SEO guide for the travel industry

The travel industry is one of the most competitive verticals globally. Many services have a very low barrier to entry, and consumers actively search for and visit multiple sites to research their ideal holiday.

I’ve been fortunate to work with some of the biggest brands in the travel industry, ranging from airlines and global travel aggregators to boutique luxury specialists, ski chalets, and airport transfer companies.

Because of this, I can safely say that ranking on page one in the travel sector is no longer a game of ranking 1 to 10, and it’s about providing value in Google’s world of SERP diversification, special content result blocks, and own products.

Because of this, it will be impossible to "package" SEO, sell it in tokens, or sell it by keyword color difficulties in 2025.

Every travel SEO campaign is unique and is about applying best practices in a way that suits the business and helps it meet its objectives.

I’ve put together this series of guides based on my experiences consulting with travel companies, ranging in specialism and business size, including case studies of what to do – and what not to do.

Table of contents

Chapter 1: Keyword Research for Travel Companies

• Keyword research for travel companies
• Understanding travel keywords and different user intents
• How to map search targets to content (and your site architecture)
• Understanding seasonality, search trends, and creating evergreen content
• Keyword research tools for travel companies

Chapter 2: Content for travel companies

• Let’s not call it content marketing
• Dealing with duplicate content across hotels, resorts, and property listings
• How to write a blog post effectively
• Blogs versus content hubs
• Content during a crisis

Chapter 3: Building a Travel Brand Online

• Offsite SEO, link building, and PR activities
• DIY: Building a travel brand from nothing
• Evaluating your brand SERP
• Managing PR & outreach activity at scale
• Building links and generating noise online
• How not to build links for travel websites
• Importance of reviews

Chapter 4: Measuring Success & Benchmarking

• Competitor benchmarking & analysis
• How to set realistic KPIs and objectives
• Easy ways to manage routine performance reports

The travel industry is one of the most competitive verticals to work in. This is down to two main factors:

1. The consumer drive of increased wealth and exposure to new cultures/and experiences.
2. There are relatively few barriers to entry in the market (obviously, getting ATOL and ABTA accredited has some barriers, but generally, anyone can set up a travel affiliate, for example).

The travel industry includes many business models, including airlines, tour operators, travel agencies, brokers, and affiliates.

Organic search is an essential channel for travel sites, especially for smaller businesses where paid search is an expensive and not always feasible alternative.

In terms of the UK travel market, data suggests that combined travel agency and tour operator turnover in the UK is worth more than $30bn, with more than 70,000 operators in the market.

So, how do you set yourself apart from the competition?

You need to make sure your website and brand are working harder for you than your competitors’ websites and brands are working for them.

You combine the four elements necessary for strong SEO: Technical, Content, User Experience, and traditional travel marketing/PR activities.

This guide intends to help you improve those four elements of your website and become more competitive as a travel business.

Chapter 1: Keyword research for travel companies

Understanding your target users and how they search for various travel products and services is always the base of your travel keyword research, it’s about finding relevant keywords with the correct search intents, not about focusing on search volume.

Keyword research can also reveal needed site elements, such as resource guides and video content, or, in some cases, justify the need for a travel blog and non-commercial content.

A lot of people only consider keyword research to be necessary for SEO purposes. But, thorough keyword research can also help identify gaps in your user journey.

It’s not just about updating your title tag and the text on your site (whilst these are important), it’s much more valuable than that for wider business insights.

In the travel sector, this activity might reveal that more people are searching for budget hotels rather than luxury boutiques, or in the case of the Czech Republic, people haven’t taken them up on their rebrand to Czechia.

In this chapter, I’m going to talk about:

• How to approach keyword research as a travel company
• Understanding the different user intents behind keywords and how they play a part in your sales funnel
• Why “long tail vs short tail” keywords are not a strategy
• How to create content to match commercial intent queries
• How to create content to match research/discovery-based queries
• Understanding the difference between seasonal/transient travel content and evergreen content, and why they’re both critical.

