Outsourcing travel SEO can have major benefits to your travel or tourism industry company. Especially in times of economic difficulty for the industry, like during the COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses may not be prioritizing search engine optimization. However, now is actually the ideal time to capture the attention of travelers during the “dreamer” phase of vacation and trip planning. Since most vacationers are travelling virtually during these times, it’s never been more important to focus on great SEO processes that will bring attention to your business, whether you have one location or several.
Is Outsourcing Travel SEO for You?
Search engine optimization has evolved tremendously in the recent past, and it can be a challenge to keep up. While some best practices remain the same, there are other previously encouraged strategies that Google and other search engines no longer prefer. As a business owner or marketer in the travel space, you might find yourself overwhelmed.
Unfortunately, and thanks largely to COVID-19, 2020 has been tough for the industry as a whole. Budget cuts, particularly in seemingly nonessential or non-income-producing areas like marketing or web development, have left gaping holes where SEO strategies once were. Even if your business was able to retain some of its marketing or SEO team, chances are good they are buried in extra work due to cuts made elsewhere.
This is where the benefits of outsourcing come in. Our team of SEO professionals is fully remote, yielding a cost savings that is easily passed along to our clients. By hiring freelancers, Galileo Tech Media can offer clients the ability to scale up or down as their needs change and as their budgets evolve.
Best of all, we aren’t restricted to a certain geographical location and can therefore hire only the best and most familiar SEO experts. We are also fortunate that our business model has allowed us to stay fully operational, even in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.
By choosing an expert in SEO and outsourcing your search needs to them, you save on the costs of office space, employee benefits, and payroll taxes. Your staff can focus its limited time elsewhere, growing the business and navigating times of both travel industry growth and struggle. Even better, you can trust that your travel business’s SEO needs will receive the most up-to-date treatment, thanks to our team’s constant attention to SEO trends and changes in best practice.
Why Outsourcing Travel SEO Yields Superior Results
Unless your in-house marketing and SEO team has a tremendous amount of time to keep up-to-date with the latest industry trends, it’s unlikely you will maximize your results in search. Google is known for frequent updates to its algorithm, all of which shift where you should prioritize your SEO efforts.
For instance, recent algorithm updates included a change to how featured snippets are treated. Previously, featured snippets achieved what Google called “position zero,” meaning it appeared above all other search results.
Therefore, if your bicycle rental company in Charleston, South Carolina, has the featured snippet response for “Can you ride bicycles on sidewalks in Charleston?” and also held the first position for that query, you would effectively get double billing in search. The 2020 featured snippets update removed this duplicate result, however, so you’ll now only appear in the featured snippet, but not again on page one of Google’s search results.
Can your in-house team be expected to know this? When search engines are constantly updating their algorithms and making sweeping changes like those involving how featured snippets are treated, you risk spending large amounts of employee time on SEO updates that will later prove fruitless.
For instance, if your team previously knew about the double billing effect with featured snippets and spent a large amount of time reworking site content to get these two levels of results in search, all that effort might ultimately prove less useful than you hoped.
Our team stays on top of trends so we can always advise you where to spend your SEO time and money. In a perfect world, every business could excel in all SEO best practices, but that simply isn’t feasible. SEO experts know which efforts will offer more bang for your buck, considering recent algorithm updates and global trends in your industry. In the end, this will yield better results and cost you less.
Why Outsourcing Travel SEO Now is Ideal
Making the most of what you have is the common refrain for travel marketers in 2020. A recent report by Skift reported that nearly 90% of travel marketers cut their budgets once COVID-19 hit. Chances are, your company might be among them. However, finding ways to maximize your SEO budget for the times we live in will pay you in dividends long after happy vacationers are once again hitting the road.
While travelers are stuck at home and wistfully dreaming of their next vacation, the time is prime to lead them to your content. Your SEO efforts can entice tourists to bookmark your site and revisit it when they are ready to book.
SEO efforts don’t end once you have visitors on your site, though. From the moment they arrive on your home page, they should be instantly engaged and want to know more about what you offer. In a world where most site visits last just 10 seconds, you need an expert on your side to learn how best to keep hard-earned traffic on-page.
Though the decision to outsource travel SEO might seem difficult, there really has never been a better time. Take advantage of a lull in business and focus on strengthening your online presence. Doing that while saving money and increasing efficiency certainly can’t hurt.
Galileo Tech Media offers travel industry clients the SEO expertise their business needs with none of the issues that accompany an in-house team. Contact us today to learn more about our SEO services and how they can benefit your business.
