Planning a vacation once involved stopping into a travel agency office, discussing plans with a sales representative, and going from there. That was in the days when travel agencies relied on foot traffic for business. Now, the internet has made vacation planning far easier. Many people don’t use travel agencies, and they plan their vacations on their own.
This means that it is vital for travel agencies to have a digital marketing strategy to reach vacation planners. This is where SEO (search engine optimization) comes into play. In this article, we will review some of the best SEO strategies to use to pull more traffic to your travel website.
What Is SEO?
SEO, or search engine optimization, is a way to improve your website so that it’s more visible to people doing internet searches for your product or service. This is accomplished through tactics that place elements in your website content that search engines understand and use to gain more knowledge about what your website is about. The more a search engine understands about a website, the more likely it will choose that website as a match to queries made by internet users. The SEO strategies listed below cost you nothing to implement and are mostly easy enough for you to do yourself.
SEO Strategy #1 – Researching Keywords
The foundation of any SEO strategy begins with keyword research. Keywords are the words most commonly used in search queries to find information online.
The first part of keyword research is identifying your audience. Once you determine the demographic you intend to target your vacation planning website to, your keywords should speak to that specific audience. There are online tools to help with your keyword research – and do not forget to use long-tail keywords. These are short phrases used in online searches such as “best place to visit in 2022” or “best country to visit in 2022.”
SEO Strategy #2 – URL Optimization
When you use search engine-friendly URLs, you can greatly improve the SEO efforts of your vacation planning website. You can do this by including target keywords in the URL, using a favicon (this builds trust with both visitors and search engines), creating URLs without capital letters, and creating URLs that contain hyphens.
With relevant keywords consistently appearing in URLs throughout the website, search engines are more likely to take notice and visit your site frequently. When they do, they will crawl and index pages, which help to improve website ranking.
SEO Strategy #3 – Improve Page Loading Time
How long it takes for a page to load has a huge impact on rankings. The longer it takes for a web page to load, the more likely a visitor is going to leave in search of a site that doesn’t take as long for them to see.
According to Digital Authority Partners, the ideal page load time is between four and five seconds. SEO audit sites online can help you determine the page load times of your site. Also, it is a good idea to make your vacation planning site mobile-friendly, so that visitors wanting vacation ideas can visit your travel website on any handheld device, anytime they want to.
SEO Strategy #4 – Link Building
Backlinks are vital because they are a source of traffic to your vacation planning website. What makes them work best is if the link to your travel site originates from a source that is from the same niche.
For example, a travel blog about a specific vacation spot that links to your site would make sense. It takes some effort to earn links from high authority sites but they do provide you with some extra benefits. High authority websites typically have a lot of quality traffic and high rankings. Your backlink will help you to receive additional traffic to your site you may not have had access to otherwise. Also, the high authority site ranking on Google will improve your ranking.
SEO Strategy #5 – Content Creation
Quality content has tremendous value. It is the one item that can convince a visitor to take action. This means that your site’s content, blog, or article, should contain information that answers questions or solves problems for those who land on it from search results.
The best content is written for people and not so much for search engines. Naturally, you will require keywords but the content has to be original. Google can tell if you are posting things that you copy and paste from elsewhere, and that impact your page ranking. Oh, and remember to publish new content regularly to attract visitors and search engines.
SEO Strategy #6 – Use Social Media
One of the most effective ways to promote a new blog post published on your vacation planning website is to cross-promote it on other platforms. You should have pages for your travel agency on all popular social media feeds.
These are the places you would promote anything new on your website. Because your social media feeds reach audiences that you may not have exposure to in any other way, these are the people you should be marketing to whenever you can. Social media also lets you engage with your audience in ways that were not possible before. Always consider social media as part of your digital marketing strategy.
Final Thoughts
The internet has changed how we do a lot of things – including shopping for a vacation. Search engine optimization will help your travel agency website stand out from all others, including your competitors. Reach more customers planning upcoming vacations by using these SEO strategies on your website.
When you use SEO, you improve your website’s visibility. With greater visibility, more people learn about your service. This makes them more likely to turn to you when planning their next vacation. Essentially, SEO increases your odds of getting business from customers who now know more about your business through your website.
