There are a ton of people in the travel industry. This includes everyone from bloggers to hotels and restaurants. While you’re all in this together, you should also remember other local businesses are your competition.
There are plenty of ways for you to set yourself apart without being malicious. The travel industry was devastated by the pandemic, but it’s slowly starting to recover. You can help others by helping yourself.
The best way to do that is with search engine optimization. Make your website show up quickly in the search results by mastering a few key concepts.
Why SEO is Important for the Travel Industry
When Covid hit us all, many local businesses suffered. Hotels and restaurants closed, some of them permanently. Communities had to close attractions like zoos, museums, and events.
This kind of thing hurts.
Now that people are wanting to travel again, they’re spending more time than ever on Google, searching to see if what they want to see, do, or eat is still in business. Not staying on top of your search presence can make your business experience even more suffering.
Here are a few tips to keep people travelling to your city or town in the loop so they know what to expect.
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Search engines are always on the prowl for fresh content. Anyone and everyone involved with the travel industry can stand to blog more to keep new content on their websites.
For bloggers, it’s becoming more and more important to have amazing review content on your site. You want to be really in-depth and do a true deep dive whenever you review or travel to a new city, town, or area.
If you’re posting something that isn’t a review, you should still go out of your way to write the best content possible. Content is the once and future king and helps to develop a loyal customer base.
Own a local business? You can’t escape the importance of blogging either. As an example, say you own a cafe in Miami. Travel to the area is starting to heat up and you want people travelling to your city to make their way to your eatery.
Posting blog content is a good way for someone to find you by “accident”. If you use the right keywords and secondary keywords, you never know who will stumble onto your site and then maybe into your cafe.
Just because you own a cafe doesn’t mean you can’t write blog posts like “The best nightclubs in Miami” or “15 cool things to do in downtown”. If you want the most bang for your buck, keep the content centred around your eatery. Talk about the fun things to do, visit, or try within a few blocks from your business.
However, at the end of the day, most of your content should be about what you do, why you do it, and why you’re the best.
The Value of Internal Links
Take a look below.
Using our cafe in Miami example, you can see that keyword research doesn’t bode well for this keyword.
What you want to do is focus on quality secondary keywords and main keywords that will be easy to rank for.
“But this doesn’t make sense!”
Sure it does. If you can get ranked for some low-hanging fruit type of keywords and content, you can include internal links that drive readers towards content that help make your business look better. This is what we call moving people “down the funnel”.
On top of the engagement aspect, internal links are also important for search engines. Your site architecture gives Google a clear idea of what content is the most important and how they should rank it.
Images and Ads
Images have a special place on travel websites and blogs. Readers want to see pictures of exotic places, the food, the people, and the beautiful landscapes that surround it all.
While ads are a great way to increase revenue for your business, you should be careful.
Ads can be a distraction to your readers. If they’re annoying as well as obnoxious, you can lose that audience forever. On the other side of this coin, people have gotten used to ads and many people just ignore them.
But the one thing you don’t want is to push them up against beautiful photos of your business or the world you live in.
Next, you want to pay special attention to the size of your photos. If they’re too big and take too much time to load, Google will hit your right in the rankings. And that feels bad.
If you deal with a sluggish website on a regular basis, you can look into plugins like WP Smush or Optimus to help compress images and speed up your website or blog.
Link Building and the Travel Industry
It doesn’t matter where you are in the travel industry, link building for your business or blog is important.
If you’re a travel affiliate, you need to be especially careful. Building bad or spammy links can destroy everything you’ve built with a single algorithm update.
The easiest way to build links for a travel blog is through guest posting. Bloggers reach out to other bloggers and websites relevant to the travel industry and write articles for them in return for a link to the blogger’s website.
One really popular tactic is called the skyscraper technique. This is an in-depth process. First, you come up with an idea for a piece of content that would be a great fit for your website. Then you go and study the competition, say the top three results in the SERPs.
Go through this content and find a way to make it better in every way possible. Write the post, polish it, and then share it on social media. Next, track links to the competition, reach out to people who link to it, and let them know you wrote something you think is better.
It’s a lot of work but often results in a lot more traffic going to your site along with some sweet high-quality links.
Social Media
Social media outlets are a great way to get early traffic to your website, promote deals and discounts, and help promote your city, town, or area.
However, it’s easy to overdo it. Some people, especially bloggers, try to take on way too much. You can’t be successful if you spread yourself thin with your marketing efforts.
Pick two or three social sites where you think your business or blog will get the most eyes. Anyone or any business that’s involved with the travel industry will do well with photo-heavy networks like Instagram and Pinterest.
Facebook can be hit or miss but everyone should have a Facebook page at this point. Even if you don’t like it, Facebook is still the most popular platform around.
Websites and businesses that don’t have accounts on social media platforms can appear to be suspect. It’s marketing at its finest and for the most part, it’s free to use.
Use the Right Plugins
Plugins are tools designed to make your life easier. They make your website run better, faster, and are used to help you use other tools more efficiently.
Free plugins can be just as good as premium ones, provided you’re willing to search for the best free tools. Most premium plugins deliver an all-in-one experience.
The first plugin you want is a quality caching plugin, such as WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache.
Caching reduces the load on hosting servers, which makes your blog or website run faster.
Next, you’ll want a quality SEO plugin. Rank Math and Yoast are two of the best. These plugins will help make your website be more visible to Google, help utilize keywords, and set yourself up for snippets and great title tags.
There is such a thing as too many plugins. Having too many can actually slow your site down. You also want to be mindful of how often your plugins are updated. Plugins that are not updated run the risk of being hacker-bait and can break your website with updates of other plugins and WordPress itself.
SEO Tips for The Travel Industry Conclusion
When it comes to SEO, some things are out of your hands and they always will be. But if you put our SEO tips for the travel industry into practice, you’ll start to see movement in a few months.
It takes a while for Google to move your project up the rankings, which is why it’s important to start getting better with your SEO efforts today.
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