compared to other sectors. A lot of the methods brands adopt to build links can also indirectly affect brand's value.

Here are some ways that can help brands earn links while building brand reliability and delivering value-added content to your audience.

1. Press Trips
   In this process, a travel brand assigns a travel journalist to create travel coverage in exchange for a free trip. Simply put, this method can be a win-win approach for both parties as it helps to bridge the gap between organic and sponsorship value exchange.


2. Luring with discounts and offers
   As the name suggests, product stunts involve marketing the travel brand with an attractive offering to lure the media attention and build links.
   In addition, one can either partner with a larger name brand, or go even wackier with its offerings.


3. Dream Job Stunt
   In this scenario, the travel brand creates a temporary job that is fun and exciting. Usually, for a short amount of time, the job is typically paired with a contest that has a hard deadline. Since its life cycle is short, this process is always in danger of being ignored by the press.


4. Featuring in Quality publications
   You have an edge with a prospect if they remember you from an article they read about you in a newspaper or a travel magazine. In a time when every service provider is competing over category keywords, having brand recall can be much more advantageous than you think.


5. Recover the losses if any
   Pages can fail, websites might rewrite their content, and links can be lost. This can happen on third-party websites that were hosting content pieces put together by your teams. It always helps to get your hand on such content and reinvent it afresh. This helps clear old clogs and clear the flow for prospects to stream onto your website.


6. Get ideas from the ones who are doing it right
   Competition benchmarking and looking at where their content is featuring is a great start to see what the world around you is doing to get their name out there. It is important to draw an ethical line between inspiration and plagiarism while taking this step into action, but you must start the research soon, from the right side of the fence of course.
   The process to master the backlink network runs deeper for sure. But a good start to the backlinking process can accelerate your SEO journey considerably.

To understand SEO, let’s first understand how a search engine works. Let’s say you are looking for the best packages for a three-day trip in Shimla. You open your desktop and open your web browser, and kick in a search in the same terms. Now the search engine you are using to look for this information matches the keywords to the thousands of websites online and looks for the ones that match the exact term you put in on the search tab.

As you may have guessed, there are a lot of pages that may show similar texts and all of them may be relevant to you. How then, does a search engine decide which website to show first and which one to push towards the end?

This decision is automated by the user engagement of each website. This includes the time users spend on the website, the quality of the content it hosts, and generally the technical adaptability it has for the search engine to be able to draw it out when a search is conducted on its niche. Optimizing a website to be able to appear high up in a search like this is what SEO is.

SEO agencies conduct searches on the keywords that are most searched within industry niches and then work backward with brands to incorporate these keywords in the content that brands generate. However, as search engines continue to update their algorithms, it is clear that there is a shift of focus from just matching keywords to actual recognition of quality content while ranking websites. Hence it is important to recognize the importance of authenticity and quality while approaching SEO for your website and other content initiatives.

When you work on SEO without a specialist, you are likely to miss out on the intricate details of the process, and may not be able to holistically work on your web-presence. This may further lead to missed opportunities of lead capturing and conversion. Having a travel SEO agency by your side can be a worthy investment that shall give you returns both in the form of brand credibility and increased revenue.

Whether it is a tutor or a content generator, they want to be the first result that pops up on google when you type in anything that can remotely lead to them. Getting more traffic means the possibility of more conversions. However, creating an attractive website does not guarantee that traffic.

That is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in. Studies show that 91.5% of searchers don’t make it past page one of the search results. Over 30% of them click on the very first result!

However, the value SEO adds up to significantly differs from business to business and depends on the mean value of an order.

For example, let’s assume, you make an average of INR 1000 on each order. you A hundred visitors visit your website per day and the customers that end up making a transaction are 2% of those. By multiplying the average per day revenue, assuming a conversion rate of 0.02%, in a thirty-day month, your business can generate INR 60,000 in revenue each month. Let’s assume this is the capital you generate without employing any SEO services

By employing just functional SEO strategies in place, you can take your traffic from let’s say 1,000 to 1,500 or even more. Thereby, taking your revenues to INR 90,000 every month just by implementing basic strategies.

Something that you should note, however, is that SEO is constantly changing and you need to keep up with it. Your website needs to be constantly updated with SEO strategies so as to not lose its relevancy and top spot in search results.

There is a lot of information out there on how to manage your own SEO, doing which gives you not only the traffic that SEO brings but also complete management of the process. Even though traditional marketing has always been the way to increase sales, it is interesting to know that SEO has a better rate of conversions as compared to traditional marketing. Over 90% of the online experiences being with search engines and managing your place in the search results would help you increase your conversions.

Smart SEO strategies executed by experienced SEO experts can help your online business, significantly and soon.