How to approach keyword research for travel companies

From working with 50+ travel companies over the years, a standard error is focusing on a small subset of keywords that you want to rank for, and seeing those as being the be-all and end-all, and not ranking for those is the end of the world.

To an extent, this can be true, but it’s important to consider that to rank for one term, you might need to be relevant for many other travel search queries - so you’re attracting many different visitors at different stages of their journey.

Keyword Research is about finding all the search queries and phrases, grouping these into categories, and then mapping them against your website.

By categorizing a single phrase as much as you can now, later down the line you can produce reports and measure progress either as a whole — or drill down into more granular detail a lot more easily. This is why the example “colosseum walking tours” is tagged both as a walking tour, and as tour.

“rome tours” has been tagged as an objective rather than a business priority, this is because “rome tours” will be (and is) a hyper-competitive term, and whilst ranking for it would be fantastic, it’s not the only search phrase that will drive leads to your company, that’s why it’s an objective to rank for the term and not a business priority.

You can also read my post looking at keyword research for hotels.

Long tail v Short tail keywords, they're a classification not a strategy.

This is one of my biggest “bugbears” in SEO and keyword research, especially the travel sector and this is the notion of short tail v long tail and it being a strategic insight.

The theory goes that a long tail keyword (which is basically a long string of words) is easier to rank for than a short tail keyword, and ranking for a collection of long-tail keywords is fine as the lower search volumes “all add up”.

The notion of the long tail is false, because:

• Search volumes are often lower on the long tail, as Google's search volume data is not total searches – it’s the average number of searches performed (within a month) in which a paid Google ad appears. So the more obscure the query, the less “search volume” it is.
• 70% of all searches performed are long tail, so this isn’t some big secret. They’re likely just as competitive within your niche as the “short tail.”
• With increasing voice and AI search, long tails are fast becoming the standard.

Naturally, you want to rank for the big keywords, and being drawn to high search volumes is fine, but it’s also important to understand their value to your business and where your users are in the user journey.

From experience, it’s also nigh on impossible to rank for a query like “Rome tours” if you’re not relevant for all the associated search terms as well – as you’re not offering much user value.

This is why it’s important to keep the big marquee phrases in mind but focus on those relevant to your business (and your business size).

That being said, in some verticals, this is easier than others – depending on your niche and who your competitors are.

Understanding travel keywords and different user intents

In 2006, a study conducted by the University of Hong Kong found that at a primary level, search intent can be segmented into two search goals.

That a user is specifically looking to find information relating to the keyword(s) they have used, or that they are looking for more general information about a topic.

A further generalization can be made, and intentions can be split into how specific the searcher is, and how exhaustive the searcher is.

Specific users have a narrow search intent and don’t deviate from this, whereas an exhaustive user may have a wider scope around a specific topic or topics. Search queries can also have multiple meanings, and can generally be classified into three types:

• The query has a single dominant interpretation
• The query has a number of common interpretations
• The query has some minor interpretations
• The query possesses all of the above

Queries can then also be classified further as Do, Know, and Go.

• Do – transactional queries
• Know – informational queries
• Go – navigational queries

This then goes back to a statement I made earlier, that it’s not longer about ranking one to ten on the first page of Google anymore. As Google has gotten better at understanding the meaning behind keywords, it understands there can be multiple intents.

This is why Google actively practices “SERP diversification”, and uses data to rank a number of results to cater various intents, so you need to work out what is ranking for the query, and were you fit into this.

As a result, page one is not a linear one to ten, and can’t be achieved through just technical, content and backlinks alone – you need to factor in intent as part of your core strategy.

How to map search targets to your content (and site architecture)

I’ve worked with more than 80 travel companies, ranging from big international household names listed on the NASDAQ, to smaller outfits based all around the world.

One thing they all have had in common, at some point they had been given crappy SEO advice around content, and as a result, generated a ton of individual landing pages.

There is a process that travellers go through before they purchase a holiday, a funnel of sorts. Now the time that it takes for the would be traveller to pass through the funnel varies, and some don’t complete it at all, but from experience it goes like.

