SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Strategies — Need Of The Hour

It won’t be very much out of context if one says that, till date 2020–21 has been an extremely tough year for everyone in general and the travel industry in particular. Every where one looks the only hot topic of discussion is COVID 19, ever since the emergence of the first case of Corona.

Specifically speaking of the impact on the travel industry, one can see the changes in the way in which dealings and travel, in itself, has been impacted. What was hitherto a one on one interaction and the information divulged therein is now an era bygone. The new norm, now, for the travel industry is to compulsorily provide the internet surfer all the information on their website, as online business is the new buzz word and the norm from now on, post the entry of COVID 19.

Needless to say, that the ball now is in the travel organizers’ court. The existing circumstances make it mandatory for them to revamp their web sites so as to attract maximum traffic and hits to their respective sires. For this they will now need to build up on strategies, upload more travel related information traveler experiences etc. on their sites. Also in order to achieve this, newer Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques/strategies are required.

Before going into the nitty gritties of the SEO strategies, we first need to understand what coronavirus actually is.

It’s not pretty, but it’s important to know exactly what we’re dealing with. COVID-19 is a new type of infectious coronavirus spread through small droplets from the nose or mouth when someone who has the virus, coughs or sneezes.

It causes respiratory problems, meaning the common symptoms are often the same as the common cold or flu — fever, tiredness and dry cough, necessitating social distancing, body protection, wearing of face mask etc. as made mandatory by the government.

Ø Should I still travel during the coronavirus outbreak?

Ø If I decide to travel, what should I be booking?

Ø How can I stay safe and healthy while travelling?

The above are some basic and fundamental concerns that exist there in people’s minds who think travel. Over and above the answer to these questions the travel agencies concerned, will, as mentioned above, be required to upload as much detailed information as they can to satisfy the visitor to their site. More over the trust that was established in the bygone era will now have to be redeveloped in this changed scenario, where, now the visitor to your site will have a multiple number of sites to visit, with just the click of the hand.

Thus, necessitating the need for a good travel SEO strategy, ensuring their visibility on the top search engine results, is of utmost priority in the travel industry.

So to start with let’s take up one of the industries hardest hit by this pandemic: travel. This was a tough one, as more and more people are understandably opting for driving, walking, or biking to get around, and are no longer relying on air travel or public transportation as trips and work get cancelled. However, certain key opportunities, have been identified that could be incorporated in the website, when talking of development of trust in the current situation.

Travel insurance

While it had an increase in the summer months, interest in the topic of travel insurance has risen back up again. Perhaps those who have to travel, under the prevailing circumstance, want to make sure they’re covered if they get sick, or maybe those who canceled travel want to see what their insurance covers.

In either case, people are looking for information about travel insurance and how it can help them.

Train travel

It seems that train travel falls into an ambiguous category that people are asking about. It is not quite sure whether it’s safe or not. As we’ve all heard, it’s best not to travel at all, but perhaps your brand can offer some clarity in this regard and offer alternatives.

The coronavirus-triggered changes coming to travel payments

There are numerous issues in travel payments that must be addressed to not only to restore consumers’ confidence and trust, but also to reduce risk and improve efficiencies for travel agencies, tour operators and other intermediaries

If the consumer pays the agency with “cash” as the form of payment, and that agency fails (perhaps due to a pandemic or natural disaster) before paying suppliers for the travel purchased — that consumer has lost their money and their vacation. The pandemic has exposed this flawed business model and the industry needs to work proactively to fix it.

Over and above this given below are some SEO tips for a travel agency: First and foremost is the:

Ø Keyword Placement and Optimization

Today, when people want to travel the first thing they do is to Google preferences for places.

It is very important for your travel business to know the keywords and phrases that people use when searching for destinations.

To help rank your travel website better, you need to research keywords on a regular basis and include the most popular ones in the content. Keep in mind not to overstuff your content with keywords and unnecessary information as Google can penalize your website.

Ø Provided below are some keyword research tips to follow:

· Choose an optimum keyword density, which is nothing but keeping a good keyword density percentage without over-stuffed keywords.

· Try to target 2–3 keywords per page.

· Try putting the keyword in the headline of a page

· Use keywords in the meta description, title tag and alt tags.

· Use the Google Keyword Planner tool to find the right keywords. This tool allows you to see what people are typing in Google.

