Travel. Humans like to travel. It is the thing that gets them away from their dreary, mundane lives, and allows them to have something worth while to look after. And we, as humans always like to travel. We plan to visit the places we like, the kind of staying arrangements we prefer. We even like to research and plan the kind of food we are going to have! It all depends on people and their preferences.
And the new age traveler appears to depend a lot on the internet and specialist websites for information regarding their travel planning. But, they also want their information fast, hence they seldom look beyond the first page. What do travel websites then do? Well, they can either choose to spend their resources to pay for advertising all across different websites and social media, or they can focus on doing some SEO for their travel website. Here we want to talk about how, if done the right way, SEO can be very effective for travel websites.
10 Effective Ways to Promote Your Travel Agency
If you are running your Travel Agency and located in a country where most of the tourists come from outside, then you must follow below strategy to get online leads and business. Using these methods, you can improve your travel agency business:
Your Site must be Mobile-Friendly
With the growth of mobile technology, it is more likely that people will book tickets on your site from a mobile device, and they will keep doing so all across their travel period. So it is very important to focus on making your website mobile friendly.
- Always use a website design that is aesthetic looking on a mobile device.
- Reduce the page load time so users don’t get irked at waiting and switch websites
- Optimize your images to smaller sizes so your webpage loads faster
- Don’t use tiny text. It is really off putting.
Find out whether your website is Mobile Friendly or not using this free tool – Google Mobile Friendly Test
Improve Website Speed
Both Google and Bing are prime search engines, and they take ‘page-loading speed’ into consideration in their website ranking algorithm. Also, users have been getting more impatient and they may leave your site if they have to wait even an extra second for your page to load. That can majorly affect your SEO ranking.
You can use Google Pagespeed to analyze your website speed.
Target Keywords
SEO is all about targeting keywords. The travel industry is always looking for places and services that are pretty specific, so anything vagueness tends to fail to make an impression.
Also, if you want to gain an edge, instead of short key words like ‘taxi/cab’ or ‘madrid hotel’, you can target longer, more specific phrases that describe what your client will look for, like ‘taxicab to madrid airport from Hotel XYZ’. This is called long-tail keywords, and it helps convert more customers.
Make sure to not to include many keywords on a single page, avoid keyword stuffing.
All above 3 comes under On-Page optimization process.
Use Social Media
Social media has become a great platform for encouraging people to explore the world and travel more frequently. It is the biggest influencer in a modern traveller’s travel plans. It sparks interest and makes an impression on what their choice of destination will be. So if you want SEO for travel website, you need to improve your Social media game and get as many channels of communication with users as you can.
Facebook and Twitter are major player in Social Media. Make sure to have an active account on these 2 platforms.
Make a Blog
Blogging is a great way of gaining traction for your Travel website. It is an ideal place to put out content, and you can place back-links to your website from this content. If your content is engaging and exciting to read, about exotic places and rich mind boggling adventures, then it is bound to influence people to click on your website. Additionally , if your article is worth, then you might get back-links from other websites.
Also, consumer behaviour studies have shown that travellers are more impulsive now and take travel decisions based on what they have heard about. If your blog contains knowledge about unknown but interesting places, it would encourage them to visit immediately.
Get Links from Authoritative Travel-Related Sources
A wannabe traveller makes his/her decision based on the sources of information available on number of websites. Hence, link building is huge aspect of SEO for a travel website. You need to earn a valuable up-link to your website from popular travel websites. Some of them are:
- The Telegraph Travel
- Conde Nast Traveller
- Lonely Planet
- TripAdvisor
- Huffington Post
Make sure to provide excellent service to your clients (tourist) so that they will be happy to leave review and blog on 3rd party sites. This will help to get natural back links for your website.
Install Live Chat on your Website
You can install a proper website chat widget on your site to liven it up and increase customer engagement. It can help you communicate with visitors and gain real time feedback about your services. This can help convert sales very easily.
Here are few popular Live Chat application that you can integrate on your website.
Both Free and Paid versions are available.
Internal Link Building
It is important that your website has a well-designed internal link structure. For an ideal user experience, it must be designed such that no user has to click more than three times to get their preferred web page full of information. So, site navigation tabs also can play a significant role in this scenarios. This also comes under seo specialist work list.
Additionally, it also help to improve website’s performance on SERP (Search Engine Result Page).
Use Relevant Images
Your website needs to have relevant and usable Visual content. Pictures and Videos have a strong impression on visitors comparing to text, so you should have imagery complementing your written matter. Video in particular is more likely to reel in consumers who yearn to travel, and converting them to customers. So make sure your website has the best videos money can buy.
It is always advisable to use own taken pictures on website. If you don’t have one, then use Royalty Free Images.
Analyse your Competitors
It is very essential to keep an eye out on your competing websites so you can have an edge on them. You can use Sem Scoop tools to get a better evaluation of their site.
Look for the key words you are targeting and check how they fare.
Check the competitor’s back links.
Look out for new key words that they haven’t optimized their pages on, and activate those key words in your site. Also, check what back links lead to them, so that you can link your domain as effectively as them.