If you manage a travel agency, you know how important it is to generate leads and bring in new business. And while there are many ways to generate leads, SEO is one of the most effective.
SEO, or search engine optimization, is a process by which you can improve your website’s visibility and rank on search engine results pages. You can attract more visitors looking for travel-related services by optimizing your site for relevant keywords.
In this article, we’ll share six tips for how you can use SEO to generate more leads for your travel agency. We’ll cover everything from choosing the right keywords to optimizing your website for conversion. So if you’re ready to get started, read on!
Why focus on SEO?
If you want your travel agency to succeed, you need to focus on SEO. It stands for “search engine optimization,” It is how you ensure that your website appears as high as possible on search engine results pages (SERPs). The higher you rank, the more likely people will find and click on your site.
SEO is important for any business that wants to be visible online, but it’s essential for travel agencies. That’s because people looking to book a trip often do so online. A recent study found that 78% of leisure travelers use the internet to research and book their trips.
If you want your travel agency to be one of the sites potential customers find when searching for travel information, you need to ensure your SEO is on point.
1. Claim your Google My Business listing
One of the first things you should do is claim your Google My Business listing. A free listing lets you control how your business appears on Google Maps and in local search results.
Ensure your listing is accurate and up-to-date, and include relevant information such as your website, address, and phone number. You can add photos, videos, and other content to help your listing stand out.
2. Select the Relevant Keywords
To get a higher rank on search engines, you have to select the right keywords, as you probably know. These must be related to the subject matter but also differentiate you. Therefore, you must include generic and long-distance keywords that detail the subject matter.
When choosing your keywords, you must consider your subject and competitors’ content. The idea is to include the most popular keywords and those that better target the subject.
Keywords should be found in the following:
- The URL
- Title and subtitles (tags)
- The meta description
- The body of the text
Remember to put internal links that will ensure an optimal mesh between your pages and external links that will ensure good notoriety for your site.
3. Optimize your website for local search
Ensure your website is optimized for local search by including your city or region in your title, meta descriptions, and header tags. You should also include relevant keywords such as “travel agency” or “tour operator.”
4. Add quality and Relevant Blog Content
Adding blog content is a great way to improve your SEO. Write about topics relevant to your business, such as travel tips, destination guides, and reviews. Be sure to include relevant keywords and links to your website.
As a travel agency, your content must be different. You are not a platform! You are an expert in your field of activity. Instead of offering informative texts that include the information found everywhere, dare to discuss destinations differently. To do this, several solutions are available to you.
You can focus on emotions by offering content on gastronomy or local culture. It is also possible to focus on a local event. Know that you have an advantage: you are in contact with your customers. So you can take advantage of their testimonials and add them to your content.
Our advice: Work on your difference by highlighting your sound knowledge of destinations and giving targeted advice specific to each travel place.
5. Promote Your Content on Social Media
Once you’ve created great content, promote it! Share your blog posts on social media, and reach out to influencers and other websites in your industry to get your content in front of a larger audience.
Social networks such as blogs are exceptional communication media. They allow you to communicate with your audience, link to your content, organize animations, and collect reviews.
You can seduce your audience and encourage your readers to share your content by offering quality and original content. They become true ambassadors.
6. Optimize Content for Local Searches
Because you have a travel agency, you must offer local references. This approach allows Internet users to identify you and also locate you. This way, you will be able to attract people to your agency!
To achieve this, it is necessary to:
- Provide keywords that include the city where you are or even your neighborhood,
- Include your address on your websites,
- Enable local search and geolocation,
- Remember your location on all your communication media, including social networks.
This approach is essential because you will be perfectly referenced if an Internet user searches by specifying a location.
7. Create Location-specific Pages
If you have multiple locations, create a separate page for each one. This way, you can optimize each page for local search. Include relevant information such as the address, phone number, hours of operation, directions, photos, and videos.
8. Adapt Design for Mobile
Did you know that more than one in two internet connections is made from a smartphone?
Your site must therefore be adapted to this new communication medium. To do this, you must opt for a “Responsive Design.” It allows your site to display itself well and offers ergonomic navigation. It is essential to work on the visuals to limit loading time.
