Modern travel marketing, part 1: SEO strategy

According to the World Travel and Tourism Council, travel and tourism generated a direct contribution of $2.3 trillion to global GDPs in 2016 and supported one in 10 jobs in the global economy.

More than three-quarters of that spending - 76.8% - is attributed to leisure travel. It’s a massive market, and one that often starts with a blank slate: Many consumers begin the travel planning process with a simple desire to get away, without a specific idea of where, when and how.

For most travelers, the answers to those questions come through self-directed online research. Searchmetrics, an SEO and content performance platform, reports 60% of leisure travelers put together their own itineraries, using the web, apps and social media to find and book flights, accommodations and activities.

So it’s no surprise that travel brands are spending big - very big - on digital marketing as they aim to reach and inspire this receptive audience.

In 2017, Expedia forked over a record $5.3 billion on marketing - a figure that equated to more than half the entire group’s revenue in that year and an increase of 21% over marketing spend in 2016. Rival Booking Holdings reported figures only slightly lower - a $4.1 billion outlay in 2017 on performance advertising, a 19% increase over 2016.

Throughout June, we're looking at a variety of topics under the umbrella of digital marketing.

We begin with an analysis of the current state of search engine optimization, which today could be renamed Google optimization.

While the ground is shifting as voice search gains prominence - and brings with it a whole new set of strategies - for now a brand’s position in Google web and mobile searches is still the dominant driver of customer acquisition.

Mobile first

As consumers spend more time on mobile devices and less on desktops, Google is shifting its focus to mobile content.

In late March, Google announced it is implementing a new system for crawling, indexing and ranking sites.

Mobile-first indexing means Google will predominantly use the mobile version of the content whereas in the past it primarily used the desktop version of a page's content when evaluating the relevance of a page to a user's query.

While Google says content gathered via mobile-first indexing “has no ranking advantage over mobile content that’s not yet gathered this way or desktop content,” clearly it’s a sign that search strategies need to prioritize mobile interfaces.

“Most of our clients have more mobile traffic than desktop,” says Kevin Gibbons, CEO of BlueGlass, an SEO and content marketing agency.

“If you don’t have a mobile-friendly website, you need one.”

Organic search

Gibbons works with several travel brands including Expedia and Orbitz. For most of his travel clients, organic search is their primary referrer of not just traffic, but also new customers.

But the strategies to drive that search traffic have changed.

While years ago he says the focus was on analyzing ranking factors and “trying to make them look like they should be number one in Google, now it’s about how do we build a brand’s reputation so they deserve to be number one.”

The solution is a mix of public relations and content marketing – creating interesting, engaging content that includes data-driven studies “because people want something newsworthy and credible,” and packaging it in a way that it is visually appealing and shareable.

“If people want to link to it from national media, publisher sites, bloggers, influencers, etc … the stronger signal you send to Google in terms of that content deserves to be number one,” Gibbons says.

Large OTAs such as Booking.com and Expedia dominate the search engine results pages, he says, because they offer a vast array of services and can rank in Google for a wide range of terms.

Rather than trying to fight them head-to-head, Gibbons suggests smaller suppliers use a more narrow strategy driven by optimization around their unique services and location.

“For example, quite often searches that include a destination or location keyword will give you a Google map listing. So hotels can rank higher than an OTA for the reason that they have a physical location,” he says.

“It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do SEO. It’s just at a boutique level you go more targeted, at a broad level you try to capture the volume in the market."

And he says the good news for brands that don’t have the multimillion-dollar marketing budgets of the big players is that the “the majority of traffic, something like 50 to 70% of clicks, will go to an organic listing. Typically only 3 to 5% click on a paid listing. So if you are the number one organically, you’re going to generate a lot more traffic than if you listed in just the paid search results.”

Best practices

Searchmetrics recently published its first analysis of search engine ranking factors for the travel industry, based on 5,000 travel-related keywords in its database.

The findings paint a picture of best practices for search engine optimization in travel, with insights regarding image count, word count, use of keywords and more.

• Lists on travel-industry websites have more bullet points than the average across all industries.

“Lists are a form of structured content that make it easier for users to absorb the information on the page. When you just have a lot of text it is harder,” says Stephen Bench-Capon, content marketing manager at Searchmetrics.

“What the data shows is, in the travel industry, list tends to be longer and provide a lot of information. People want lots of detail and descriptions since often they are comparing options.”

• Top-ranking landing pages in the travel sector use the searched keyword far less frequently in the page body than the overall average.

“In the past one SEO tactic, referred to as keyword stuffing, was filling the text, for example, trying to write 'Majorca' as many times as possible so the search engine algorithms would pick it up and know it’s about Majorca,” Bench-Capon says.

“Now it’s more about actual genuinely relevant content. This tactic of keyword stuffing is generally on the way out, but in travel we found that it’s not even slightly relevant. So the idea is to write a proper piece of content that approaches the topic normally and not do any sort of tricks with keywords.”

• Travel-industry landing pages on Google’s first search results page use 38% more images of at least 200 x 200 pixels than pages of other industries.

“An image can be used to inspire or to spark emotion or capture attention,” he says.

“In other industries, they may shy away from images because they don’t want to overload the page, but in travel we found images are popular. Images should be carefully selected so they are relevant, but you should not shy away from using them if it adds to the content.”

If you don’t have a mobile-friendly website, you need one.

Kevin Gibbons - BlueGlass

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• Travel pages on Google’s first page use 23% more internal links than the overall average.

“It’s always important to have a good internal linking structure to help the user find their way around the page but also for the Google crawler, and we found in travel there’s a much stronger connection between the high-ranked pages having more links and the lower-ranked pages have relatively few links,” Bench-Capon says.

“The more you can keep people in your universe the better it is. We found that high-ranking travel pages seem to be doing that very well.”

• The content relevance of travel URLs on the first Google search results page is higher than for pages on average, when all industries are analyzed.

“Google has been saying for a few years now that the relevance of the content is the most important thing that matters,” Bench-Capon says.

“We see that in the travel industry more strongly than across the board. It means travel SEOs are doing something right.”

• Top-ranking URLs in the travel industry have 57% more words than the general average measured across all industries.

“We found that in travel, more words are better, but only if they stick to being relevant. You can’t just fill it with words for words' sake,” he says.

“One word we use quite a lot is holistic - trying to provide a page that answers a range of questions the user might have. That’s what we call a holistic, comprehensive piece of content and will appeal to a variety of users, and Google should like you too.”

As Google has become more active in travel, Bench-Capon says it will likely become even more challenging for brands to win at the game of organic search.

“If you Google any destination, you get a whole Google travel section where they’ll give you flights and hotels, etc. Anyone who lands there is kind of in Google’s world. And at the same time it takes physical screen space away so it lowers the opportunities for normal websites to be seen,” he says.

“Google seems to think it can get a big piece of the pie, which is worrying. It means that the actual competition and the organic search gets all the harder.”