Horrible year, right? Already thinking about your next holiday, I bet. Chances are, when you come round to book it, you’ll look online. You’re not alone. With so many people now pricing and booking holidays online, the need for SEO within the travel industry has never been greater.
Online Travel Agencies or (OTAs) such as Expedia, Booking.com, and TUI spend incredible amounts of money every year just to make sure its them at the top when you want to book that week in Mexico you’ve been dreaming of.
With so many holidays canceled last year, there is pent up frustration and a desperation to escape to a sunny destination. When the COVID restrictions finally lift, there is going to be a mad rush in booking holidays. Make the most of this pent up frustration and get ahead of the game with an SEO investment today.
With a seeming dominance from the giant corporations, how can smaller businesses hope to compete?
Direct Services:
Often, a hotel on Expedia isn’t exclusive to them and you might offer the same hotel, for the same dates, for a cheaper price. So how do you take a chuck of some of that traffic?
The simple answer is SEO.
There are a few things you can do yourself, but others you might not be able to.
For example, you can look at specific amenities the hotel has which might be attracting traffic or you think would attract traffic. For example, is your Florida hotel within a 5 minute drive from Disney? Is it the only hotel that has an infinity pool in a 5-mile radius?
Understand your products and which services make them unique. Then, optimise your page for it. Does TUI’s site only briefly mention how close it is to Disney? Put it in your title, your H1, your meta description! That way, when people search for “hotel within 5 miles of Disney” you should see an increase in your search engine ranking and in turn, your site traffic.
More specifically within this strategy is the option is to try and rank for what we call ‘long tail keywords’. These are almost sentence length search terms that your site can be optimised for in order to stand out from the rest.
For example:
- Hotels close to Buckingham Palace London
- Dog-friendly hotels in Cheltenham
- New York Hotel near Michelin star restaurant
By attempting to optimise your pages for longer tail keywords, you increase your chances of Google ranking your pages when people search for these specific terms over just attempting to compete in the endless waves of “London hotels”, “Cheltenham hotels” or “New York hotels”.
Here at Mr Seo, our London SEO team can crawl your site through our expert industry programs and develop a bespoke strategy based on the search terms you could be aiming to rank for and competing against the mega-corporations with. Get in touch today if you want to use our and discuss this further.
I’m a local travel agent without a huge online presence, what can I do?
Fear less! The high street isn’t dead! With holidays reaching well into the thousands to exotic places across vast oceans, many people hesitate when booking online.
They just want to give someone a location and some dates and be given the options. Often, online booking can be complicated and faulty, which scares many people when handing over such a huge amount of money. Especially when it comes to the older generations, they like a professional to make sure their booking goes smoothly with them, rather than trusting themselves to input data into completed sites with so many variables.
This is where a local campaign can benefit. There isn’t a comparable pedestal to having a great online presence nationally, but there are still great local techniques that you can do yourself or we can work together to implement into your site.
We offer bespoke local SEO campaigns here at MR SEO, where we will do research on what people look for in your surrounding area, optimise your site to just try and get in-person traffic through the door or on the phone rather than making online bookings.
You can also use tools yourself such as Google My Business which when set up correctly will increase your local visibility and local search traffic. For example, once your site is set up for a bespoke local campaign, we might optimise your My Business page with your opening times, address, inviting photos of your business, example products, and contact details. All of which, should increase your in-store visitors, online traffic, telephone conversions, or all three.
For any further information on how a bespoke local travel strategy might benefit you, get in touch today!