· Write an optimized content around the keywords along with semantic (LSI) keywords.

· Include your keywords in the website URL.

· Make your most important keywords the first few words in your blog post’s title.

· Optimize the destination page as well as homepage with keywords

Local SEO:

Local SEO is a way used by search engines to show the most relevant results based on the location data. When searching a travel agency you are more likely to prefer the one in your locality, right?

If you wish to see your travel businesses succeed online and appear in Google 3 pack listing then you need to do the following:

· For your travel agency, first and foremost create a Google My Business account and provide your business address.

· Complete your Google My Business profile.

· Enlist your travel agency in the local business directory.

· Add schema markup to your local business address and include it on a homepage.

· Include city/ state in the title tag of your page.

· Ensure that your business name, address and phone number is the same everywhere for Google maps, your website, local directories, social media pages etc.

· Geotag the images.

Ø Club Voice Search & Related Search Query To Build a content

As per Google’s statistics, 20% of mobile queries are voice searches and we are increasingly using voice search to make our search queries online than type search. Voice search is fast and allows for hands-free interaction with smart devices.

For example, if a voice query/search is made from an Android device, on the India Travel Store website about an entity, say travel to some destination, by saying “I want to travel to XYZ” on this Google displays the results as mentioned below.

In the results page, were found the top ranking pages of travel agencies and next click on the links of top 3 websites to gain an idea why they are ranking for the query “I want to go to XYZ”.

Interestingly it was found that the related India Travel Store website had written head to toe information about the destination XYZ on the basis of the traveler’s search intent. Now the question arises as to how you would incorporate voice search in your content marketing plan that will boost your travel SEO efforts and keep your business ahead of your competitor?

Let’s give you an example…

As said before, how a voice search query, “I want to go XYZ”, was made, and then on scrolling down to the related search result section at the bottom of Google’s 1st page the following result was found :

“I want to go to XYZ”

Related searches

XYZ TRIP FOR 7 DAYS

XYZ TRIP FOR 4 DAYS

XYZ TOUR GUIDE MAP

BEST XYZ TOUR PACKAGES

XYZ TOUR PACKAGES BY TRAIN

XYZ TOUR PACKAGE FROM KOLKATA, etc.

This is the kind of detailed information that was made available on the search for “I want to go to XYZ”

Now with this related keyword suggestion, you can frame content for your travel agency blog like the following because there are a lot of chances of your blog post to come on the 1st page of Google as you are creating a relevant content based on Google’s search-related suggestion.

· Top 7 places to visit in an XYZ trip for 7 days.

· Things to do an XYZ trip for 4 days before you die.

· How will you Plan your XYZ tour from Kolkata like a pro?

This is how you can incorporate voice search and related search results in your content marketing and increase organic traffic to your travel website.

Ø Local SEO: How To Optimize For Near Me Searches To Rank 1st in Google

The millennials and Gen-Xers demand instant and accurate information from the search engines. A clear indication is an increase of Google near me searches (almost double compared to 2014)

Moreover, most of the near me searches (80 percent to be precise) have been performed on mobile devices. Search for any key phrase on Google and you’ll be offered with the local search results.

· Keep the business address up-to-date on google map

· Make the website mobile ready for Near Me Searches

· Create content appropriately

· Sprinkle the Keywords in the content

Ø Focus on user experience

One of the most important things that your website should focus on is the user experience. You should always have the website visitor in mind. It’s not just about ranking high on the search engines anymore. The site should be able to meet the expectation of all the users who will visit.

Google uses RankBrain, and what this system does is observe what the users do when they go to your site. It will check bounce rates, dwell time and CTR. So make sure to consider user intent when optimizing for SEO.

Ø Use a short domain name

Ø Use HTTPS

If you have not yet done so, you may want to HTTPS. Because security is very important to Google, your site can get a boost in ranking when it has an SSL Certificate. Users are also less likely to access your site if they see that it is not SSL certified.

If you are going to get data from users, moving to HTTPS will assure them that the information is encrypted and that it cannot be corrupted

Ø Focus on one keyword

If you have found several keywords that you think you can use, that is good. But do not get too excited and use all those keywords for all the pages on your website. It’s not enough to stuff your content with so many keywords, hoping that it will push your pages to the top rankings.

Quality is what is important.

What you can do is focus on one keyword and its long-tail variations. According to Neil Pate, long-tail keywords make up about 70% of all web searches.

