10 SEO Tips for Travel Blogs and Websites
When he first started at Tiqets, Senior Copywriter and Digital Media Specialist Liam McGarry says, “We had a lot of original, fun, useful content on the blog – content that you’d want to read – but no one was reading it. So at the end of the day, there was no point.” And that's because there was no SEO strategy for the Tiqets travel blog.
But in 2019, the team decided to adopt a focused, strategic approach to SEO, or search engine optimization. SEO refers to the techniques travel content marketers use to raise the rankings of their content in search engine results pages.
These techniques, of course, are not written on a gold screed somewhere. Search engines such as Google constantly tweak and alter their own algorithms. Mastering SEO for travel blogs requires you to stay closely tuned in to current best practices.
When the Tiqets team began to hew closely to SEO strategy, McGarry notes, the blog content ranked higher and higher in search results. In recent months, Tiqets has achieved a 9,000% increase in organic traffic compared to when the blog team started focusing on travel blog SEO just two years ago.
We know what you’re thinking: How did they do it? Here are 10 best practices Tiqets currently uses to increase SEO rankings for travel blog posts.
SEO tip #1: Do your keyword research
At the most basic level, travel blog SEO efforts come down to keyword research. Ask yourself: What keywords and phrases do people in your target audience use when they’re searching for travel-related topics?
There are many tools available for keyword research, including the Semrush Keyword Magic Tool, KWFinder, and Google Keyword Planner. They’ll give you straightforward industry data on what keywords are popular and how often they’re being searched.
Keyword research results typically look something like this:
“Art museum in Paris” is the search term, and from the results, you can see that between 1,000 to 10,000 people a month typically conduct this search on Google. This hasn’t changed much year over year, and the competition for this term is “low,” which makes it a good keyword to write content about.
At the bottom of the list, “Paris art gallery” is getting fewer searches, and the competition on that one is “medium,” which means it has less potential to rank well in Google — and fewer people are searching for that term in the first place.
Once you get the hang of reading keyword research results, it’s time to think about the people doing the actual searches.
SEO tip #2: Understand user intent
When choosing keywords, relevance is an important factor. You can’t choose a keyword just because it’s got a lot of search potential if it doesn’t actually fit what you’re writing about and who you’re writing for. “The most important thing to consider when choosing keywords for your blog content is knowing the intent of the user,” says McGarry. “Google is an intent-based search engine and doesn’t just put something at the top because of the keyword alone. It really wants to know what people want and bring them to the right topic."
For instance, your keyword research might reveal that a lot of people are searching for the phrase “trip to Italy,” but what you may not realize is that Trip to Italy is also the name of a movie.
If you start peppering your content with this phrase, it may raise your status in search results, but your page is not what people are necessarily looking for. Before you choose a final list of keywords to write about, always ask yourself, “Will writing about this keyword satisfy the intent of the person reading it?” The answer to this is partly simple subjective intuition, but you can also search for that keyword and look at what other types of results come up.
Pro tip: Use the massively popular forum Reddit to get a sense of what people are talking about and what they expect when they search for certain keywords.
SEO tip #3: Use keywords strategically and in various ways
To give your blog post the best chance of ranking in Google, make sure you include your keyword in:
- The title of your blog post
- The meta title and description of your blog post, which are two important “behind the scenes” fields Google and other search engines rely upon to initially filter out blogs and websites for keywords
- The body copy of the post itself; feature the keyword, but without using it so much that your post becomes both unreadable and a huge red flag for search engines
- Consistently in the top half of your body copy, and specifically in the first few paragraphs
- In some of your subheads throughout the post
Pro tip: More variety in your keyword use makes your content both more fun to read and more interesting to search engines. For instance, if you’re writing about a venue in New Orleans, this type of keyword research can give you ideas for different ways to write:
Don’t just write about “facts about New Orleans.” Write about “fun facts” and “history facts” and “interesting facts” and “creepy facts” – and don’t forget about “legends.” If you pay enough attention to keywords, your blog posts start to write themselves.
SEO tip #4: Write to satisfy keyword demand and human curiosity
Before you start to sprinkle keywords everywhere, know this: It’s a mistake to focus exclusively on the number of times you can squeeze the right keywords into your copy.
If you’re only writing for search engine algorithms and not for real humans, people will find your page, but not want to read it. In fact, both search engines and people have gotten smart enough to recognize when a blog is attempting to game the system with “keyword stuffing,” and neither will put up with it. When it comes to your human readers, make sure you’re using the keywords as a jumping off point to real, authentic content they want to read.
SEO tip #5: Not too long, not too short, but just right
In general, search engines respond better to more words. “It’s tough to get anywhere with a 500-word blog post,” says McGarry. “We always try to concentrate on the length of each post and offer more information than competitors already in first position.”
Note that McGarry talks about “more information,” not “more keywords.” Again, a 10,000-word blog about “how to rent a bike in Amsterdam” will only rank and stay high in search results if the writing is actually useful and relevant.
That said, it can be easier than you might think to write 10,000 words about “how to rent a bike in Amsterdam.” The current #1 post ranking for this phrase is over 12,000 words long, and it’s pretty interesting! It’s also illustrated by a lot of pictures, and it’s formatted well to break up the lengthy text (more on that in the next tip).
In general, McGarry says, “There’s never too much information on a travel subject – as long as it’s useful and relevant to the person trying to search their query.”
SEO tip #6: Focus on formatting
Photos, graphics, embedded videos, maps, infographics, FAQs, and other types of supplemental visuals and information can help break up a longer text. Use these types of assets both to add value for readers and to make the post more pleasing to the eye.
