Creating an excellent travel site is only half the work done. The next phase is to work on optimizing it for search engines. Now, driving organic traffic in the highly competitive travel industry is not the easiest feat. But it’s certainly not impossible to achieve! On that note, here are the eight tips that will help you get started on the right note in terms of travel SEO. Let’s get on with it!
1. Ensure that you have a mobile friendly site
Since the aim is to improve search traffic, one of the first things to focus on is the mobile-friendliness of your site. The modern travelers manage their entire trip from the tip of their fingertips. Right from planning to booking, everything is done through mobile devices.
So, if you have a site that works perfectly on a desktop but starts glitching on mobile devices, you will lose traffic. Responsiveness has long been an important ranking factor for search engines, and your site needs to keep up.
2. Keyword research for understanding volume and intent
You need to know what keywords your target customers are searching for in order to optimize your site accordingly. Now, there are both free and paid tools available to help you with this research. If you have a Google Adwords account, you will get Google Keyword Planner for free, which is pretty good software.
In your research, pay attention to keyword volume and user intent. Keyword volume refers to the frequency of unique searches for that phrase each month. It usually varies for different locations and seasons. For instance, you’ll find more people from Australia searching for ‘Yoga holidays in Bali,’ rather than the UK.
User intent is also different for different keywords. For example, “food trails in Bali” and “holidays in Bali” might speak of the same place, but the intent isn’t exactly the same.
3. Consider the importance of keyword competition
Keyword competition, simply put, refers to the number of sites that are trying to rank for the same keyword. It is closely related to keyword volume because a high volume also leads to a higher competition.
Since so many sites fight for the high volume keywords, it gets increasingly difficult to rank for them. On the other hand, you might find it easier to rank for keywords with a bit of a low volume. Thus, jostling only for the keywords with the highest volume is not always the way.
4. Prioritize engaging content to drive traffic
Any discussion on organic search for a travel website will remain incomplete without outlining the significance of content. Well, content is truly the king in your case.
Making sure that your website has a steady supply of fresh, engaging, and relevant content should be one of your priorities. As you offer new content regularly on your site, you keep giving the search engine crawlers something to index – a good way to improve your ranking.
Now, since you want to hold on to that rank, you will have to engage your users with relevant and impeccable content that aligns with your business at the same time.
5. Establish relevance for your website
Relevancy is all about helping the search engines understand what your site focuses on. In order to make that happen, you need to focus on things beyond content and keywords.
A search engine evaluates the following factors to understand the relevancy of your webpages:
- Website URL
- Header Tags
- Page Title
- Meta data
- Media Tags
For the ones using WordPress, you will find some really good free plugins to manage the one-page signals stated above. Additionally, these on-page signals are critical in helping you target the right keywords for your webpages.
6. Deliver an excellent user experience
All these algorithm changes and the webmaster guidelines ultimately have one objective in mind – to deliver a better user experience. Search engines want the users to get the best experience when they open a webpage. So, when the visitors click on a result and come back to the search box immediately, the search engine either considers the result irrelevant or the user experience is lacking.
Therefore, you need to focus on delivering a seamless experience on your webpages. Are the pages loading fast enough across all devices? Is the visitor having to click multiple times just to find what they are looking for? Is the content skimmable for the users? All these factors and more culminate into delivering an enhanced user experience.
7. Backlinks are your best friend
Backlink is a link that is found in one website that takes you to another site. For search engines, backlinks are a sign that the website is popular and offers value.
Thus, if your site gets backlinks from all the relevant and authoritative sources, it will help you scale up in ranks. Did you know that the most popular travel websites get more than 100k backlinks from thousands of domains?
Of course, it does not mean that you will have to strive for 100k and nothing less. Go slow and gradually try to build up backlinks. You can reach out to other websites that are related to your domain and ask them for backlinks. Also, you can try guest posting, blogger outreach, and social media for this purpose.
8. Rely on social signals for better ranks
In terms of off-page SEO factors, social signals work just as well to get to higher ranks on search engines. Think of social signs as a type of backlink but for social media. In other words, when your webpages are shared across social media platforms, search engines consider your site popular and valuable to users.
Hopefully, you already have a social media account across the popular platforms. It’s time to work on engaging your followers there as well. Get them to not just follow your social media handles, but also to share your content as much as possible.
And that’s all! Are you ready to work on your site to improve it’s rank? So, wait no more and implement these effective techniques right away!