Ø Make sure your URL is SEO friendly

Here are several ways you can make your URL SEO-friendly. First is that you keep it short, do not use too many keywords. Keep it brief by using words that describe your content. Adding prepositions and conjunctions are just distracting. Several findings have shown that the shorter the URLs (somewhere between 50–50 characters), the better. If you have more than 80 characters in your URL, you might get a lower ranking.

It is also important to use top-level domains. Use the usual .com or .net instead of the more unique ones like .biz, and the like.

Although this does not hugely impact your rankings, it does make users more confident that your website is a trustworthy source.

Ø Use hyphens (-) instead of underscores(_)

If you are going to have several words in your URL, it is important that you separate those words using hyphens, and not underscores. That is because instead of several words, Google will actually read it as one word if you are using underscores.

Hyphens are treated by Google as word separators, but underscores are not treated the same way.

Ø Write a unique title tag

Moz claims that the “title tags are the second most important on-page factor for SEO, after content.” Basically, the title tag will convey to search engines what your page is all about.

It is what will be seen on browsers, on social media, and on the search engine result pages (SERPs).

Ø Write a unique meta description

A strong meta description is what appears under the URL of your page in the search engine results page, and even across social media platforms. It helps your title and URL and it specifies to the potential site visitors what your site is all about.

You need to write your meta description with the end-user in mind. What are they looking for? What do they need to see so that they will choose to go to your site over the other websites in the SERPs?

Your meta description must begin with the most important information that your readers need to know. Use long-tail keywords and don’t forget to include a call to action.

Ø Put the keyword into the headline & the subheading

Ø Don’t over optimize your content

While there is no doubt that utilizing keywords is one of the most important SEO tips for travel websites, there is such a thing as over-optimizing. Take care not to practice keyword stuffing.

Many SEO practitioners consider this a black hat trick.

Not only will you get penalized by Google by lowering your rank, but your site might also actually be removed. Stick to having a keyword density of 2%-5% and creating relevant content and your rank will surely go up.

The preciseness and subtlety of the introduction is of prime importance, and make your content super easy to read

Ø Compress images for site speed

Ø Link internal pages

Another excellent SEO tips for travel website is to link to already existing pages in your site. You can have them go to sites that offer relevant information.

This will not only boost more traffic to your website, but it will expose the visitors further into what you can offer to them.

Try to link pages that have a good impression. You can check your Search Console report for this

Ø Have other websites, partners link to you

Ø Build a healthy backlink profile

Make sure to monitor the sites that backlink to your site. They must come from trusted sites. Not only that, they actually have to be relevant, meaning they must be in an industry or niche similar to yours.

Ø Speed up your website

If you are looking for a simple but effective SEO tip for your travel website, here’s one:

Improve your page speed.

No one wants to waste time waiting for a page to load. You can be sure that if your site loads slowly, more often than not, the consumer would have looked for another resource to go to.

This report from BBC actually says that half of the consumers will not even wait for three seconds before they give up and go to another site.

Ø Create your social media presence

Ø Check your competitors SEO strategy

Ø Spy on Your Competitors

If there exists a niche without any competition, travel is definitely not it.. The powers that be tend to favor those with courage. There is a way to turn your rivals into your allies: you spy on their travel websites.

Analyzing their sites with your own two eyes is a good start, but will only get you so far. You can also use WebCEO’s tools to get a better evaluation of your competitors’ SEO strategies. Things worth investigating:

Ø How they rank for the keywords you’re using:

If they are ranking too well, you might consider picking new ones they forgot to optimize their landing pages for. After checking how your competitors are doing for a basket of keywords you’ve chosen, go to the WebCEO Keyword Research tool to find great keywords you can dominate with.

Ø Domains that link to them, sorted by authority or popularity:

the best backlinks your competitors have could also link to you, too. The WebCEO Competitor Backlink Spy can show you the various industry specific articles, forums and publications your competitors are mentioned in. You will soon know exactly what you’ll need to do to compete with them.

Ø Their activity in social networks:

Are you in the lead on this battlefield of mentions, likes, shares and comments? Google notices most such activity. Do you need to step up your game?

Doing business without a competitor analysis strategy is like playing blackjack with a single card in your hand. Fortunately, spying on your competitors’ websites is easier than bugging their offices (and much more legal). All of their hidden aces will become plain for you to see online.