Research & Discovery Content

This phase is where people are literally looking around on Pinterest, Instagram and performing searches like “where is sunny in September in Europe”, or “cheap European city breaks winter 2020”. They will be bouncing around a lot of websites and destinations.

Your content at this point needs to provide value to the user and not immediately try and sell. The more value you provide at this stage the more you will be seen as an authority for that particular query, and the more likely you will be referred back to further down the funnel.

Planning & Scoping

This is the stage before the would-be traveler makes the purchase.

They’re no longer looking for the high-resolution images and sales patter, they want the cold hard facts.

• How much does it cost?
• Where can I fly from?
• Where do I fly to?
• What days can I fly on?
• What are the hotel options?
• What's local transport like?

These are all important things. These can be included on the same page as the research and discovery information, and in my opinion, you should—as this would create a very comprehensive resource on a particular destination that provides a lot of user value (and Google will recognize this, too).

A great way to identify “interrogative travel searches” is with a tool called Also Asked. This is easy to export from and provides good visuals and question-based searches around travel topics.

Understanding seasonality and search trends

We all know that travel, for the most part, is a seasonal business, and you’ll likely know the trends for when you get most traffic and inquiries; however, Google Trends is a great tool that can also help you map travel-research phase keywords. This will not only help you better curate content and a content calendar but also give you more insight into your buyer journey from the research phase, all the way through to purchase.

You can then use Google Trends data in two ways:

Create relevant content to coincide with the peak.

For example, suppose you’re a business selling winter sun holidays. In that case, it may make sense to put together a “best cheap winter sun destinations for 20XX” and publish it in August, as this has historically been the start of the “peak” for searches surrounding [winter sun destination] search phrases.

Start optimizing existing relevant pages before the peak in search demand.

Once the guide has been published, you will have time to strategize other channels (and off-site link building) to build authority and focus on the guide.

Keyword research tools for travel companies

Travel companies have unique needs for keyword research, requiring tools that provide insights into user behavior, seasonal demand, and location-based interests.

Skyscanner Trends

Skyscanner provides flight search data, giving insights into user interests for destinations and travel dates.

• Real-time data on popular flight routes and destinations.
• Insights into the most searched travel dates (seasonal demand).
• Price trends and forecasted travel cost insights.
• Data on multi-city and round-trip search behavior.

Use Cases for Travel Companies:

• Identifying high-demand destinations to prioritize in content and ads.
• Aligning promotions with peak travel dates.
• Creating content around trending destinations to capture seasonal traffic.

Google Travel Insights

A data platform provided by Google that gives insights into travel demand, popular destinations, and travel search trends.

• Real-time data on top destinations by region.
• Insights into trending destinations and travel categories.
• Audience insights based on search behavior.
• Interactive visualizations for a better understanding of travel trends.

Use Cases for Travel Companies:

• Prioritizing destinations with increasing search demand.
• Adapting content strategies to target popular travel themes.
• Optimizing PPC campaigns with data-driven insights.

Chapter 2: Content for travel companies

Using the knowledge gained in chapter 1, you can now start to craft and plan a content strategy and calendar to satisfy the commercial and non-commercial queries that your target audience are searching for – when they are searching for them.

Let’s not call it content marketing

Content marketing makes it sound like we are producing content for the sake of marketing – but we’re not, we’re creating content to add value to the website, and to users.

Your webpage content has to be unique and add value to them at their specific point in their journey.

Dealing with duplicate content across hotel, resorts, and property listings

If you’re a holiday website listing multiple hotels and resorts — that are also listed on thousands of other websites, you may have content issues. This is not so much a duplicate content issue (yes, it is duplicate) but more of a value issue. What additional value are you offering to users by having the same copy in the same format as hundreds of other websites? Use their copy, but add to the overall value of the page and supporting content.

This isn’t so much an issue for major websites such as Airbnb or Booking.com – because they’ve built the authority necessary, and offer the additional value.

You can do this by talking about things in addition to the physical property itself by bringing in content (and links to content) from other areas of the website. Internal duplication of content isn’t a big issue as long as it adds relevance to the page and value to the user.

