In the last year, the travel industry has suffered a great decline due to the lack of tourism and restrictions. But with better measures being put into place and borders starting to open up, travel could see a big increase, especially considering people will be looking for long term travel instead of shorter vacations due to quarantine restrictions in certain countries.
Travel is a highly competitive industry where advertising can be very expensive, therefore investing in travel SEO can help you lower your costs and obtain more leads. You can get quick results thanks to pay per click campaigns, but if you are willing to invest in SEO you could get organic search placements in the long term. This is much more valuable, and you will be appearing at the top of searches for a much smaller cost. In this post we will give you a few travel SEO tips to focus on if you want to improve your SEO score.
Mobile-Friendly Website
One of the first things that you should do for your travel site and any other type of site, if you want to increase your presence online is to have a mobile-friendly website. According to statistics almost 55% of searches conducted online come from mobile devices while desktop searches stand at around 42%. According to a google survey done in 2018, 44% of the people questioned were comfortable when booking a trip using only their mobile, meaning that you could be missing out on a good amount of bookings if your page is not mobile optimized. You can use tools like Googles Mobile-Friendly Test to find any issues and find solutions for them.
Link Building
One of the main ways of getting future clients to trust your company is link building. By getting links back to your page from other sites people will be able to access your page from other sites, discovering your company and possibly bringing in new customers.
But you should not try and get backlinks just on any sites, try and focus on pages that are related to your industry. When it comes to travel, link building is quite simple, thanks to the great number of travel blogs that accept guest/sponsored posts on their websites.
Keywords
Keywords can make the difference between appearing at the top of a search result or the bottom of the page. You should always make sure that each page you have offers relevant and unique keyword. Make sure to include in your keyword the main subject of the page and any variations that people might search, so that you do not miss out on any relevant searches
Individual Campaigns for Different Trip/Tours
When creating google campaigns for your business make sure to include page-specific campaigns for different destinations. This way you can focus on specific keywords in each campaign related to the content of the page. Especially if you are a new business, ranking for “generic” travel search could be hard, so you should try and aim for those keywords that have less competition. Tools like Googles Keyword Planner can be very useful when trying to find those less competitive keywords
Get Reviews
There is no better way to show your future clients that you are a trustworthy business than by having reviews regarding your website. Getting 5-star reviews is important as it shows that you provide a good service, but do not be worried if you get a few negative reviews also. No business is perfect and having a 5-star average review score could make people suspicious that something wrong. That is why it is always good to have a rating between 4 and 4-5, considering that businesses with a rating between 3.5 and 4.5 earn more revenue than other ratings.
Avoid creating fake reviews for your site, as Google can detect fake reviews and will take them down. Instead, incentivize your past clients to leave a review, send an email showing your appreciation and include a link to your google review page.
Social Media/Blogging
We previously mentioned that obtaining posts on travel blogs can improve the traffic to your website, but so can create your own blog. Writing informative posts about your destinations on your blog can incentivize people to gain interest in your destinations and eventually book a trip there. Focus on informing people on the destination while including a call to action to the booking/contact page so that if they are interested, they can immediately get more information or book the trip.
Social media is also very useful for promoting your trips/tours, whenever you write a blog always make sure to share it on your other social media accounts. Especially when it comes to travel, pages like Instagram can be useful for sharing images of your destinations and connecting with other people that travel to create sponsorships.
