How can you increase bookings and make more sales from your travel website? How can you guarantee the steady growth of your travel business? The answer is through travel SEO.
Travel SEO is not a theoretical concept, but it’s a term used to describe the steps you can follow to optimize your travel website for search engines.
Why Is Travel SEO Important?
If you have a travel website or blog and are new to SEO and Digital Marketing, the first thing you need to understand is why SEO is important for your website’s success and the benefits of SEO for your business.
Why should someone in the travel business care about SEO?
Getting More Leads From Search Engines
SEO aims to help a website appear higher in search engine result pages (SERPS) for keywords related to your business. For example, when a user opens Google and types “rent a villa in Sicily”, the websites optimized for SEO appear first in the results (after the paid ads – more details below), meaning more qualified leads for those websites.
A study by Google on the behavior of ‘travelers’ showed that a large percentage of people start their travel and booking process through search engines.
So it’s obvious that if your website does not have high rankings for your business keywords, you are already losing a large percentage of your potential customers to competitors.
What is more interesting is that despite the fact that there are big brand websites like booking.com, airbnb.com, and tripadvisor.com (to name a few), users still turn to search engines when they are ready to start their trip planning process.
More Cost-effective Compared To The Next Best Alternative (PPC)
Travel websites that don’t practice SEO will not appear organically in the top results, but they can still get traffic from those searches through PPC, particularly Google Ads.
While this is a perfectly good practice, and Google Ads is one of the best ways to get highly targeted traffic to your website quickly, it is not as cost-effective as SEO in the long term.
The reason is simple: when you stop advertising with Google Ads, traffic will decrease, while with SEO, once you achieve good rankings, targeted traffic will flow 24/7. In addition, for every visit you get from Google Ads, you will have to pay a few dollars per click, and depending on your daily budget, it can minimize your traffic and lower your conversion rates.
SEO is not less expensive, there are costs involved but in the long term is a better investment.
SEO Can Guarantee Your Business Growth
Can you imagine how many bookings/leads you could get if you had 2000 people visiting your travel blog or website daily? How could this change your business plans?
I’ve been working in the travel industry for a few years now and know from experience that a constant flow of targeted traffic can really transform a business and generate growth opportunities that otherwise could not be possible.
Although we always say that nothing is guaranteed in SEO and Digital Marketing, achieving good rankings in the correct way can make a huge difference for travel businesses.
How To SEO Your Travel Website
Follow these tips to optimize your travel website for search engines:
- Local SEO
- Homepage SEO
- SEO For Categories And Tag Pages (Destination Pages)
- SEO For Property Pages
- Technical SEO
- Social SEO
- Link Building
- Blogging And The Importance of A Travel Blog
1. Local SEO
First on the list is local SEO. Local SEO is a way to optimize your website so that it shows up when people search for your location or when searching through mobile in an area close to your physical business address.
If you examine several travel-related searches in Google, you will see a pattern like the screenshot above, i.e., Google shows 5 PPC Ads on top, Local SEO (Google Map) results, and then organic results.
To get your business listed in the local SEO results, you have to do several things like:
- Create a Google Business Profile account and verify your business address.
- Complete your Google Business profile with accurate descriptions, contact information, photos, and any other information required for your business.
- Add schema information to your homepage.
- Add your local address to your homepage.
- Properly optimize your page titles, h1 tags, and descriptions to reference your location.
- Get good quality links from local websites and other highly trusted sites.
- Ensure your business name, address, and phone number are the same across all channels (Google Maps, your website, local directories, social media pages, etc.).
The above list is not complete but it’s enough to get you started.
Note: General SEO practices (like the ones I will describe below) also influence Local SEO.
2. Homepage SEO
The homepage is an important page for all types of websites, but in the case of travel websites, it’s even more critical.
In terms of content, your homepage should include things like:
- Nice photos of your properties
- Nice photos of happy people on holidays
- Your most popular properties
- Special offers or deals
- Your most popular content (from your blog)
- A few words about your business and what differentiates your properties and services from the rest
- An easy way for visitors to search for properties (either by area, type, facilities, or costs)
In terms of SEO, the homepage should give several signals to Google about the nature of the business and the areas of operation (location of properties).
