Travel brands looking to maximize their search engine
optimization strategy should focus on creating interactive content since it
ranks higher than all other forms of content for URL ratings, social shares and
referring domains.
That’s the primary takeaway from a report by London-based
content marketing agency Kaizen based on its analysis of 2,000 pieces of content
from travel brands including Expedia, Skyscanner, Marriott International, Delta
Airlines, TUI and more.
The agency analyzed articles, infographics, interactive tools
and guides, videos and influencer-written posts to determine what makes a given
piece of content successful in terms of SEO statistics.
“Interactive is the strongest form of content for SEO
purposes,” says Jess Lang, marketing executive at Kaizen.
“The reason for this is it had such a high level of
referring domains. It was so liked that so many different websites would link
back to the content or feature the content in their own websites. It also performed
way better for social shares than any of the other types of content.”
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On average, a piece of interactive content was shared more
than 4,000 times – whereas content produced by an influencer was only shared
about 150 times.
Lang says that’s a valuable finding for brands that may have
the assumption that working with influencers is an effective way to optimize
content for search engines.
“Influencers are so synonymous with travel. It’s typical for
a brand to send an influencer on an amazing holiday, to Instagram-story the
amazing hotel on the beach in Bali [for example],” Lang says.
“What’s important to note is our report is purely SEO-based.
It doesn’t take into account the brand awareness an influencer can get. They
probably would perform quite well for that. But in terms of actual rankings on Google,
influencer posts were found to be the worst form of content.”
The study found that infographics, the most common form of
content in the travel sector, rank second to interactive content for social
shares and also do well in terms of referring domains and URL ratings.
“Infographics are still extremely cost-effective for travel
brands to use as a way of getting their content out there,” Lang says.
“And they don’t take so much development time as an interactive
would.”
Video content is second only to interactives for earning
unique backlinking domains, and it can achieve high URL ratings. But the report
notes videos are primarily of value for driving brand recognition, for example
via YouTube views, rather than traditional SEO metrics.
Kaizen’s analysts also looked at content headlines and found
that those written as questions get a higher rate of sharing on social platforms.
Thirteen percent of the content analyzed included at least one question word,
and “how” was both the most used and the most effective overall in generating
SEO.
“We thought that was really interesting because this is
purely on travel content, so you’d expect it to be ‘where’ or ‘when,’ but ‘how’
creates the most SEO-friendly results,” Lang says.