The Tour and Travel industry is extremely competitive – both offline and online. Contact us for Travel Site Optimization
With tens of thousands of small, mid-sized and large companies vying for their share of the market, finding a client is always a challenge.
What is good news?
The hyperlocal nature of Tour and Travel gives a viable chance to the smallest of businesses – provided you properly optimize your site for local search.
Here are 10 SEO tips that will improve your Tour and Travel website and help it dominate in local search.
Conduct an SEO Audit
A website SEO audit is a huge topic in itself. For a local SEO audit, pay attention to these areas:
- Site structure: XML sitemap, robots.txt, redirects.
- Page structure: Titles, meta descriptions, H1-H6 tags, ALT tags, URLs.
- Content: Keyword and link placement, structure, visual elements, duplicates, proper redirects and canonical tags.
- Links: Outbound and inbound, interlinking, broken links.
- Usability: Mobile-friendliness, site speed.
- Bring these five up to snuff and you’ll see a considerable increase in traffic and clients.
An optimized site will rank nicely, including for local searches.
Optimize Your Website
A perfectly optimized website is essential if you want to show up in local results. Address all the SEO essentials, including:
- Keyword research and analysis
- SEO-friendly URLs
- Optimization of tags and meta descriptions
- Image optimization
- Proper outbound and internal link placement
- Broken links
- Redirects
- Site speed optimization
- Content optimization
- CTR and bounce rate optimization
- Schema
- Robots.txt
- XML sitemap
- SSL certificate
- W3C validation
If you’re not an SEO specialist, then hire a professional as an SEO professional will help you with tips 1, 2, 3 and 9.
Optimize for Mobile
Why is mobile optimization necessary? Consider that over 68 percent of all tour and travel searches are now initiated on mobile.
Make sure potential clients can access and use your site conveniently on any mobile device.
- Responsive design
- Page speed
- Hosting speed
- Homepage
- Site navigation
- Site search
- Forms
- Conversions
- Usability
All of these are pretty important to your rankings and conversions. Visitors expect your site to load in less than two seconds and will immediately leave unless you provide impeccable user experience.
Some mobile optimization tips:
- Run a Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to learn if your page is mobile-friendly, and access the list of page loading issues that need fixing.
- Fire up a Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to get access to even more errors related to mobile optimization and load speed. Fix them until you score 100 points.
- Optimize your site’s code to delete all Flash and script elements that can increase your pages’ load time.
- Get rid of ads and interstitials that block users from accessing content. Both Google and users hate websites, especially mobile sites, that are a pain to navigate.
- Make sure that your site’s homepage is easy to use. It needs to feature visually appealing but not intrusive CTAs, short menus with large, easy-to-click tabs, a distinctive search field with selectable filters, user-friendly contact form, and a logo button that allows users to get back to your homepage.
- Optimize images. Reduce the size of large images and make sure that each image features an ALT text.
- Check if your site search displays relevant results. Ensure that filters work properly and do not make users zoom.
- Adjust your blog to AMP. This will drastically improve a site’s load time.
- Address caching issues of your site. In some cases, a site can suffer from poor performance in mobile search due to problems with hosting and caching. Make sure that all of your HTTP requests are handled in a flash.
Bonus tip: Use this emulator to check how your site is displayed on different devices. A bit of testing never hurts.
Start a Blog
Though you can run an IDX site, you still need a blog. Properly optimized content that speaks to the needs of your targeted audience is your path to dominate local search results.
Meanwhile, as a small business, you can’t go big on content. Your resources are too limited to compete with established corporations. This is why you should prioritize:
Informative articles. These are blog posts about your neighborhood: schools, crime, walkability, median income, prices, social life, entertainment, restaurants, etc. Provide unique perspectives and describe actual pros and cons of the neighborhood.
Interviews with local business owners. These can take a pretty large chunk of your time, but it will be time well spent. They will display the soul of your neighborhood and demonstrate to prospective home buyers how nice your area is. On top of that, business owners will share these interviews on their social pages and websites, building awareness and increasing reach for your business.
Visual content. These are your images (ordinary and 360-degree immersive panoramic photos), infographics, video tours, live-stream videos, virtual tours, etc.
Optimize your content for search engines before posting and sharing. Include “geo” keywords into titles, subtitles, meta descriptions, ALT text, URLs, hashtags, etc.