What is a traveler’s best friend? It’s not an awards program, a fancy luggage set, or the latest and greatest guidebook. It’s the Internet. Indeed, according to a recent survey of travelers, over 50% of all bookings happen online. More importantly, about 65% of those bookings happen directly on a brand’s website. While this poses a great opportunity for digital marketers looking to reach eager and engaged travelers, it also means that web content must be optimized in order to connect with these individuals. Ahead, we’re sharing our top 3 travel industry SEO strategies – passport, not included.
Don’t target your industry – target your destination.
Unsurprisingly, travel searches tend to be more location-specific (“North Miami luxury hotels”) than general (“luxury hotels”). So while targeting “macro” travel keywords might seem like a solid foundational strategy, unless you are an industry-dominant player globally, your best bet is actually to focus on integrating destination-specific, hyper-local keywords within your content.
This doesn’t just mean ensuring keywords like city and state are incorporated into copy, titles, and meta-data – it means integrating items like neighborhood, nearby local landmarks, and even notable streets to make your content hyper-relevant for the inquisitive traveler. So, for example, if you’re a hotel located in New York, in Midtown, just steps away from the Empire State Building, all of those defining keywords should be integrated into your copy. Doing so might make the difference between someone selecting your business over your neighbor’s.
Speak the local language.
So you’ve optimized your main pages to include relevant, location-specific keywords. The next step is to build out unique and location-specific pages to further enhance your SEO. For example, a “neighborhood guide” or “local blog” is a great place to start. In it, you can include information about nearby landmarks, plus top restaurants, bars, shops, and other notable attractions in your area. In doing so, you’ll be increasing your search relevance and taking advantage of the built-in equity of these higher-ranking keywords. Plus, this content will only further enforce the message to travelers that you are the local authority.
Take time to create, manage, and maintain your local social profiles.
Yelp, anyone? Yep, many travelers rely on internationally recognized – but locally maintained – social properties like Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Google Business Pages to research and evaluate travel destinations. As such, the savvy marketer should be taking steps to ensure that their business has a presence across all of these channels (and that the information listed within each is accurate and informative). But establishing pages isn’t enough – take the time to monitor them and to actively interact with your communities, too. Doing so has a dual fold benefit: One, by listening and communicating with your audience, you’re building relationships and, hopefully, goodwill. Two, by maintaining a positive brand presence on these local channels, you are increasing the likelihood of inbound clicks to your website – something which Google (and other search engines) looks favorably upon when ranking your page.
And if you’re looking for help, this just happens to be Galileo Tech Media’s specialty. We’ve researched tens of thousands of travel-related keywords. We’re written thousands of pages of SEO hotel content. And this content is seen by millions of online searches. We know how to help travel focused businesses get customers.
