SEO and Tourism Sites

Tourism website SEO

The Alberta tourism industry is thriving year-round. More travellers from around the world are learning about Alberta’s great attractions from Banff to Drumheller. With the growing population of Alberta, high disposable income, many Albertans are desperately seeking a holiday. While Florida and the Caribbean always beckon, tourism businesses can still capture a large number of vacationers.

If you own a California or Banff tourism site, strong exposure on Google can make a huge difference in the success of your business. From an appearance on travel portals to top rankings on Google, we’ll create the keyword positioning and exposure you need.

Online travel marketing is conducted a number of ways, but perhaps the best method is search engine optimization. It certainly has the ROI if not the reach of television. Travel consumers are using search engines increasingly for discovering hotel rooms, cheap flights or airfare, vacation destinations, and in particular, affordable, fun travel experiences. U.S. online travel sales is continuing to grow fast and represent a critical promotional medium for travel businesses.

professional SEO company that has extensive experience in travel SEO and search engine promotion of travel Web sites is your best bet for success in this highly competitive area.

Yahoo Travel

Several big travel portals such as Yahoo Travel welcome huge volumes of travel consumers. For the most part, they offer visitors very similar travel services. What’s the difference in the success of each? Google rankings. Yahoo Travel focuses on searches for cheap airline tickets, hotels & car rentals. As the search starts on the right demonstrate, there are hundreds of thousands of searches every month for travel-related services.

You’ll notice many of these searches involve cheap airfares. There are just as many searches for vacation packages, ecotours, and all-inclusive vacations to destinations such as Florida, California, Hawaii, Cancun, West Indies, Australia, Europe and even tsunami-stricken Indonesia. Cruise ship holidays are also a lucrative travel product.

SEO and Tourism SitesIf your Web site sells travel services and you’re resisting selling via search engines, you’re going to fall behind your more progressive competitors. Yahoo Travel, Expedia Travel, Travelocity, CNN and the Discovery Channel tend to dominate the travel area, but that doesn’t mean search engines won’t allow smaller sites to get in the top ten somehow. There are a lot of keyword phrases being used by searchers. It’s in their best interests to allow a little variety into the results pages since the top sites tend to offer the very same deals and destinations. Often, they’re just quoting flights from the same airlines.

Travel Search Behavior
Something that’s in your favour as a search engine optimized Web site, is that travel consumer are very price-conscious when beginning their search. They sample many sites and stop when they find something they like.

The Yahoo travel site page is a primary search engine service for online travellers. Visitors can search for cheap airfare, discount travel packages, cheap hotel rooms, cruises, and vacation resort deals. Regrettably, not every travel deal is available for the searcher’s perusal. Only major airlines, cruise lines and hotels are advertised.

Expedia.com
Expedia.com is another big online travel search engine providing visitors with an array of travel-related services ranging from cheap airfare to maps of travel destinations. Hot deals are offered in the right sidebar on the homepage and other tools offer the standard information.

Most consumers may be overwhelmed by the amount of information and the range of products and services offered by Expedia.com and other portals, even though they broker for only a small variety of travel product suppliers. That means travel consumers may tire of checking too many sources. This is to the advantage of the top-ranking travel sites. They’ll retain more of the visitors who hit their site.

On average, a traveller will spend $2,962 in 2004 on airfare, accommodations, sightseeing, meals, souvenirs and other expenses for all longer vacations. Acquiring even 100 new customers then maybe a bonanza for a travel service company. When it comes to travel planning, the Internet continues to beat out other travel resources in popularity. It’s at 45% up from 35% a year ago. Travellers still book offline but their choices are increasingly determined by what they see online.

This means that travel Web sites with access to travel consumers via search engines stand to gain a great deal in the next few years.

There are numerous keyword niche categories in the online travel search market, including travel, last-minute travel, adventure travel, travel insurance, travel agency, travel accessories, travel to Mexico, airfare, cheap airfare, discount airfare, cruises, Alaska cruises, Caribbean cruises, vacations, Hawaii, Hawaii vacations, vacation packages, airline ticket, airlines, beach vacation, Disney vacation, eco-tours, Alaska tours and more.

These are great market conditions and offer travel companies an excellent variety of opportunities to connect to travel consumers.

Yes, it is one of the most challenging sectors, however, if a client is dedicated to the task and appreciates the return on investment a high ranking will produce, the rankings and the referrals will come.

Where is the demand for search engine referrals in travel services?

Sector
Estimated Search
Engine Referrals/year

Estimated Yearly Cost to purchase these clickthroughs
Hawaii
3,000,000
$3,000,000
Air fare tickets
3,000,000
$3,000,000
Cheap Flights
3,000,000
$3,000,000
Travel
2,000,000
$2,200,000
Cruises
1,000,000
$1,200,000
Vacations
1,000,000
$1,100,000
Eco/Wildlife Tours
300,000
$500,000

How do the leading ranking Travel Sites do what they do?

They build a lot of valuable, and often unique content and that’s why Web site owners are only too happy to link to them. Top travel site builders are aggressive about planning and creating a site that has an element of good reading, information about destinations and services available or are have online travel services.

High ranking sites often have owners who are willing to partner with other competing or non-competing Web sites. The travel industry are leaders in co-marketing since travel consumers often buy vacation packages that require multiple vendors. This type of co-marketing is rarely done in other industries, however, “co-petition” as it’s known, is often what separates the winners from losers.

High ranking sites are often optimized to whatever level the search engines will allow or accommodate. Search engines attempt to delete Web sites that are deliberately or excessively optimized to appear in their listings. That means a professional SEO who knows how to scale the strategy and implementation to the requirements of the search engines is also a key asset these companies possess.

Search Engine Marketing ROI
Bid prices on travel keyword phrases such as cheap airfare discount vacations and last minute travel are rising rapidly to a level where companies will only be able to afford to advertise for one day before they’ve used their budget. As the price of PPC bidding rises, the natural or editorial search engine results pages will become even more sought after. Those who are establishing a strong presence now will reap the benefits when the prices skyrocket.

If your company is a travel product/services provider you may want to consider hiring the services of California SEO. Not only will you maximize the worth of your current site, but we can also help you build a successful site or advise you on which types of content will give you the kind of results you need.

SEO for Travel Web Sites

Each travel site has its own unique range of products and services, along with its own unique value proposition to its customers. Each has its own technical limitations and potential for search engine rankings. Many travel sites are dynamically driven and therefore need creative search engine optimization solutions. Others simply need content to be integrated properly.

MORE SEO POSTS

Leave a Reply