Travel blog content

A blog might be a bit of an outdated idea, but it can add a lot of value and topical relevancy to your website.

Typical travel blog content can include:

• Travel tips
• Activities you can do in your destination.
• Places to visit while enjoying your holidays in a particular area.
• Special guides for families with kids.
• Special guides for large groups and young people.
• Events worth visiting.
• Best beaches to swim.
• Local guides (where to eat, where to go at night etc.).

However, in my opinion, not all of this content is suitable for a blog – and can work a lot, a lot harder for your travel website.

How to write a blog post effectively

In summary, the best way to go about writing a blog post is to follow a simple 5 step plan, this isn’t new or groundbreaking, but it is simple:

1. Plan your blog post by choosing a topic, creating an outline, researching, and checking facts.
2. Craft a headline that is both informative and will capture readers’ attention.
3. Write your post, either a draft in a single session or gradually word on parts of it.
4. Use images to enhance your post, improve its flow, add humor, and explain complex topics.
5. Edit your blog post. Avoid repetition, read your post aloud to check its flow, have someone else read it and provide feedback, keep sentences and paragraphs short, don’t be a perfectionist, don’t be afraid to cut out text or adapt your writing last minute.

Using dictation to speed up the content production process

Using dictation can significantly speed up the content production process, especially for travel companies creating destination guides, travel tips, or blog posts.

Some great tools to help you start the dictation process are:

• Google Docs Voice Typing: Available directly in Google Docs (Tools > Voice Typing). Ideal for quick drafts.
• Apple’s Built-in Dictation (iOS/macOS): Fast and accurate for those in the Apple ecosystem.
• Microsoft Word Dictation: Integrated with Office 365, great for structured documents.
• Otter.ai: Advanced transcription with speaker recognition, useful for interviews or multi-person discussions.
• Dragon NaturallySpeaking: Industry-leading dictation software with advanced customization and high accuracy.

Production tips:

• Use Voice Commands for Formatting: Most dictation tools support commands like “new paragraph” or “select all.”
• Create Custom Shortcuts: In advanced tools like Dragon NaturallySpeaking, create voice shortcuts for common phrases (e.g., “Insert SEO tips section”).
• Repurpose Audio Notes: Record thoughts on the go using apps like Otter.ai, then turn the transcript into content later.
• Collaborate Using Shared Documents: If you’re working with a team, dictate directly into a shared Google Doc for real-time collaboration.

Travel content hubs for multi-location offerings

Content hubs and knowledge repositories are not new concepts, in-fact TripAdvisor and Lonely Planet are effectively content hubs first, and commercial sites second.

Whilst the content in theory can sit on a blog, and if you offer a single location service then in theory the blog is the best place for it — but if you offer multiple locations, content hubs are much more focused and a lot more powerful.

A content hub allows for more focused structure around target markets and better caters for different search intents

The blog model is a traditional model, and content is collated in a single folder that’s applicable to multiple locations, this is represented on the above diagram on the left.

The content hub model however still leaves you with commercial pages for flights and hotels (etc), but also has evergreen guides built for the target countries in a single hub. These provide valuable resources and content areas to support non-commercial intent queries, and provide strong “supporting” content areas for the site’s main content (the commercial content).

I’ve used approach across a number of verticals to improve rankings and relevancy for a number of commercial and non-commercial phrases to great effect, and if you’re a travel company offering multiple locations (cities or countries) then this definitely an approach I would take.

You can still run a blog in parallel for some forms of content, such as top 5s, ad hoc guides, etc — but the “hardcore”, evergreen content such as things to do, places to eat, tourist attractions that are must-see, this should be in the single hub. Through clever blog tagging, you can relay users to relevant blog articles from the hubs and really demonstrate your expertise to them.

A good example of this on a smaller scale is one produced on the Bonawe House website, a holiday cottage letting company in Oban, Scotland.

They have the content hub – The Oban Travel Guide:

As well as a number of standalone blog articles, including:

• A Guide to Fishing in Loch Etive
• 5 Great Day Trips from Oban
• An Exhaustive List of the Best Beaches on the West Coast of Scotland
• A Guide to Visiting Oban Distillery

All of which compliment the site in terms of topical relevancy, and act as good standalone content pieces.

