SEO for the Travel Industry: Right Place, Wrong Time? A Case Study
“Right place, wrong time” is a song, a quote from Star Trek Voyager and a principle, a basic rule that should be considered by any SEO strategy for the Travel Industry (no matter if we are talking about the biggest Hostel booking company with thousand of destination worldwide or a little hotel website).
Having been involved in a wide range of Travel SEO projects during the last 3 years , I thought it would be a good time to share some ideas.
The theory
When travellers are looking for an holiday are normally considering 3 variables: How much, Where, When.
Taking from granted that you are already targeting your locations (“London Hostels“, “B&B in Paris”…) and your typical audience (“cheap hotels”, “Luxury holidays”…), the variable “Time” is not always fully considered. Or at least not enough.
In general websites are targeting large period of time such as “Ski Holidays” or “Summer Holidays” but they are not trying to grab all that long tail searches that would make the happiness of every conversion focused analyst. Targeting long tail time related keywords can bring you little but extremely tailored precious traffic which is likely to increase considerably your conversion rate and your sales. And let’s talk frankly, at the end of the day every online retailer’s KPI is just one: money.
The case study
To support this theory I made a little experiment (I made it in Italian but that’s not really relevant):
In a website NOT travel related I built 8 landing pages promoting one different Easter (“Pasqua” in Italian) destination in each page:
Sharm El Sheikh, Paris, Prague, London , Amsterdam, New York, Berlin and Barcelona. All very popular destination for Italian people in Easter.
I haven’t done any link building, any PPC, I haven’t released any press release, haven’t done any promotion whatsoever. The only thing I did is been to place one single link from the homepage of this website to one of these deep pages and to do some “good old boring” on page optimisation.
Having less than 100 words, these pages were mainly targeting the keyword “hotel in<city> in Easter 2010″. The content was more or less something like that:
Book now your hotel in Paris for Easter 2010! Imagine being in the most romantic city in Europe walking along the Seine river or sipping a glass of French wine sitting outside a traditional bar in the Latin Quarter or enjoying the beautiful Parisian landscape from the Eiffel Tower … Not bad right? A Hotel in Paris for Easter may be much cheaper than you can think: transform your Easter in an unforgettable moment!
Ok, not the best piece of literature ever, I have to admit but good enough for the purpose of this experiment.
The Results:
Considering ONLY good long tail potentially high converting keywords that were including the word “EASTER” I’ve monitored 682 visits (92.38% new visitors) via 200 different keywords.
January with almost 500 visitors had a 179.04% organic traffic increase from December and I’m confident that this trend will grow for another couple of month or so… and yes: I’ve earned a bunch of money via Adsense LOL!
Conclusion:
Build your landing pages well in advance: building SEO landing pages to promote Christmas Holidays in December is a waste of time. Give the Search Engines enough time to pick up your pages.
Be as much specific as possible: do not target “Hotel in Paris in Easter”, target “Hotel in Paris in Easter 2010″. You’ll increase a LOT your organic click through rate and your chance to convert. Next year you can either change the content of your page or redirect 301 the old page to the new one.
Do not ever delete your page when a certain holiday is over: I m pretty sure we’ll have Easter even in 2011, 2012 etc… keeping your page live will help their authority and consistency.
When a certain holiday season is approaching boost your pages with some good links from your home page and use press release and article submission to increase rapidly your visibility and establish your brand authority.
Build internal and external links strategically and don’t be afraid to link back to other sources from your landing page: getting a good link from a council website or an established local weather report website may well worth a link back.
Understand “when your audience is travelling where”: Some locations are more popular in certain parts of the year.
If you don’t know a certain international market do not guess! Hire a multilingual SEO agency that using native speaker can understand the cultural habit of a certain country.
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Great post Davide, I’m British working in Italy (strange world!) I find being a mother tongue makes a big difference in implementing an efficient SEO strategy for the Travel Industry