SEO for Travel
SEO Services For Accommodations, Destinations, Industry, Tourism, Agencies, more
When it comes to travel SEO strategy basics, it is essential to have a strong plan at the ready. Implementing some aspects of best-practice SEO but not others can be a bit like throwing darts when blindfolded. There’s a chance they might ring true, but more likely than not, you’re not maximizing your efforts. Travel, whether for business or pleasure, is an emotive experience. Tapping into the emotional journey attracts more targeted traffic and leads by reaching out to those who crave such experiences.
Micro-Moments
Travel SEO Strategy Steps
SEO strategy for travel websites can be a bit overwhelming, but there are certain basics that your travel or destination website really can’t afford to miss. After all, businesses in the travel industry face strong competition when it comes to capturing a prospective customer’s attention, building brand trust, and driving conversions.
Many travel businesses also have to face marketing multiple locations or multiple destinations. In a cluttered environment — which includes booking sites, hotels, tourism companies, travel agencies and more — it can be difficult to get noticed, let alone gain loyal customers who are willing to convert. Key to Galileo’s Travel SEO strategy is to understand the planning steps travelers go through preparing for trips and the language they use in search reflective of those planning stages. We consider these planning steps to be micro-moments.
- For a potential traveler, the first step is the realization they want to get away. Targeting the right keywords, we can focus on appealing to travelers who have not considered a specific destination, brand, accommodation, or airline.
- After researching, travelers are ready to make a plan. At this point, we can target keywords that reflect their intent to read reviews, get recommendations, compare prices and find in-destination experiences.
- With a plan in mind, travelers become eager to book their great escape. They might put down the mobile device to do more in-depth discover on a laptop. During this micro-moment, we rely on search to ensure travelers find the experience and get all the details they need to make a decision.
- Finally, the travelers have booked a trip and are eager to explore the destination. The majority of travelers don’t know what they want to do until they reach the place. Travel brands have a golden opportunity to reach out to them as they look up information about attractions, local events, restaurants, and landmarks.
Memorable Tourism Experiences
Travel Content For SEO
How do you differentiate your content for Travel? There is over 600 Million blogs in the world today. Over 2.5 Billion blog posts are published each year. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, TikTok all compete for content views. How does a Travel site get its content noticed? At Galileo Tech Media we have focused on the emotional factors of the reason people travel.
SEO Marketing research has revealed that Memorable Tourism Experiences (MTE) are a big factor in a travelers brand loyalty, revisit intention, and satisfaction. Anticipation has been shown as an important factor in creating MTEs. Creating anticipation with words and keywords we have also found increases engagement, search position, click thru rates, and conversions. To build anticipation, we identify the emotional triggers that can make travel unforgettable. Content is created using emotional keywords to build a sense of excitement during the typical travel search process.
MTEs are based on an emotional scale that includes hedonism, interaction with local culture, involvement, refreshment, novelty, meaningfulness, and knowledge. Experiential MTE content shares an interesting story of a destination, helping travelers imagine themselves in an irresistible setting. Stories focus on gratification, native food and customers, new experiences, and historical and informational settings. People who crave these MTEs will be ready to book once they read the content.
Examining the travel landscape
Why do you need SEO for travel?
According to Google Research, 57% of Leisure Travelers and 64% of Business Travelers begin their planning process by researching trips online. Knowing this stat, a smart travel SEO strategy can help your business appear when these consumers are searching.
Of course, one good strategy for targeting a prospective audience is through paid search. However, that leaves more than half of the audience on the table—because only 39% of search results pages have ads! To put this in context, that means that over 60% of 1.2 trillion searches per year feature no advertising. Consequently, the only way to capture some of this all-important traffic is to appear in organic search results.
For travel-focused businesses, getting organic search placement provides huge opportunities – and huge challenges. Your reach, once limited mainly to local knowledge and word-of-mouth, now has the potential to expand on a regional, national and even global scale. At the same time, you’re faced with competition from other travel providers in the digital space. To succeed, you need data-backed SEO research, a carefully planned SEO and content marketing strategy and an understanding of your customers’ journey, their intent and the various micro-moments that happen along the way.
Done Right
What are travel SEO best practices?
Google frequently makes changes to its ranking algorithms—which can create ample opportunities for confusion and strategic mishaps. Despite these regular algorithm updates, there are certain travel SEO strategy best practices on site structure, content, and local SEO you should focus on for success. Especially in the travel industry with its needs for multi location or destination SEO.
We Know SEO Strategy for Travel Websites
What help is available for your business to do SEO for travel?
If you’re searching for a savvy travel SEO partner, you’ve arrived at the right place. Galileo Tech Media has extensive industry experience, researching tens of thousands of travel-related keywords and producing thousands of travel-oriented content elements—from niche blog posts to web pages for Fortune 500 hospitality companies. Simply put, SEO strategy for travel websites—and we’ve helped many travel-focused businesses grow their businesses.