To be more precise, let’s say you have a travel website showcasing several holiday villas for rent in Costa Rica. Your home page title should reflect this. An example of a good SEO title would be: “Exclusive Holiday Villas in Costa Rica | ReliableVillas.Net”
The homepage description is also important since it may appear in Google results when users search for your domain. It has to be eye-catching and SEO-friendly. Here is an example of a good homepage description:
“Beautiful Villas for Rent in the most stunning areas of Costa Rica. Browse our collection of exclusive villas and receive discounts for early bookings.”
Besides the title and description, you definitely need to make sure that you have schema information on your page together with your address and other contact details (as explained in local SEO above).
3. SEO For Categories And Tag Pages (Destination Pages)
A good structure for a travel website has the following characteristics:
- It has a dedicated landing page for each City / State where the properties are located, i.e. Villas in Florida
- It has a dedicated landing page for each specific area i.e., Villas in Miami
- For each property, there is an optimized page (more on this below)
To visualize the structure of your travel website, it should look like the diagram below.
If you use WordPress, your ‘City / State’ and ‘Specific Area’ pages will probably be categories (archive pages). Regardless of the platform, you must ensure that these ‘destination pages’ are SEO optimized.
This means they should have unique titles, unique content, and proper H1 tags included in the sitemap submitted to Google and showcase the properties available for the particular area.
Special attention should also be given to the page URL. For maximum optimization, the URL should also include the destination, i.e.,/villas-in-Miami/
Read my previous post, How to SEO your WordPress categories and tag pages, for more examples and step-by-step instructions.
4. SEO For Property Pages
Next on the list are property pages. The purpose of a property page is to give potential customers more information about the particular property and convince them to convert (by either submitting a contact form or completing a booking online).
A good property page has the following items:
- Detailed description of the property (including the number of people it can accommodate)
- Rich Image gallery with good-quality photos
- A map showing the exact location of the property
- Facilities and Services Offered
- Rates and Availability calendar
- User Reviews
- Contact details
- Live Chat
- Call to Action - Inquiry or Book Now Button
In terms of SEO, a property page should include the following:
Breadcrumbs
A breadcrumb at the top of the page gives users and search engines an easy way to return to the ‘Area Pages’. For example, the breadcrumb of a property page located in Miami should look like this:
Home >> Florida >> Villas in Miami >> Large Villa with Private Pool in Star Island
Unique and informative titles
This is tricky, especially when your website has several similar properties. When crafting the title of a property page, think about the characteristics that make the particular property unique and different from the rest.
Avoid mentioning the general location in the title, but make it more specific, like the examples below:
Large Villa with Private Pool in Star Island
4 Bedroom Villa in Cefalu with direct access to the beach
Page Content
The content of the page has to be unique. One of the most common problems with travel websites is content duplication, mainly because a property may be listed on multiple websites.
Property owners list their properties on different websites to increase their chances of making bookings, and they usually do this using the exact same content. This may not be a huge issue for big websites like Airbnb, TripAdvisor, or booking.com, but this is a problem for smaller websites.
For SEO purposes and a better user experience, you must differentiate your content as much as possible. A good way is to describe the property features like a story instead of just stating the facts (that are already published on other websites).
For example, consider this standard introduction:
“The property is located 30km from Rome Airport and has 4 bedrooms and ….”
And consider this ‘story-like’ introduction:
“Once you arrive at the airport, you are only 15 minutes away from a remarkable holiday experience in Italy. A 4-bedroom luxury villa is waiting….”
Besides content uniqueness, other things you should take into account are:
Content in Tabs
Using TABS in your pages is normal to organize them better, but you should know that Google will probably ignore that content or give it less value.
If the content in a tab is dynamically generated, i.e., users have to click on the tab to trigger the generation of the content, then this is completely ignored.
