Travel agencies no longer enjoy their former popularity. Today they face major competitors: sites dedicated to booking flights and hotels.
How do you stand out? How do you attract an online audience and get them to visit your travel agency? Know that the best way to boost your professional site is SEO. Indeed, it’s the best way to appear in top search results, and it allows you to target each client's needs.
To help you, we offer 6 best practices to follow!
Why focus on SEO?
You might think SEO is reserved for the internet giants. Yet even a small travel agency can compete with the major booking sites. To do so, it simply needs to work on its content to benefit from good visibility and be on the first page as mentioned above.
Let's remember that users rarely go beyond that famous first page, while according to a BtoC e-tourism study, 66% of travel sites on Google rely on SEO to gain visibility. To be present there, you need to offer the right content. Here are our tips to achieve that.
1. Select relevant keywords
You probably know that to gain good visibility you must select the right keywords. These should be related to the subject but also set you apart. You should therefore include generic keywords as well as long-tail keywords that provide details about the subject addressed.
When choosing your keywords, you must consider your topic but also your competitors' content. The ideal is to include both the most popular keywords and those that better target the subject.
The keywords should appear in:
- The URL
- The title and subheadings (tags)
- The meta description
- The body text
2. Offer quality, relevant content
As a travel agency, your content must be different. You are not a platform! You are a an expert in your field. Instead of offering informative texts that repeat information found everywhere, dare to talk about destinations differently. To do so, several options are available to you.
You can play on emotions by offering content about gastronomy or local culture. You can also focus on a local event. Keep in mind that you have an advantage: you are in contact with your customers. You can therefore use their testimonials and even add them to your content.
3. Make the most of social media
Social networks and blogs are excellent communication channels. They allow you to communicate with your audience, link to your content, organize events and even collect reviews.
By offering high-quality, original content, you can win over your audience and encourage your readers to share your content. They become genuine ambassadors.
4. Optimize content for local searches
Because you run a travel agency, you need to implement local SEO. This approach allows internet users to identify you but also to locate you. That way, you can attract people into your agency!
To achieve this, you should:
- Plan keywords that include the city where you are located or even your neighborhood,
- Include your address on your websites,
- Enable local search and geolocation,
- State your location on all your communication channels, including social media.
This approach is essential because you will be properly indexed if a user performs a search specifying a location.
5. Adapt content for mobile
Your site must therefore be adapted to this new communication medium. For that, you should choose a Responsive design. This allows your site to display well and offer an ergonomic navigation. It is important to optimize visuals to limit loading time.
6. Analyze results to improve
Publishing content online, even high-quality content, is not enough. At the same time, you must monitor your pages' performance to make necessary corrections and also to identify what works and therefore what appeals to your audience.
Why boost the SEO of a travel agency website?
The tourism and travel sector was the most affected by the coronavirus crises. Beyond the competitive reasons mentioned above, here are additional reasons to boost your travel agency website.
SEO in tourism: long-term work and patience
The travel agency SEO requires regular work and a lot of patience. The result cannot necessarily be immediate, because it is Google that takes into account the improvements made, and given the high level of competition, the results will take time to appear.
Based on some experience in the field, you should expect roughly 6 to 8 months on average to reap the benefits of an agency or tourism site (after the site audit phase). So, when you can afford it, always try to boost your site's SEO.
The need to take concrete actions on Google rankings
You must analyze your position as well as those of your competitors in Google's search bars! Before implementing your strategy SEO for travel agencies, you must indeed know your ranking to set the target to reach, in order to achieve the best result. It's not just a question of making improvements and hoping for a small change in placement.
Ideally, you should use a tool like Google Search Console (free and complementary to Analytics) to closely monitor this progress, and you'll have the opportunity to make any necessary corrections.
It's also essential to go directly into competitors' sites to analyze and leverage what brings them traffic. It's not about copying their layouts, but it often gives you ideas you haven't thought of yet.
Regarding the concrete actions you should take, the ideal would be to optimize all the elements within your site. This includes meta titles and descriptions, HTML tags, the semantic field, content optimization, Hn headings, etc. If any of these elements are incomplete or disorganized, the result given by Google will be poor.
The importance of website architecture for travel and tourism
Architecture is an element not to be neglected (especially for an agency site), because it also improves your optimization! For example, create thematic menus for your offers, like family trips, hiking, luxury category, etc. You will then have the opportunity to create landing pages and an SEO content hierarchy.
Internal linking
Internal linking is sometimes neglected by many professionals, but it helps strengthen your travel agency SEO! The more links your page has pointing to the site, the more link juice you'll get.
You still need to be careful about link stuffing! As a travel site, you may be tempted to direct tourists and visitors from every page load, and that can create saturation that should be avoided.
Tourism content and travel guides
Content marketing is currently considered one of the most effective strategies for feeding a website. It has a dual role: pleasing visitors as well as the Google search engine.
Indeed, content is the primary material that represents the essence and nature of your activity. Working it well will therefore allow you to generate more traffic, which also means more travel bookings for your agency site.
It is especially through the latter that you can demonstrate your expertise in the field! For example, if you organize trips to Mexico, you should talk about the city's must-sees, the different sites to visit, etc.
The goal is to make your visitors want what you present as content. If they need to research their travel destinations, don’t just show tickets and hotels—help them discover the country through your site. Create a short travel guide to attract them, which will increase traffic to your travel site.
Targeted marketing actions
Still within the scope of improving your SEO, a travel site requires regular work on the overall marketing strategy.
However, offering quality content alone is not enough; you must also ensure targeted marketing to achieve sustainable growth. This is the best way to stabilize your SEO, by providing content that meets visitors’ needs in real time.
Our tip for improving the SEO of a travel site
In conclusion, travel agencies must provide very high-quality content but above all optimized content to ensure their site's effectiveness. These two aspects must be balanced, because the tourism and travel sector is currently quite sensitive, and you must do everything you can to dress up your site and generate as many visitors as possible.
To achieve this, you can follow all the tips mentioned above, but if you need help with SEO, don’t hesitate to hire professional freelancers on Redacteur.com.