Content during a crisis

The travel industry is often at the whims from a number of external factors, and sometimes Governments need to advise against travel to particular countries.

If your business is affected by such advice, there are two routes to go down – a scorched Earth approach of removing all content, or a combined approach that:

• Preserves rankings (as best you can as it’s likely the real-life event that has triggered the Government advice will also affect SERP layouts, intents, and what content is appropriate)
• Adds value to users/customers beyond trying to sell – this is a good opportunity to build trust with your audience
• Leaves you in a good position post-turmoil, with a good foundation to move forward with

So what is the scorched Earth approach? This is taking your landing page, and deleting all content aside from the notice:

How to not handle a landing page during Crisis (Circa: 2014)

Removing all content and putting up a small notice such as this (without any links to the contact section) is bad for several reasons, namely:

• No content, no rankings
• It offers little use to existing customers who may have already purchased a holiday
• It doesn’t link to sources

It’s a scorched earth approach and can be detrimental in the long term.

You need to incorporate messaging in a user-friendly manner, remove CTAs and opportunities to book, whilst adding user value for varying user intents by:

• Outlining the company’s policy for customers with existing holidays booked and clearly state and link to the channels they need to explore
• This will both lead to a better user experience and reduce the processes on the company’s side from users entering the wrong communications funnels
• Maintain content and information for users, and preserve rankings
• Follow best practice guidelines around the use of interstitials, pop-ups, and overlays if used for notifying customers

Chapter 3: Building a travel brand online

Building a brand is not cheap and can take a long time, but it can ultimately be one of the best SEO assets you can have.

Years of experience has convinced me that every product or service needs to develop a brand to be successful (on some scale).

When you're building your travel brand, or refreshing/repositioning within the marketplace, it’s important to consider the following:

• Brand values – what value your brand brings to your customers
• Brand promise – what you mean to your customers
• Brand positioning – where you fit into the marketplace
• Competitor research and analysis
• Brand mission – your ultimate goals
• Brand story – the “why” of your mission, why you set out to do what you’re doing
• Tone of voice – how you communicate and the language you use
• Brand pillars – the main pillars and driving factors of your brand
• The elevator pitch – a 30-second explanation of your brand and what you’re about

Offsite SEO, link building, and PR activities

The purpose of this chapter is to address offsite SEO for the travel industry, and some of the misconceptions and obstacles that come with it.

Link building in the travel industry is quite difficult down to two main factors:

1. Its an extremely competitive space
2. Travel bloggers now realize that their links have some value, so charge money for sponsored posts

Aside from paying for links, which is not a practice I endorse – there are some tactics that still prove successful in the travel industry, these include:

• A member from your team is interviewed on a podcast and gets linked to in the podcast notes
• You create an amazing data-driven infographic and bloggers want to include it in one of their blog posts
• You create a travel calculator that gets shared and linked to
• You create the ultimate guide to a certain event, type of travel style, or country that becomes the definitive resource and is linked to
• You guest post for other websites, linking back to your own
• You reach out to sites with resource pages to include a link to your best resource
• Your company gets listed on your partners’ websites

The only thing that is for definite, is that doing outreach and link building properly takes a lot of time and resource as it’s labor-intensive (unless you’re buying links).

Building a travel brand from nothing

From the experiences of working with branding agencies in past roles, there is a trend of the services that they offer to help “brand you”, these are brand strategy and brand identity.

Some do offer both services together, but by dissecting what these mean and reverse engineering processes, we can build a travel brand on a budget!

What is the cost of building a travel brand?

It’s essentially:

Agency Time (Optional) + Your Time + Cost to Create or Change Physical Assets of Your Business = The Cost of Branding

Evaluating your brand SERP

A brand SERP occurs when Google recognizes a known entity or “thing” within the search query used, and as a result, it augments the search results accordingly.

