10+ Tips for Improving SEO for Travel Websites

Improving your travel website’s search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most useful methods to market yourself as an influencer. When you improve your website’s SEO, you increase your exposure on the internet by appearing on the first page of people’s search results.

If you are new to optimizing your website or blogging in general, this article will teach you what steps you can take to rank higher on search engines. Here are some of the tips you can use to improve your travel website’s SEO:

1. Install and Use Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a very useful tracking tool for your website. In general, it gives you data on how much traffic your website has in real-time. This data is important for you to understand your audience better and help you strategize how you approach content creation.

Google Analytics also has some sections that give you more detailed information about your website. The Acquisition tab tells the nature of traffic to your website, whether they come from google search, referral links, or social media.

The Behavior tab will give you information about which page receives the most traffic. You can use this data to decide which type of content to recreate based on how much they regain traction.

Installing Google Analytics is relatively easy and only takes a few minutes. It is a hassle-free tool since it will collect the data automatically once you integrate the trackers to your website. Google Analytics is also free-to-use, which is one more reason why I recommend using it.

2. Use Fast, Reliable, and Secure Hosting Platform

The hosting platform you choose also plays a great deal in improving your SEO. There are several aspects to consider when choosing an SEO-friendly hosting provider.

The first thing to keep in mind is to put the users’ experience as the top priority. How fast your visitors can load your website will dictate their experience, and a slow-loading website will increase its bounce rate. Make sure that your hosting provider can give you the best uptime possible by providing fast servers.

The server’s uptime is a crucial factor to consider. I think we can agree that a website that often returns your request with a time-out page or no result is less preferable. Do some research about the hosting’s servers’ reliability and how fast they can help you if any trouble happens to your website. Google will definitely take notice as well and reduce your chances of landing the coveted first positions on SERPs.

Another thing to remember is to find out if the hosting provider has any SEO tool available. A lot of well-known web hosting providers offer the tool that will help you analyze your website’s structure or even submit it to the search engine on your behalf.

3. Install Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is one of the most well-known SEO plugins for WordPress websites. It is a free-to-use tool that will give you information on how your article will perform in terms of search engine optimization.

Yoast SEO has an intuitive interface that is integrated with your WordPress blog editor. It will tell you if you have used the right amount of keywords on your blog post. It will also help you easily add other important details, including meta descriptions, image alt texts, and additional links to internal and external resources.

I highly recommend you use this tool to check your blog posts’ SEO quality and make sure that they are performing optimally on the search engines.

4. Use Keywords Naturally

Keywords are the core of your effort to improve your website’s SEO. As mentioned before, some tools will help you know if you have used the right amount of keywords on your article. But another important thing to know is that you have to use them naturally.

The ability to know how to include keywords in your article without making it sound robotic or forced is the key to make reader-friendly content. Include your primary keyword on your title, and the secondary keywords should follow in the rest of the content’s body.

Keep in mind that you should not force too many keywords into your article since search engines can penalize your website for it.

5. Publish More Content

Publishing new content on your website regularly can help you rank higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs). This is because Google and other search engines will scan or crawl your website from time to time, and if they find new content, it will help your rankings, as active websites are deemed better.

By publishing a minimum of one relevant content piece per week, you improve your rankings on SERPs and attract more visitors naturally. People will be more likely to visit your website if they know that it provides them with valuable information.

6. Publish Quality Content

Besides focusing on increasing the quantity of content you publish weekly, you should also consider how they are relevant to your target audience. As a travel website, you have tons of competitors, meaning that you have to be more creative and unique in some ways.

Besides your trip experience, including other useful information such as cost breakdown, hidden gems, and other tips and tricks into your article can be good. Remember that most people read travel articles to know more about the place they will or want to visit, including all the technical details.

Take your time to write valuable and engaging content rather than pushing plain articles that only work as keyword-vessels.

7. Optimize Images for SEO

High-quality photos of beautiful destinations are almost a staple for travel websites. They serve as the visual illustration that enhances your audiences’ experience of reading your posts. Pictures can also alter how your article looks by separating the sections and making them look less dull.

But images have much more use than just decoration purposes. Adding alt descriptions and proper titles to your images can help improve your website’s SEO.

Also, pay attention to your images’ size and format. Pictures with large sizes will make your page load slower, which will affect your site’s ranking negatively. If you are unsure what to do with your images, you can use image optimization plugins available to download.

8. Increase Domain Authority

Domain authority is one of the search engine’s most important ranking factors. Think of it as a search engine’s way to determine your website’s reputation as an information provider. Domain authority is based on how well you can provide the best quality content for a specific subject, in this case, travel.

The more you create content that your target audience wants to see, the more likely it is that they will come back and trust your site. Other websites that want to talk about the same subject might also use your articles as a source and link back to your website.

Another way to increase your website’s domain authority is by opening yourself to guest posts. By allowing visitors or a specific group of people to contribute to your website’s content, you will have more content ideas and offer different perspectives for a certain topic.

9. Target Featured Snippets

Featured snippets are considered as the position zero on a SERP. When you look something up using a question, usually you will be given the most probable answer as the top-most result.

Your content can get the chance to be picked as the featured snippet once it has ranked high enough for a certain keyword. The way Google picks this snippet is by scanning for websites that offer a clear and concise way to answer a certain question.

To help Google understand your content better, use headers that directly refer to a question and include the immediate answer to that question in the body. The featured snippet is a critical position in SERPs since it is the result that has the highest chance to get clicks and gain the most traffic.

10. Leverage Old Content

If you ever noticed that your content that discusses a time-sensitive topic gains a lot of traction, you might be able to reuse it. Updating old content that performs well is a common practice to improve websites’ SEO.

Take a look back at your old blog post and try to make some updates on it. Try to improve its keyword use or add more paragraphs to explain something that you think is important. Creating a new post that revolves around this topic might also prove to be useful.

Just keep in mind that while updating your old posts, you can update anything except the URL because Google will have to recrawl and rerank the webpage all over again.

11. Improve Your Page Speed

Many people often overlook page loading time, but it affects your web page’s bounce rate, as mentioned in this article’s earlier section. There are several ways to improve your page load speed.

Several WordPress plugins, including W3 Total Cache and Autoptimize, can help your page to load faster. On the other hand, some plugins can also slow down your website performance. Therefore, disabling some non-essential plugins can be a good idea.

Conclusion

Improving your travel website’s SEO is one of the most important steps to further market yourself as an influencer. The better your SEO performance is, the more likely you are to attract visitors to your website.

This article has discussed several essential steps to improve your travel website’s SEO; they include:

• Install and use Google Analytics.
• Use a fast, reliable, and secure hosting platform.
• Install Yoast SEO.
• Use keywords naturally.
• Publish more content.
• Publish quality content.
• Optimize images for SEO.
• Increase domain authority.
• Target featured snippets.
• Leverage old content.
• Improve your page speed.

Now that you know the importance of SEO and how to improve it, try implementing them to your travel website content and start growing your audience.

Juliet is an Editor at PRable.org, all in one content marketing agency. She loves creating articles about technology, innovative product reviews, and technical writing to help scale up digital growth. She is a writer by day and a frustrated singer by night