Galileo Tech Media’s team has honed its travel SEO strategy expertise with decades of combined experience, working with some of the biggest names in the industry. We know how people search for travel, and we understand the subtle differences in behavioral patterns across demographics. Our travel marketing strategy is a combination of tried-and-true research and bespoke techniques, using mind-type genomics and predicting search tendencies based upon sophisticated experiential data.
The result is a multifaceted approach to travel SEO, SEM, and content marketing, employing mobile technology and real-time data analysis to deliver a powerful strategy that speaks to the distinctive needs of hotels, travel providers and everyone in between. When we work with our travel partners, we offer the following:
Travel SEO
The Galileo Tech Media difference
Rising to the top of the SERPs is something that takes time, effort and technical know-how; it requires a diverse team of professionals who offer talent in keyword research, content creation and local SEO. Not all businesses have the resources—including the budget—to handle travel SEO on their own. Instead of being overwhelmed by SEO and attempting to keep up with tactics that are beyond their scope, some of the world’s most notable travel brands have turned to Galileo Tech Media for help.
We provide travel SEO services that are scalable. Our SEO experts know how to gather big data to customize repeatable processes for our clients—from Fortune 500 hospitality brands to regional hoteliers. We work with travel companies to understand and document their customers’ journey, then creating and implementing a goal-oriented SEO strategy. Our expertise is in modular travel marketing services that supplement your in-house marketing or work in place of it completely. While your team is doing what it does best, Galileo is making sure you enjoy organic search success.
Take Action Now!
What should you know about Travel SEO?
Travel SEO is much more than just having some content or targeting a list of keywords or doing a bit of link building. In today’s hyper-competitive, deeply fragmented environment, those days are long gone. Today, a successful travel SEO strategy encompasses data-driven research and a deep understanding of the nuances of digital behavior, particularly in the travel industry.
Keyword research
Every travel SEO campaign requires an astute understanding of the keywords that drive commercial transactions. To start building an effective campaign, we begin with keywords that have high transactional intent but are narrower in scope, so that competition is lower. Over time, we will evolve to more broad-based terms that encompass multiple intent, but also drive more traffic. This Funnel (broad) and Pinpoint (narrow) approach also helps to inform the design of the content and navigational structure of a website.
As a site becomes advanced, with thousands of visitors, we start analyzing the actual keywords driving traffic. We learn about the language used by site visitors, about the path they traveled through in order to arrive at the site and about their purchase behavior. In short, we uncover customer intent. We use this information to make dynamic and data-driven decisions, maximizing your organic search results.
Identifying your target customer
When engaged in any marketing activity, you should have at least one ideal buyer in mind. A trendy Hotel, for example, might want tech-savvy millennials as their ideal clients. This ideal or target buyer can be generalized as a fictional person with wants, needs, fears, demographics, psychographics, and various other descriptive information derived from experience or data. This fictional person is called a Persona.
For Travel Search Engine Optimization, there are several types of Personas we need to consider. A Buyer Persona is the most important since this is the actual purchaser. An Audience Persona represents both the buyer and any other person who might be involved in the decision-making process for purchasing, for example, someone just gathering information on behalf of someone else. Finally, an Influencer Persona is important because this Persona represents people in social media, the press, bloggers, publishers, and anyone else who might write about or refer people to the products and services being sold. These influencers help build the authority of the site.
As your Travel SEO program grows, your Personas become integrated into a customer experience journey. They become more directly connected to data sources and behavioral information you gather. They become an important part of all your enterprise marketing initiatives.
Frequent auditing
Auditing a site is an activity that is done on a regular basis. Galileo Tech Media gathers data about the site by using various crawling technologies and accessing data provided by search engines like Google’s Search Console. Then we score the site on the following factors: Accessibility, Performance, Indexability, On-Page Ranking Factors, Off-Page Ranking Factors and Competitive Analysis.
Creating content
It’s no longer enough to create content for content’s sake. Successful content must be what identify as “Wise Content” — scalable, targeted to prospects and proven to drive success over and over again. In short, Wise Content must understand and meet the intentions of the visitor.
Building your authority
Wise Content needs an authoritative site to generate search results—you cannot have one without the other! It is, therefore, crucial to develop a sound authority-building strategy, something which encompasses two major elements: Activity on-site and activity off-site.
Link building goes hand-in-hand with authority-building, and it’s a tactic that must be approached with nuanced and skill. In the past, many link builders believed that it is best to have thousands of links from diversified sources, which led to spamming and penalties from Google. Now, it is better to have multiple links from a few, highly trusted link sources. This means earning links from quality on-site content and authentic outreach. Galileo Tech Media has plenty of experience doing both!
Browse our Travel SEO Case Studies
Learn more about how Galileo Tech Media has worked with clients across the globe.
In our ongoing partnership with a leading international hotel group, we provide an array of SEO and content marketing solutions across their entire brand portfolio. Working on nearly 6,000 properties — including 90 hotels in the luxury category — we’ve achieved a broad range of goals.
When a boutique New York City-based travel agency approached Galileo Tech Media to drive targeted traffic to their homepage in order to drive bookings, we addressed the project with a multi-pronged SEO strategy.