This phenomenon happens for many reasons, and only in rare circumstances can be “solved” through template SEO (e.g. content and link building), but instead can be influenced through a variety of activities, including but not limited to:

• Traditional marketing and PR activities
• Link placements, forum mentions, and general online signal generation
• Content matching, and mapped against not just keywords, but matches and provides a relevant user value proposition

So how would you evaluate your brand SERP if that’s what your SERP looks like? The answer is simple! You’d need two things. First, you’d need to perform some brand research. That is, you’d have to ask people who are familiar with the brand. That is, YOU! Ask people who are familiar with your brand about their opinions of your company.

You might also search “company name + complaints” or “company name + scam” to make sure that the company isn’t a bunch of scammers!

In any event, your search results will probably contain links to review sites or forum comments.

If those links show up as Google brand SERP (search engine results page) then those review sites and forum comments are directly influencing your brand SERP.

Understanding this will allow you to form a better content (and overall SEO/user acquisition) strategy, as people search for the brand (especially when it’s new to them) to ensure they are safe online, so this will impact conversion from other channels as well.

Creating a travel brand strategy

Your brand strategy is the backbone of your travel brand, and help enforce (or reinforce) your position in your market/niche.

A brand strategy is a plan of action for your business, that helps to outline specific, long-term, goals as well as your brand mission, and brand story. It should really form a part of your business plan, and acts as guidance for all marketing activities (including travel SEO). Simply put, your travel brand strategy is the “thinking” behind the brand.

Purpose

What is the purpose of your brand, and why you’re doing what you set out to do? This isn’t the purpose of sales, it’s the “mission”. For example, if you’re a niche company offering tours of Silk Road countries, it may be to introduce new adventures and cultures to travelers.

Consistency

How will you remain consistent and “on brand” in your communication? This comes from two places:

1. Preparedness – having good guidelines in place for the brand tone of voice, boilerplate responses to basic complaints (for consistency), and having a crisis communications plan ready to action.
2. Training – ensuring staff are aware of the policies and procedures, and have the tools and ability to carry them out.

Without these two elements, consistency cannot be achieved.

Emotion

What emotional connection do you want to make with your target audience?

Flexibility

How can your travel brand remain flexible and react to the marketplace?

Employee involvement

How can you get your employees involved and invested in your brand vision?

Loyalty

Is there an option for you to reward loyalty among your customers and staff?

Competitive awareness

Who are your competitors, and what are you doing that’s different to them?

Managing PR & outreach activity at scale

In my opinion, when it comes to managing outreach activities at scale, there are three pieces of software that can really make your life a lot easier (depending on your budget).

These tools are BuzzStream, Mention, and Google Alerts.

BuzzStream allows you to send targeted email campaigns to individuals (as well as track whether they’ve been opened or not) as well as build email gauntlets and automated scheduled follow-ups. In terms of pricing it starts at $24 a month, and can be a real asset if you’re dedicating a lot of resource to this activity.

In theory, you could get around not using BuzzStream and use an Excel/Google Doc instead – if you’re super organized, but you miss out on some of the time-saving automation and reporting features (such as being able to see if they’ve opened your email and how many times).

Mention is an online listening service, and pricing starts at $29 a month for 2 basic alerts. You can set these up to monitor your brand name as well as any key, target phrase. It also pulls through Twitter so you can see if people are talking about you (positively or negatively). For larger campaigns and ongoing PR/outreach work, this is great, but on this list, I guess it could be considered a luxury.

Google Alerts are free, and you should set them up on your brand and target keywords. TechRepublic wrote this great guide on how to set them up.

Building links and generating noise online

This one is easier said than done, but collaborating with other businesses related to your niche, travel bloggers and travel influencers to publish guest blogs, social content pieces, and cross-promote each other’s content will not only help increase the reach of your content, but it will also provide you with an excellent opportunity to increase the number of backlinks your website has.

Backlinks are still an important part of Google’s algorithm, but they shouldn’t be measured in terms of DA (Domain Authority), or PageRank – because:

• Google has publicly acknowledged that it doesn’t use domain authority
• PageRank scores haven’t been publicly available for years.

