Travel and hospitality is one of the largest and fastest-growing global industries. With low-cost flights and cheaper accommodation arrangements, it gives more opportunities to people all over the world to travel more and spend more.
Booking.com, commonly used travel fare aggregator website, revealed that 80% of customers prefer to self-serve in order to get the information that they need. What does it mean?
It means that tourists look for the best offers and destinations online. In such circumstances, the way you arrange a professional travel website becomes critical. This post will show you six tips on how to boost your travel website. Let’s check them out!
Keyword Strategy
Building a successful website without the corresponding keyword strategy is impossible. Before you start producing content, you must brainstorm to find the right solution for your niche. The travel industry is so vast that you’ll probably need to focus on a specific niche such as luxury, outdoor, or honeymoon traveling.
Besides that, there are many online tools to help you find the best keyword solutions in all fields of work and expertise. Google’s Keyword Planner is always a good starting point that allows you to reach the targeted audience using the most appropriate keywords.
Keep in mind, however, that keyword stuffing won’t get you too far in your search ranking projections. Google penalizes websites that simply throw in keywords to maximize the SEO effect, so make sure to use keywords strategically.
Local SEO
Local optimization is crucial for travel agencies with physical branches. After all, a lot of people still like to visit a company and get advice from real sales persons. For this reason, it is important to add location preferences to the SEO equation.
You should add region, city, and address of your branch to Google My Business. Doing so, you allow Google Maps to show your company in location-related searches, so anyone who looks for “travel agencies near me” can see your name in search results.
Technical Optimization
Although most of the website maintenance is done automatically, there is still plenty of technical work to pay attention to. Here are the most common site-related issues:
- Mobile optimization: More than half of Google searches are conducted through smartphones and the numbers are only growing bigger. It means you need to optimize a website so as to fit the screens of all sizes and dimension, not only laptops and desktop computers.
- Page load speed: Internet users are impatient. They don’t want to wait more than 2 to 3 seconds for your website to load, so don’t forget to check the load times and make improvements if needed.
- Broken links: A customer who sees the sign “404 Page not found” will immediately leave your website. Fix every broken link and keep checking it regularly to avoid losing valuable leads.
Publish Quality Content
According to the study, almost 80% of travelers claim informative content from destinations or travel brands can influence their decision-making process. You need to exploit this fact by posting high-quality content on your website.
Blogging is the thing to do here. Travelers love authors who can describe targeted destinations and provide them with intriguing insights into local people, cultures, and customs. But don’t forget multimedia content, too!
As you already know, a picture is worth a thousand words, so each post must include beautiful and appealing images. You should go a step further and publish videos to add even more credibility to your writing. Textual descriptions, followed by multimedia content, will make wonderful posts that inspire users to keep coming back to your website.
Social Media Marketing
There is little evidence that social media like Facebook or Instagram influence a website’s search engine ranking, but they still play a major role in website promotion. Popular networks give you the opportunity to raise awareness and engage the target audience.
Posting wonderful videos and images, asking questions, and encouraging followers to comment, you can drastically improve the online visibility of your website. It’s also a chance for you to engage and reveal the human side of the business, thus strengthening relations with your customers.
Re-marketing
Re-marketing is another interesting way to win over new customers. Namely, a vast majority of visitors leave a website without taking any specific action. With re-marketing, you can chase these users outside of your site.
When they open Facebook or go to another website, they will see a banner with the special offer. This is usually a tailored offer for the first-time customers who get an extra motive to engage, so you can expect some of them to return to your website and seal the traveling deal.
Conclusion
The leisure and travel industry experienced a huge increase in popularity in the digital era. The Internet allowed almost everyone to self-plan their trips and search for the most convenient options, giving travel websites the power to make or break entire companies.
Our article showed you six tips on how to boost your travel professional website. Make sure to implement our suggestions related to keywords, SEO, and other important features as these could become the biggest success driver of your business.
And if you have any additional inquiries about this topic, feel free to let us know in comments – we will be glad to answer you.
Author Bio:
Jack White is currently working at the Department of Public Relations at assignment service. Jack began from the bottom and has managed to become today’s excellent writer. Looking back into his past he has achieved great success and he hopes to carry on the same spirit into the future.