5 SEO Marketing Success Factors for Travel

It’s time to ask yourself if you’ve done everything you can to market your travel website to the right audience. If not, now is the time to try these 5 sure-fire strategies to boost your website performance:

Optimize your images

The number one selling feature of any travel-related website is photos. Some may say an image-heavy website is bad for SEO. We beg to differ. Images can be optimized with keywords using the alt tags and with proper naming conventions. These are also crawled by Google Bots and are displayed in both the Image Search results and the Universal results page. As a pro tip: submit an image sitemap in your Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) to get those beautiful pictures crawled. Another plus points for beautiful pictures – they’re not just good for SEO, they actually help increase your conversions and take inspiration and dreaming to another level.

Get a blog up and running

If you don’t have one yet, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to tap into your audience at different phases of the buying process. Thankfully, the travel industry gives you a lot of potential topics to write about, so you will most likely never run out of topic ideas for blog posts. Talk about your location, benefits of choosing your hotel/resort/cruise line, general news about travel to the country, things to do in the area, recommended food and restaurants to try and so much more.

Scout for user-generated content

There are many ways to get your guests to generate content for you. The lowest hanging fruit would be to add a review section to your website. This doesn’t just add fresh content to your travel site, it is also a must-have when you are adding the review schema to your blog to get those star ratings up in Google’s results pages. Plus, reviews give you a real idea of what customers think about your brand – giving you an opportunity to improve customer service.

Add a video to your site

Pictures paint a thousand words, now imagine what videos can do! Videos make the purchase decision so much easier for your potential guests given the emotional connection it establishes with them. Give them a 360 virtual tour of your resort, show them how beautiful the views are from your rooms or give them a virtual taste of your food and beverage options. Videos uploaded in YouTube and optimized for the right keywords can also show in the top search results, so definitely plus points for your SEO strategy.

Be mobile-friendly

According to Google, in the past year, mobile’s share of travel visits has grown by an astounding 48%. Mobile helps people find things faster, so even with a drop in time spent per session, mobile web conversion rates for travel sites have grown 88%. If you’re not on the mobile bandwagon yet, you cannot afford to lose another second waiting to get this done.

Tomahawk is your partner for travel online marketing. We can help you put together a responsive, mobile-friendly website optimized for maximum visibility. We also have a Blog Master package to help get you in blog posting mode.

Contact us to find out how we can help grow your tourism business online.