Travel is a highly competitive and saturated market; therefore, your keyword research has to go above and beyond if you want your site to perform well in the SERPs.
User experience is now very valuable in SEO, and this means it’s important to optimise your content for search intent. To do this, you’ll need to conduct some thorough keyword research, as this is an excellent way of gaining valuable insights into your audience. For those of you who are new to the process, we’ve created a short guide to talk you through it.
How Does it Work?
Optimising for search intent is all about figuring out what searchers want to achieve from their search query. Then, you have to ensure that your site provides the best information or answers for them. Once you have your basic keyword idea (for example, “India holidays”), you can seek related keywords that a user may be searching for as well.
You can stick to conventional methods like looking at the search volume and keyword difficulty to help you decide on the best options. Ideally, you would discover a keyword with the largest volume and lowest difficulty, but something with a difficulty between 60-80% is going to be a medium level of difficulty to rank for.
Long-Tail Keywords
Most importantly, you should aim to uncover variations and long-tail keywords that are connected to your basic phrase (for instance, “cheapest time for India holidays”). These are going to be much easier to rank for than the original short-tail keyword.
A couple of ways you can start finding these is by looking in Google’s ‘related searches’ section or by utilizing tools such as SEMrush to aid your research. Then, you can begin creating a content plan around your chosen keywords, before organising your site structure, linking within your site and optimising your pages accordingly.
Answering the Searchers’ Questions
Since people often search using questions (for example, “Which month is best for a holiday to India?”), be sure to investigate these as well and tailor your content to provide the answers to them. This helps your text match their search intent.
Plus, optimising your content so that it answers the searchers’ questions in the best form possible (for instance, by using a clear and informative blog post) means that your page is more likely to rank as a featured snippet in the SERPs. This puts an extract of your content at the top of the SERPs, placing you above the highest-ranking sites.
Search Trends
Another tip is to keep an eye on social media and what is trending in the news, to see what people are talking about. If you can create an enlightening article that is relevant to what travellers are currently interested in, then you have a better chance of ranking highly.
In this way, keyword research is crucial to the success of your travel website, and therefore has a significant impact on your business, too. Overall though, it’s important to remember that providing clear, concise, and of course, relevant content should always be the priority in your strategy.
To find more helpful SEO insights, read our other posts on the It Works Media blog, or get in touch to discuss how we can help improve your site.