How not to build links for travel websites

One of the easier routes to go down when you’re looking to build links to a website is a paid link building route, and to this day a lot of SEO agencies still take part in actively buying links for client websites. To some degree, and depending on vertical, this is still an effective tactic if done correctly (not one I engage with, but respect where respect is due).

However, when done sloppily, it’s very easy to see trends and patterns with paid links. Common patterns include:

Patterns in backlink acquisition timing

In order to provide a package service, there has to be some level of routine and organization, as a result, links tend to get bought around the same time of each month (or time period), this pattern is extremely recognizable to the naked eye – so Google and other search engines can clearly see how unnatural it is.

Often appearing with the same websites in articles

Finding blogs or websites to get links off (or buy links off) takes leg work, as does produce content to place on those sites, and if you operate in a specific travel niche one way some agency’s try and scale is to include multiple clients in a single article. This can be very easily reverse engineered – for example, using the below methodology:

• Taking a ranking travel website from one of my previous Rome keywords
• Using a single backlink identification tool (Ahrefs)
• Looking at links from a couple of travel bloggers

I was able to identify that:

How easy it is to identify unnaturally placed and paid link building patterns, you can’t fool Google.

I was even able to identify a pattern in the three websites that they all seemed to appear on one website first (at the start of the pattern), and then gradually over others in a similar order.

If I’m able to identify this with one tool and 10 minutes of free time, Google definitely is. If you’re going to buy links, don’t make it obvious.

The importance of reviews

Reviews are critical for travel companies because they directly impact trust, visibility, and customer acquisition.

Positive reviews provide social proof, showing potential customers that others have had good experiences. They demonstrate transparency, as travel companies encouraging reviews show they are open and confident in their offerings. Travelers often base their decisions on reviews, especially when choosing hotels, tours, and travel packages.

Reviews help travel companies better understand their customers. They also serve as fresh content, which search engines favor, and can appear as star ratings in search results, increasing click-through rates.

Reviews influence customer decisions because they provide reassurance.

Travelers are more likely to book with a company that has positive reviews and high ratings. Reviews reduce purchase anxiety by answering potential customers’ concerns before they even reach out. Customers often compare reviews between competing travel companies to choose the best option.

Reviews also drive user engagement and provide social proof. They encourage interaction, as customers leave feedback and companies respond. User-generated content, including photos and videos, adds authenticity to marketing, and positive reviews can be repurposed on social media, email marketing, and websites.

Strong reviews can directly increase revenue and bookings. Travel products and services with positive reviews often see a higher conversion rate. Satisfied customers are likely to return and leave additional positive reviews, creating a cycle of trust. Reviews can also promote upselling, as customers read about premium experiences, like upgraded rooms or exclusive tours. They give travel companies a competitive advantage, helping them stand out if they have significantly better reviews than their competitors.

Travelers searching for new experiences often rely on reviews, making them a powerful tool for attracting new customers and reducing acquisition costs. To effectively manage reviews, travel companies should encourage satisfied customers to leave them, respond to both positive and negative feedback, monitor reviews across multiple platforms, and showcase their best reviews on their website to build trust with new visitors.

Chapter 4: Measuring Success & Benchmarking

Measuring your efforts accurately is just as important as strategic planning and executing them.

Being able to track progress and show a demonstrable ROI (return on investment) will enable you to make better decisions around your SEO budget, as well as prove the investment is worthwhile to other business stakeholders. This is especially important in the travel sector, as there are clear seasonal peak months (and slow months), so being able to feast and know when to store for the famine is important.

In this chapter I’m going to talk about:

• Identify your competitors within the online travel landscape
• Competitor benchmarking
• How to identify and set realistic KPIs and objectives
• How to select tools on a budget (and how to use them)
• How to manage report effectively (and for the most part automate it)

Competitor benchmarking & analysis

When you are benchmarking against competitors, it’s important to be realistic. For example, if you’re a holiday deals website or affiliate, and you list websites like booking.com, Kayak, and Priceline as competitors – it’s important to understand that in the third quarter of 2018, Booking Holdings (the parent company behind these) spent $1.3 billion on “performance marketing”.

