Optimizing the online presence of your travel agency pits you against national brands and long-established travel agencies. These companies hold the most desirable high-ranking spots on the search engine results page (SERP). To topple them from their position, you need a solid and effective SEO strategy and an intimate understanding of navigating the digital landscape. This isn’t easy.
Perfecting your digital marketing strategy requires expertise that ensures you focus on the right things to enhance your online presence. But how do you gain that expertise? You work with a digital marketing company that specializes in tourism.
Clear Sky Tourism understands the tactics contributing to a travel agency’s online presence and can help improve your visibility. Even if you have an in-house team, if you’re not seeing the online traffic you expect, they’re not using the right strategy to create a significant presence.
Clear Sky Tourism works on improving tourism business rankings daily, with a clear understanding of the changing algorithms and trends that impact the volatile digital landscape. We can help your travel agency stand up to the big brands with big budgets using proven strategies that improve your online presence.
Here we explain how Clear Sky Tourism can help you navigate the intimidating digital landscape and optimize your travel agency’s online presence.
Understanding Customer Search Behavior
Although no one knows more about the tours you book than you, being too close to your travel packages can hinder your ability to sell them properly. Your focus needs to be the type of traveler who will book your travel products, but understanding how they search for travel products might not be on your radar. Knowing where travelers search for your specific travel products is essential to optimizing your online presence. It determines what channels make the most sense to invest your digital advertising budget, find the ideal traveler, and see the highest ROI for your efforts.
Clear Sky identifies your target audience, outlines their pain points, and creates a strategy based on their needs, habits, and search methods. By determining the hows, whens, and wheres of the customer booking process, we identify your customers so we can focus your presence based on mobile or desktop searching, the reason your customers travel, and how you make it easier for them to book reservations whether they travel for business or pleasure.
Once we establish this information, we can develop a digital strategy to expand your reach and attract more travelers, so you’ll see results faster.
Fixing SEO Technical Errors
Online presence is all about SEO. Search engine optimization applies keywords commonly used to search travel services and find travel agencies. However, Clear Sky has a team of SEO experts who understand that SEO isn’t just about keywords. It also involves a lot of technical background tactics that ensure your website is optimized. As a result, search engines can quickly establish who you are and whether you are the best travel agency to meet the need of their users.
Clear Sky runs a site audit to determine if your site has common technical issues undermining your SEO efforts. Using diagnostic tools, we find and correct technical problems that interfere with search engines and that eventually lead to penalties that suppress your rankings.
Some common issues include:
- Slow-loading web pages
- Duplicate content
- Poor navigation
- Pages not optimized for mobile viewing
- Broken or questionable links
- Plagiarized content
We can correct those issues while introducing schema markup to send signals to search engines that confirm your website is worthy of ranking. As a result, your SEO efforts are redeemed, more of your web pages are indexed by Google, and you can see a boost in website traffic.
Improving On-Page Optimization
On-page optimization ensures that each page of your website is leveraging SEO effectively. It makes it easier for search engines to analyze your website and determine if your content is suitable for queries. Clear Sky improves the structure of your website and creates engaging, optimized content that search engines love to rank. Some of the ways we enhance on-page optimization includes:
- Rewriting and providing high-quality content introducing keywords naturally to attract search engines
- Removing poorly edited, grammatically incorrect content
- Removing keyword stuffing
- Linking to pages throughout your website to help people intuitively find additional information when they need it
- Adding optimized title tags and subheadings, images/videos, meta descriptions, and links
Because search engines put high-quality, original content above all else when ranking websites, on-page optimization helps improve your ranking.
Verifying and Claiming Your Google Business Profile
Google Business Profiles (GBP) is a free marketing tool crucial to improving the online presence of local businesses. As a travel agency, your GBP is the focal point of your online presence, allowing search engines to find you for local searches.
We first claim and verify your GBP and then complete the information, including:
- Providing an accurate NAP (business name, address, and phone number) and ensuring it is consistent with your website and other online channels, such as social media
- An overview of your services and travel packages
- Your location on the Google map so people can find you
- The option to schedule an appointment with an agent
- Images and videos of happy clients enjoying their vacation
- Reviews and ratings of your service
- A completed question-and-answer section to address FAQs
A complete GBP helps create more online citations, as online directories use Google to source and collect your information. Your profile ensures that all citations have the most up-to-date and consistent information so search engines confirm that you are legitimate and local. This both improves your ranking and expands your online presence.
Also, Google increases the rankings of travel agencies that have a lot of positive and current reviews. Google also allows customers to post questions and answer them, which could pose a risk if the information provided is inaccurate. By addressing every detail of information on your profile, everything is correct, and clients won’t be disappointed or misled.
Performing a Competitive Audit
Competitive audits of the top-ranking travel agencies appearing in the SERPs allow you to improve your efforts based on what these brands are getting right and where they are failing. Analyzing competitor websites for target keywords will enable you to leverage the exact ranking keywords and look for opportunities to generate better content.
We also use tools to search websites and scan their pages to understand:
- How many pages are indexed
- What type of websites are linking to their pages,
- How well the pages load
- If pages are mobile-friendly
- The type of navigation they use
- Landing pages
- Calls to action and more
You can then use similar strategies to help improve your position and maybe even take their place.
Increasing Local Business Listings and Citations
Your optimized GBP will go a long way in increasing online citations. Citations are crucial, as the more citations you have, the more consistent your NAP, and the more industry and local directories that list you, the more legitimate your travel agency appears to search engines. We ensure that a) you appear on as many legitimate, trustworthy local and industry-related directories as possible and b) that your NAP is consistent across every citation to ensure Google recognizes your business as a local travel agency. As a result, you build trust and improve your online presence.
Creating Online Partners
Links from local sites and other businesses in the travel and hospitality industry help improve SEO. Known as backlinks, or off-page SEO, when reputable websites link to yours, it shows search engines you are a trusted travel authority. While it can be challenging to approach companies to share your links, we can help develop a strategy to create logical partnerships.
It can be as simple as links from directories, but we can also find opportunities for you to appear as a guest blogger, live stream from partner social media channels, or come up with online cross-promotions. Link building improves SEO and can lead to long-lasting partnerships to raise awareness in your community or the tourism and hospitality industry.
Online Reputation Management
Online reviews play a critical role in rankings. Google prefers travel agencies that have five-star ratings and recent, positive reviews. This is because no one travels today without reading online reviews. Firsthand experience is the most trusted source, providing authentic customer accounts. Finding a travel agent is the same, with prospects wanting to understand what sets you apart and why they can trust you.
However, online reviews are tricky. First, it can be hard to get happy customers to post reviews, and second, you can also encounter negative reviews from fickle customers. With online reputation management, Clear Sky ensures you have an ongoing thread of positive reviews and ratings while managing less satisfied customers immediately. We solicit reviews using automated texts or emails, making it easy for satisfied customers to either click a link to provide a review or testimonial or simply select stars to rank you right in their text feed or email.
Monitoring your reviews and triggering notices telling you when reviews are posted ensures you quickly thank people for their comments and, more importantly, offer apologies and solutions for dissatisfied customers. This helps establish trust and show customers you are responsive.
Clear Sky Tourism uses proven strategies and leverages the latest trends to optimize your online presence.
Stand out in the competitive online space and maximize your travel agency’s visibility and engagement with the help of Clear Sky Tourism.