Here’s a bold statement: “SEO in the travel industry is immensely challenging.”
The sheer number of pages to manage, complexities of properties, flights, accommodation, availability, occupancy, destinations, not to mention the crazy amount of APIs and databases to make a travel site function, can all make life tricky for an SEO, particularly when it comes to the development queue…
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Having said that, there are still common mistakes and missed opportunities out there that have the potential to be really impactful and believe it or not, they don’t actually require a huge amount of resource to put right.
So, here’s a list of the six most common travel SEO mistakes to get right for 2019:
Forgetting about index bloat
There are a LOT of facets and filters when it comes to commercial travel category pages, arguably the most of any industry.
Typically with every facet or filter, be it; availability, location, facilities, amenities nearby, occupancy etc. A URL is created with the associated parameters selected by the user.
If not handled correctly, this can produce thousands of indexable pages that have no unique organic value to users.
This is a problem for a number of reasons:
It can be confusing for search engines because they can find it tricky to identify the best and most relevant URL to rank and show users depending on their queryIt can dilute domain level ranking signals drasticallyIt can cause a huge amount of duplicate content issuesIt can waste crawl budget which for big travel sites is super important
Combined, this can cause big losses in rankings, traffic and subsequently conversion!
How to identify index bloat
Go to Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) and check your ‘Index Coverage’ report or, in the old version, check ‘Index Status’ to see if you can see any spikes or growth in ‘Total Indexed’ pages. If you notice something like the graph below and it’s not expected, then there may be a problem:
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If you find there is a big increase and you can’t explain why, conduct some ‘Site:’ operator searches and spot check areas of your site where this may be commonplace to see what you can find.
Here’s an example of index bloat from the page speed tool ‘Pingdom’. It seems as though every input a user executes produces an indexable URL:
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Once you’ve found a problem like this, review the extent of it with a Screaming Frog crawl. This way you can see how many URLs are affected and distinguish between whether they are actually indexable or not.
For example, there may be a few hundred pages that are indexable but have not yet been found and indexed by Google.
How to fix index bloat:
Noindex – Use a page level meta ‘noindex’ directive on the culprit pagesWhere possible redirect – index bloat can happen as a result of mountains of historical 404 pages too, 301 redirect them into the most appropriate page to consolidateCanonicalisation – apply an absolute canonical tag to the culprit pages to indicate that they are duplicatePagination – where possible use rel=”next” & rel=”prev” markup to show that pages are part of a seriesURL parameter tool – By far the easiest but arguably the most risky method is using Google’s parameter handling tool to indicate the purpose of the culprit pages, be careful though, this can cause bigger problems if implemented incorrectly
Expert tip
If any of the above are difficult to get implemented in your dev queue and you don’t trust yourself using the parameter handling tool, you can actually noindex web pages & directories in your robots.txt file. You can actually add lines reading:
Noindex: /directory/
Noindex: /page/
This could save you a lot of time and is fully reversible, so less risky if you have control over your robots file. If you’ve never heard of this, don’t worry it is supported and it does work!
Unemotive meta titles
It’s pretty staggering but in the UK, there’s a lot going on in January for travel — it is certainly the biggest spike in the year for many brands, followed by ‘holiday blues’ peaks after summer.
Here’s the trend of interest over time for the query ‘tenerife holidays’ (a destination famed for its good weather all year round) to show you what I mean:
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January might be a bad time to experiment because of the higher interest but, the rest of the year presents a great opportunity to get creative with your titles.
Why would you?
Simply, keyword heavy titles don’t inspire high click-through rates.
Creative titles entice users into your landing pages, give your brand a personality and increase your click-through rate. This sends strong positive relevancy signals to Google which helps towards highlighting that your website is the best for the initial user query.
Here are a few things you can try with supportive content and commercial landers:
Get emotional, people buy holidays on the experiences they anticipate having. Play on that with your titles – how will products/content from this page make the user feel?Where possible use a numbered list to be as descriptive as possibleUse strengthening words such as premium, secret, amazing, proven, guaranteedTie in emotional hooks using words like; fun, adventure, seamless, safe, welcoming, luxury, relaxingExperiment with ‘price from’ and actually quote pricing in the titleSwitch up your ‘PHP’ generated title tags for property pages and experiment with more descriptive wording and not just PROPERTY NAME | LOCATION | BRAND – but don’t remove any keyword targeting, just improve those titles.
Expert Tip
Write five completely unique title tags for the same page and test each one with a Facebook or PPC adto see whether they outperform your current iteration in terms of engagement.
Poor merchandising
As previously mentioned, the travel industry experiences peaks and troughs of consumer behavior trend throughout the year which causes the majority intent to switch dramatically across different months in the year.
So, having a deep understanding of what users are actually looking for is really important when merchandising high traffic pages to get the best conversion out of your audience.
In short, gaining an understanding of what works when, is huge.
Here’s some tips to help you make better merchandising decisions:
Use last year’s email open rate data – what type of content/product worked?Use Google Search Console to find pages that peaked in organic traffic at different timesInvolve the social media team to get a better understanding of what your audience is engaging with and whyUse Google Trend data to verify your hunches and find clearer answersUse UGC sites such as Quora to find questions users are asking during different months of the year. Use the following site operator and swap out ‘holiday’ for your topic: ‘site:quora.com inurl:holiday’ and then filter by custom date range on your search
Often consumers are exposed to the same offers, destinations and visuals on key landing pages all year round which is such a missed opportunity.
We now live in a world of immediacy and those in the industry know the challenges of users cross-shopping between brands, even those who are brand loyal. This often means that if users can’t find what they are looking for quickly, they will bounce and find a site that serves them the content they are looking for.
For example, there’s an argument for promoting and focusing on media-based content, more so than product, later in the year, to cater to users that are in the ‘consideration’ part of the purchasing funnel.
Expert tip
Use number five in this list to pull even more clues to help inform merchandising