SEO Travel Marketing
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 represents a critical promotional medium for travel businesses.
A 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 stats 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 air fares. 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.
Yahoo Travel, Expedia
Travel, Travelocity, CNN and the Discovery Channel
If 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 favor as a search engine optimized Web site, is that travel consumers
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 travelers. Visitors can search for cheap
airfare, discount travel packages, cheap hotel rooms, cruises,
and vacation resort deals. Regretably, not every travel deal
is available for the searcher's perusal. Only major airlines,
cruiselines 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 traveler
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, may be 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. Travelers 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-opetitiion" 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 Bay Street SEO. Not only will you maximize
the worth of your current site, 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.
There is
no one single seo optimization technique
that will work for travel Web sites. The trick is to strategically
utilize the travel company's available resources and build new connections
and perhaps new content.
If your travel site
is underperforming, then you should inquire about what Bay Street SEO
can do for you. This is the best online travel marketing opportunity you'll
find.
|
Monthly search
volumes for airfare and other phrases:
535000 air
fare
249000 cheap air fare
156000 lowest air fare
95000 discount air fare
26000 low air fare
19000 last minute air fare
13000 student air fare
10000 international air fare
9600 cheapest air fare
900,000 cruises
150,000 discount hotel
280,000 cheap flights
1,000,000 car rental
TIA is the US travel
industry portal. It reports that overall demand
is up from the same time last year. Delta Hotels is the leading Canadian Hotel chain offering luxury rooms in Toronto Hotels and Whistler Resorts. Canadian tourism results of 2006 show a market in decline.
 
Before you spend your
budget on text link advertising, remember that
on-site optimization will determine how well those incoming links will improve
your rankings. You still must validate your site content to the search engine.
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