For a more optimized page, avoid having important content in the tabs. You can still use them but keep your most valuable content visible all the time for Google and users.
User Reviews and Rich Snippets
User reviews and ratings are among the factors that influence conversions (bookings) in the travel industry. For the owner of a travel website or blog, this means 3 things.
- You need to show reviews and ratings for your properties.
- You need to add schema information to your reviews and ratings so that Google may show them in the search results.
- You need to have the reviews and ratings visible on the page, not in a TAB.
5. Technical SEO
Besides the above factors, you should remember that technical SEO practices are always essential.
For example, things like page speed, mobile friendliness, correct use of canonical URLs, the 404 page, correct implementation of multi-language websites, paging, optimization of images and videos, sitemaps, proper configuration of Google Search Console, and many more are necessary for a fully optimized travel website.
Note: Read my SEO tips article and how to perform an SEO Audit of your website for a complete list of all factors you need to consider when evaluating technical SEO.
6. Social SEO
It is widely accepted in the SEO industry that although social signals do not directly impact rankings, they can help indirectly.
A travel website should have an active social media presence because:
- The vast majority of potential customers spend a lot of time daily on social media networks
- Travel is a visual topic and highly suitable for networks like Pinterest or Instagram
- Social media is a good way to connect with other bloggers in your industry
- People may visit your Facebook page before booking with your company to read reviews and get an idea of the experience of your existing customers, and you don’t want them to visit a page that is empty or a page that was updated two years ago.
Social SEO best practices for travel websites
- Create business pages on all major networks (Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter) and ensure your social media profiles are SEO optimized.
- Build a decent fan page for your Facebook business page.
- Post regularly on your social media pages. The posts should not always come from your website but post content related to travel tips, things to do in your destinations, interesting things to know about your destinations, and content that is not too promotional but something that readers may find interesting to read and share.
- Monitor mentions of your brand in all networks and ensure you reply to any comments, good or bad.
- Monitor mentions of your destinations and try to engage in discussions or answer related questions without being too pushy or over-promotional.
- Allocate a monthly budget for Facebook ads (either promoting your properties or blog posts).
- Check that a page shared from your website shows correctly on social media (good photo, title, and description).
7. Link Building
There is no way to avoid discussing link building when promoting a website in a highly competitive industry like travel.
Off-page SEO is still among the most influential ranking factors, and good-quality incoming links are necessary to achieve high rankings.
How can you get links that matter for your travel website?
Link building is always difficult and time-consuming, and you should be careful not to go the easy way and get links from low-quality websites (even if they are somehow related to travel) because you risk damaging your domain’s reputation in the eyes of Google and this is not good for your business in the long term.
Press releases – Travel is one of the few niches that press releases are useful. Reporters and travel journalists look into press releases to find destinations and deals to propose to their readers. If you have good offers, they may see your website and properties listed in big travel portals, and besides the free publicity, this is also good for SEO.
Mentions (links) from travel review websites and portals – Besides press releases, you can also connect on Twitter (X) or Facebook with travel bloggers or journalists, giving them incentives to visit your website.
By making connections, I don’t mean sending them a message asking for a link to your website but trying to establish a conversation with them and maybe inviting them to visit your properties or sending them an exclusive offer for their readers, etc.
As I said above, it’s time-consuming, and you need to think outside the box to make this work, but when it does, the benefits are valuable for SEO.
Don’t forget about the easiest form of link building – internal links
Although internal linking is part of on-page SEO, I included it under link building to emphasize it more. From experience, this is something that most travel websites and blogs get wrong.
Internal links can help your website in many ways. Google uses internal links to discover more pages from your website and understand them better, and users can click on an internal link to find out more about a topic or visit another page from your website.
Don’t be afraid to use keywords as the link anchor text when adding internal links. Unlike external links, Google will not penalize your website for using keywords in the anchor text, on the contrary it is something they encourage you to do since it helps them understand what the linking page is about.
8. Blogging And The Importance of A Travel Blog