If your site is not “mobile-friendly,” search engines will penalize it. Indeed, currently, Google and its competitors pay particular attention to the customer experience.
9. Monitor your SEO progress
Keep track of your SEO progress by monitoring your website’s traffic and ranking in Google search results. You monitor your SEO progress with Free SEO tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console. This will help you see what’s working and what needs improvement.
Remember, adding content online is not enough, even quality content. At the same time, you must also monitor the performance of your pages to make the necessary corrections and identify what works and what your audience likes.
Why boost the SEO of a travel agency site?
Travel tourism has been the sector most affected by the coronavirus crisis. Apart from those mentioned earlier, here are the additional reasons to boost your travel agency site.
SEO in tourism: a fundamental work and patience
Travel agency referencing requires regular work with a lot of patience. The result cannot necessarily be immediate because Google considers the improvements made, and given a large number of competition, the result will take time to appear.
Following some experiences on the estate, you must take about 6 to 8 months on average to reap the fruits of an agency or tourism site (after the audit phase of the site). So, when you have the means to do so, always boost your site’s SEO.
Action needs to take to get a good ranking on Google
You must analyze your position and competitors’ position in Google search bars! Before setting up your travel agency SEO strategy, you must know your rank to obtain the best result. It is not just a question of making improvements to hope for a slight change in investment.
The ideal would be to use a tool, such as Google Webmaster Tools (free and equivalent of Analytics), to monitor this evolution closely. You will have the opportunity to make any corrections needed.
The main thing will be to directly enter competitors’ sites to analyze and exploit what allows them to obtain traffic. It is not a question of reproducing the same presentations, but it often allows you to have ideas you have not yet found.
Regarding the actions you must concretely perform, optimizing all the elements inside your site would be ideal. These include meta titles and descriptions, HTML tags, semantic fields, content optimization, and Hn titles. If one of these elements is not complete or messy, the result granted by Google will be wrong.
The importance of the architecture of travel and tourism sites
Architecture is an element not to be neglected (especially for an agency site) because it also improves your optimization! It will include creating thematic menus on your offers, such as family trips, hikes, the luxury category, etc. You will have the opportunity to create landing pages and a hierarchy of SEO content afterward.
Focus on Internal Link
Many professionals sometimes neglect the internal link, which strengthens your travel agency’s SEO! The more your page has a link to the site, the more link juice you will get.
You still have to pay attention to stuffing links! As a travel site, you may be tempted to direct tourists and visitors to each page opening, creating a saturation that must be avoided.
Tourist Content and Travel Guides
Content marketing is currently considered one of the most effective strategies for feeding a website. It has a dual function to please visitors and Google’s search engine.
Indeed, content is the raw material representing the synthesis and nature of your activity. The advantage of working well will generate more traffic, meaning more travel bookings for your agency site.
In particular, through the latter, you will be able to prove your expertise in the field! For example, if you organize trips to Mexico, you must talk about the essentials of the city, the different sites to visit, etc.
It will be a question of making your visitors eager through what you present as content. Suppose they need to research their travel destinations, present tickets, and hotels, and make sure to make them discover the country through your site. Please make a small travel guide that can attract them, increasing the traffic to your travel site.
Targeted Marketing Actions for Travel Agency
Always remaining as part of improving your SEO, a travel site needs regular work on the overall marketing strategy.
Nevertheless, it is not only enough to offer quality content but also necessary to ensure targeted marketing to achieve sustainable progress. In particular, it is the best way to stabilize its SEO through real-time content that meets visitors’ needs.
Our Tip to Improve the SEO of a Travel Site
In conclusion, travel agencies must offer very high-quality content and, above all, content optimized to guarantee the effectiveness of their site. These two points need to be balanced because travel tourism is a relatively sensitive sector of activity, and you must do your utmost to dress your site and generate as many visitors as possible.
You can follow all the above tips to achieve this, but if you need help with SEO, do not hesitate to get a professional SEO expert from OrixLab.