What does “performance marketing” mean? Paid Google Ads. Even though this isn’t a component of organic search performance, it gives you an insight into the marketing budgets these brands are playing with.

Using third party tools and data sets (so that everyone is on the same, level playing field), comparing yourself to these major travel brands won’t provide any useful insight, or provide any strategic direction:

In comparison to a global travel brand, you won’t stack up – so are you really competitors?

However, if you compare yourself to operations of a similar size, the graphs start to become more practical and you can see were your competitive advantage lies, as well as areas of improvement:

By comparing to similar travel businesses, you can identify your own competitive advantages as well as highlight any opportunities

This can almost be treat like an SEO version of a SWOT analysis, you need to be objective in assessing your travel brands strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats around your various SEO elements.

However, a lot of smaller travel businesses may not be as easy to discover (due to lower marketing budgets), so how do you go about identifying competitors of a similar size? There are some methods you can use, but primarily I use the following models:

• SWOT analysis
• PEST analysis
• Porters 5 Forces

SWOT analysis for travel businesses

Use SWOT analysis for business planning, strategic planning, competitor evaluation, marketing, business and product development and research reports.

A SWOT analysis is a subjective assessment of data which is organised by the SWOT format into a logical order that helps understanding, presentation, discussion and decision-making.

PEST analysis

The PEST subject should be a clear definition of the market being addressed, which might be from any of the following standpoints:

• a company looking at its market
• a product looking at its market
• a brand in relation to its market
• a strategic option, such as entering a new market or launching a new product
• a potential acquisition
• a potential partnership
• an investment opportunity

It’s an analysis of Political, Economic, Social, and Technological factors. This type of analysis is not only great for identifying your competitors, but also in identifying if your product offering is equal to/better than those of your competitors or identifying the viabilities of business expansion activities.

This can also be expanded from PEST to PESTLE, and also include Legal and Environmental factors. Below is an example (top level) PESTLE analysis that I put together in 2012 as part of a project analysing the opportunities for the UK commercial fishing industry:

Example PESTLE from 2012 looking at the opportunities for the UK commercial fishing industry given marketing conditions and consumer behaviour.

Porters 5 Forces

Porter’s 5 Forces is one of my preferred analysis models, especially when looking at bigger markets (suitable more for tourism generation businesses perhaps). This model looks at:

• Threat of new entrants to the market
• Bargaining Power of Consumers
• Bargaining Power of Suppliers
• Threat of Substitute Products

How to set realistic KPIs and objectives

Regardless of how well you advance your organic search performance, if you don’t set realistic KPIs (key performance indicators), milestones and objectives, you’re going to fall short by your own standards.

So how do you go about forecasting, and setting realistic objectives for the growth of your travel business online?

SEO goals should be SMART goals, these are:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Realistic
• Timelined

Obviously achievable and realistic are open to interpretation, but necessary. It’s also important to benchmark what value achieving the goal would bring. I’ve seen people have goals set for them before that made no sense, such as “reach 10,000 followers on Twitter” – great, will this increase sales? Will it increase leads? In their position, no – it was a vanity metric.

Easy ways to manage performance reporting

Reporting can be time-consuming, and when you’re a small to medium-sized travel business time is not something you have the luxury of. That’s why it’s important that you’re able to streamline your data collection and analysis process as much as possible.

You should be using free tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console as standard, and then connecting your Analytics to Google Data Studio (more information on this later).

Data studio reports

Another really easy way to manage your reporting is to connect your Google Analytics account to Google Data Studio. Here is a good guide on how to set-up Google Analytics as a data source.

Alternatively, there are a number of pre-made Data Studio dashboards out there that will more than do the job for your online reporting – and in my opinion, are a lot more insightful than a Google Analytics screenshot in an Excel document.

Good examples include this one from Datasaurus-Rex, and if you sell online, this dashboard from Canonicalized helps you map performance of sales versus speed.

Datasaurus-Rex’s Google Data Studio report is great for smaller travel companies to easily manage reporting