Travel SEOYes, that's me climbing the Dolomites. I enjoy travelling and make it a point to travel at least thrice every year. Living in London has made it so easy to travel all over the world as it's centrally located to the parts I normally travel to, especially Europe in the summers. And in winters, when I can't deal with the cold anymore, I head to India for a 2-week break and soak up the sun :-). Enough about me. Before I get into the best practices for Travel SEO, I should tell you that each traveller is different.

So, what’s the objective of my Travel SEO guide?

In this post, we’ll start by looking at the Google trends and technologies shaping the search landscape, before outlining the steps of good technical, off-page and on-page SEO.

According to a study by Google travellers (both leisure & business travellers) begin researching online on search engines before they decide where or how they want to travel. Search is part of the travel customer journey from the very start, to using it for trip inspiration and booking.

I am always headed to Google to conduct research for my next holiday before using an OTA to compare options and prices before booking. I perform searches like best places to stay, cheap flights, best things to do, figure out the range of travel options in the destination etc. Some travellers head to online travel marketplace or agencies such as Expedia, Booking.com, Lastminute, Hotels.com, Tripadvisor etc and metasearch sites such as Kayak, Skyscanner and Trivago. These are the most common ones in the UK.

The organic search results related to flights and hotels are mostly owned by the likes of Booking.com, TripAdvisor, Expedia, Hotels.com etc. Below is the SEO visibility trend graph over the last 6 months at the time of writing this post.

Booking.com Hotels.com Expedia.com SEO Visibility

Google Travel Search Landscape

The new features in the travel space by Google is having a big impact on the SEO in the travel industry. Travel SEO is not easy, especially with Google placing ads and the Google travel modules above the organic results. The Google Travel module shows up for searches related to flights, hotels, holiday packages etc. You can search and book hotels, book flights and holiday packages right from the Google SERP. This makes it harder for OTA's such as Expedia, Booking etc to get traffic even if they rank in positions 1-3 which is currently a big concern for online travel sites.

In the GIF below, you can see what a typical search for a hotel or a flight looks like on the Google SERP. Note how much scroll is required on a Google SERP for the organic SERP for a hotel search.

google travel seo search landscape
With hotel and flight search modules now appearing at the top of Google search results pages when conducting travel searches, to make up for the lost organic traffic, online travel agencies don't have a choice but to purchase top Google Ad placements and increase their overall marketing expenses.

Google has also been displaying "Destinations on Google" since 2016. These are travel guides displayed on the SERP based on the destination you are looking for. Again these results also compete with the likes of Trip Advisor and other OTAs which have lots of travel guide-related content.

travel SEO popular destinations
Google is reporting strong ad business year after year, thanks to their ever-changing search landscape. While they are making profits, OTA's such as Expedia, TripAdvisor profits are declining YOY.

So is Travel SEO still Important?

Despite challenging search landscape changes it is important because of the following reasons;

How to SEO Your Travel Brand?

Now that you understand the importance of travel SEO, let’s look at the steps to optimize your travel website to improve SEO;

Step 1: Optimise for Local SEO

If you are optimised for Local SEO, your business listing will show up for searches on a knowledge graph and Google Maps. There has been a huge shift in recent years with Google listings increasingly appearing for almost all hotel searches. In order to get listed on the Google Local pack, you need to list your business on Google My Business. Of course, there are other SEO best practices to follow to compete on local search which I am not going to cover in this article. And don't forget Bing.

Step 2: Have a Clear Site Structure

Start with a nice Homepage and include the most important information a visitor will need in order to make a booking. The page should also give a clear signal to Google about the nature of the travel brand and the areas of operation (location of properties). And for the users, your homepage should be inspirational. Some of the popular travel website homepages usually include the following;

In terms of structure for your other site pages;

Home >> Goa >> South Goa >> Villas in Baga Beach

A clean and intuitive site structure not only keeps the Googlebot's happy but also helps your potential site visitors navigate around your site more easily, ultimately improving your conversion rate.

Step 3: On-page Optimisation

Optimise your title tags: Create unique titles and keep them to a maximum of 70 characters. Use the most important keywords at the beginning of the title. See an example of how the below sites incorporate local search terms in their titles.

travel seo title tags

Optimise your meta descriptions: Have a nice custom meta description for every page and keep the length to a maximum of 160 characters. Target keywords related to the page and use them naturally. Create unique and informative meta descriptions.

Headings: Have proper page headings on every page consisting of H1 tags. Ensure they are unique on every page.

Step 4: Page Content Optimisation

Don't focus overly on keyword optimisation

There's more to just keyword optimisation. Focus on topics and unique selling points. Let's take the example of a hotel page. Apart from providing a good detailed description of the property, mention what's unique about the property on the hotel inventory page such as;

Create content to address search intent and cover all areas of the customer journey including navigational, informational to transactional searches. For instance, planning landing pages and creating rich destination guides capture informational searches. The informational category has the largest potential and represents a great opportunity for a travel search.

Adding high-quality content to landing pages should, therefore, be a priority – as well as helping capture informational searches it can improve user metrics, which are correlated to positive ranking signals as well as strong conversion rates.

You should optimise for featured Snippets for travel search terms as these appear on position 0 and technically don't compete with organic results, paid results or Google sponsored results. You can do this by structuring and optimising your site content to answer a user’s search query. Please see examples below of featured snippets that appear for searches for specific hotel questions such as check-in time or if you have queries related to flights etc.

travel SEO featured snippetsTravel SEO Featured Snippets

Step 5: Create a Blog with Informational Content

A blog for a travel brand is a smart way to focus on providing value to the user by sharing experiences, interesting articles etc rather than just core commercial messaging. Good content is vital for Travel sites not only to help you rank for long-tail and relevant travel search terms but also to inspire travellers with some good holiday planning. Showcasing some good photos, videos, image galleries and guides of destinations and properties is a good way to convince users on why they should travel to that destination. The blog posts give you a nice opportunity to optimise your internal link structure by deep linking to your most important pages such as the property pages.

There are plenty of content possibilities to create good content to improve Travel SEO. I am going to throw a few examples below, but you can always look at the top sites in the travel space for inspiration. Keeping the blog updated regularly is a way of showing fresh content updates for Google bots. These blog posts also attract quality links from other travel bloggers/publications/websites and get shares on social media.

Some examples of what you could post on your travel blog;

If you don’t already have a content marketing strategy in place, start with a travel blog.

Step 6: Technical SEO-optimised website

Pay attention to the following Technical SEO best practices that you need to follow;

Often the hardest part of SEO because it is difficult and time-consuming, quality link building is necessary to achieve high rankings. See below some ways to build links to your travel website;

FURTHER READING OR VIDEOS WITH THE BEST SEO FOR TRAVEL WEBSITE TIPS

I hope this gives you a good starting point to improve your Travel website visibility online. If you are a travel/hotel business looking for SEO services, Contact me today!