SEO For Travel Agencies Post COVID-19 Pandemic

SEO as an online marketing strategy involves best practices that are universally applicable and a slew of SEO strategies that you should employ depending on your niche area, customer expectations, and competition.

The travel industry, in particular, is exceptionally competitive, featuring some of the most prominent players with varied flights, accommodation, and other countless niche services like the type of tours and activities.

The travel industry as a whole has taken a severe blow amid the COVID-19 crisis. As people worldwide postpone/cancel their travel plans, there are many startups and small businesses in the industry that are ceasing to sustain. Companies in this niche are downsizing their workforce, reevaluating salaries, and are executing leave without pay.

As these uncertain times continue, one thing that can be done is to focus all the energy and resources on strategizing for the future – the time when everything begins to get back to normalcy.

In this article, we will discuss four immutable laws of SEO that every travel marketer should apply, regardless of the type of travel services they offer.

Let’s get started!

1.  Targeting destinations

To get your targeting right, you need to get inside your potential audience’s brain. What are the keywords they use for searching a travel-related query? When you start digging, you will find out that travelers often plan their holiday by searching for the travel-related service plus the name of the destination, e.g. “Hotels in Goa” or “Cheap flights to Ladakh”. Using such keywords has SEO implications for site structure, content strategy, and social media.

The key is to develop destination-specific assets like content, landing pages, and social media posts to support your ranking for each destination.

• Keyword research and analysis for every destination that you offer
• Geo-targeted landing pages (for accommodations, flights, etc.) with optimized meta descriptions and title tags.
• Authentic, informative, and engaging content for destination-specific travel. For example – 10 Things To Do In Ladakh, or 5 Sports To Try In Goa.
• Optimized profiles on local listings and forums like Google Business Pages, TripAdvisor, Yelp, Quora, and more.

There is a vast difference between ranking for generic short keywords like “cheap flights” or “three-star hotels”, and the ability to use SEO for reaching out to potential customers. They are already a step or two down the conversion funnel.

2.  Onsite SEO

Once you layout your SEO targets and priorities, the next step is to optimize destination-specific assets that were mentioned in the previous point. There is no use of creating these assets if search engines cannot crawl and index them.

Especially if you have an eCommerce portal, you should offer multiple channels of navigation (categories, site search, travel themes) to help them find what they are looking for easily.

You should have destination-specific directories that the search engines can identify, read, and understand.

These directories should include –

• Linking to these directories in navigation menus
• Use the Fetch as Google tool to make sure that your offerings are indexable
• Marking up destination-specific directories and your offerings specific web pages for structured data using schemas.
• Submitting an XML sitemap to Google
• Regularly monitor your site for crawl errors that might hinder your rankings.

As long as the search engines are unable to crawl and index your website, you will be unable to rank on your targeted keywords properly, and most of your SEO company practices will yield no ROI.

3. Relevant content

Producing quality continents that are destination-specific with optimized meta descriptions and title tags, header tags, and optimizing content structure is one of the first steps towards making your travel website rank for targeted keywords. Also, make note that search engines prefer websites that regularly update their content.

Although popular search engines like Google give preference to those websites that produce quality content, instead of creating bulk material that is low on quality, therefore, you must invest in a content strategy plan for your travel agency with a long-term vision.

Consider the following points-

• Dig deep in each of your targeted destination
• Post quality, engaging, and attractive content on your social media
• Analyze your sales funnel and accordingly produce blogs and social media content, linking back to your product/service page and destination-specific directories.

Having a proactive content strategy can help you promote and brand yourself online, and help you achieve website authority on different targeted keywords.

4. Social Signals

Once your website is completely optimized on-page and you are producing destination-specific content, it is time to work on your off-page SEO strategy. Off-page optimization mainly consists of creating and acquiring high authority backlinks that influence your website’s ability to rank higher in the search engines. Another essential thing to consider is social links that also have an impact on your rankings.

Yes, SEO is a steady process. So, if you want to be visible to your potential customers online, it is time to roll up your sleeves and begin building links and social signals.

Link building comes with its own set of challenges. Search engines refrain from black hat activities like paying for links or else your site will be penalized. Guest posting has its limits, blogger-outreach is time taking, and often never works out. Nonetheless, you must get links if you want to show up on the search engines – this is where content marketing comes in.

Instead of focusing on seeking links from websites, you should create interesting and useful content (social media posts, blogs, and articles, infographics, travel guides, blogs, podcasts, and webinars etc.) that the online users and influential people like bloggers and journalists want to link back to.

Your travel content should be pleasing to the eye with high-definition images and videos of the targeted destinations, local experiences, and aesthetics. You cannot attract customers without showing them what all they will be missing if they don’t travel to the targeted destination.

Final Words

SEO is neither rocket science nor a piece of cake. Although it does not require any advanced degree, if one aces the SEO game, they can generate higher-quality traffic to their travel website.

SEO is about following a set of best practices regularly. Although, one does need to possess the in-depth knowledge of what those practices are, and the experience to adhere to them during trend shifts, advancements in technology, or unforeseen market conditions (for example, the COVID-19 Pandemic hit). Therefore, while you can implement SEO basics on your own, it is better to hire SEO agency in Delhi for your travel website. An SEO Agency that has that profess to manage your travel website and eventually make it rank higher in the search engines.