“If you can make your blog post easy to read, nice to read, and scannable, with the best visuals, it makes a huge difference,” says McGarry. “Don’t just pick standard stock photos off the internet. Try to use high-quality visuals that give people a sense of inspiration.”
Blog posts, no matter their length, should be easy to scan and read, with clear titles and structuring. Formatting blog posts well means they get read more often and more fully, which in turn increases your search rankings even more.
SEO tip #7: Optimize the load time of your page
The flip side of a really visually stunning page is that a lot of visuals and widgets can make the page load much slower. Always optimize your code so pages load as quickly as possible. Make sure your images are low or medium resolution and aim for dimensions of no more than 1920x1080 or 500kb in file size per image.
There are plenty of tools on the web for testing your page speed, such as Google’s PageSpeed Insights. Also, in case images don’t load quickly – and to make your page accessible, for instance, to the visually impaired – always include alt tags on every image.
Pro tip: While you’re at it, get your keywords into those alt tags (as long as they're relevant).
SEO tip #8: Aim to become the #1 source for _________
One of the best ways to “get good” at SEO is to focus on strategic themes. Going back to tip #1, your keyword research can inform you just how competitive a term is. If a term is getting tons of searches, but it’s also incredibly competitive, it’s much harder to rank. For instance, if you’re trying to rank high for “best museum in Paris” and you’re not of the ilk of the Louvre, the Musée des Arts et Métiers, or the Centre Pompidou, it’s a bit of an upstream struggle:
There may be a more specific place in the SEO hall of fame for you. Find a niche, low-competition keyword that’s appropriate for your blog, and you have a theme you can run with. For instance, the more specific search “best fashion museum Paris” brings up a different set of choices:
For the Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris and the Louis Vuitton Foundation, it makes far more sense to focus on promoting the phrase “best fashion museum in Paris” and similar keywords.
Your museum or attraction might have something that no other attraction has. Perhaps you’re the expert source on tap water in Beijing (real place) or the owner of the most British lawnmowers throughout history (also, strangely, real). Or perhaps your museum or attraction is less thematic but still has something original and interesting going for it.
Chances are, there’s a subject you can write about that is heavily searched but still up for grabs in terms of keywords and SEO competition. Seize your spot!
“When I think about what to write and post about,” says McGarry, “this is my number one aim — to be the number one source on whatever it is we’re talking about. If you can say you’re the best on whatever topic you’re writing about, you’re most of the way there to making sure people are reading it.”
SEO tip #9: Post consistently
The fact that you’re even reading this suggests you’re serious about SEO. But one of the biggest patterns in blog posting is initial enthusiasm followed by a flatline of zero activity. Positioning your website as the subject-matter expert on creepy facts about New Orleans, or how to rent a bike in Amsterdam, or whatever your thing may be, means posting regularly.
“Regularly” doesn’t necessarily mean frequently. Do what you can do without sacrificing the quality or consistency of your blog content. If you’re low on time or resources, always prioritize quality, even if it means you’re only posting once or twice a month. The more time and resources you have, the more often you can post.
“But what’s ideal?” you may be wondering.
SEO guru Neil Patel says there is no magic number of posts per day, week, month, or year: “High-quality content matters and you can’t afford to push out tons of low-quality posts every day.” On the other hand, he notes, Google does rank newer content higher a lot of the time, so you want to keep your blog fresh. But one way to do this is to revise content that’s already live to make it even better, which brings us to our next tip...
SEO tip #10: Analyze and optimize
A critical mistake small, beleaguered travel content teams make is to write blog posts with keywords and algorithms in mind, but forget to check back and see if those efforts worked. SEO is a puzzle. In fact, this was an early mistake the team at Tiqets made.
Following current best practices is only part of it; you also have to analyze your metrics. How you do so depends on what tools you use to post content, but there are plenty of analytical tools available on the market, both built into your content-publishing tools and supplemental to them.
Here are some of the SEO analytics tools we now use at Tiqets:
- KWFinder – initial keyword research
- Semrush Keyword Magic Tool – tracking live blogs
- Google Search Console – tracking how our SEO is doing, specifically in terms of where we’re doing well and which keywords we haven’t used enough
- Yoast SEO – a plug-in for any WordPress blog that ensures you hit every point on the SEO checklist
“We have a checklist on every blog post that goes out to make sure our posts have the most opportunity from the get-go,” says McGarry. “We don’t have to do a lot of optimization later on, just small tweaks here and there. This was a huge step for us in giving our blog posts an opportunity to do well.”
The tweaks he refers to include going back to the metrics and seeing where you could have taken more advantage of certain keywords and techniques, and where small changes in new blog posts and already-published posts could boost search rankings. Note that Google takes some time to start tracking how people are using your posts and how long they’re staying on your page. Once that “initial analysis period” is over, you can start making those small tweaks.
You have arrived: Mastery of SEO for travel blogs
It’s a lot of very specific information, but if you treat it like a checklist, you’ll be at the top of the search results in no time. It’s happened for Tiqets, and it can happen for you.
For newbies on the SEO scene, McGarry offers this last advice: “The most important thing? Don’t give up. One of our biggest learnings is that it might take two to three months and maybe longer for content to start ranking.”
Use your checklist, write as often as you can without sacrificing quality, be smart about how you format copy and how you use keywords, and track your progress, and McGarry says, “You’ll soon squeeze the SEO juice out of your posts.”