- Travel site with online store function
- Tourist Information Site
- Recommendations for optimizing all types of travel sites
- Summary
Before you start promoting a travel site using SEO tools and contextual advertising, you need to understand that the choice of methods will depend on the type of resource, seasonality and eventfulness.
Travel site with online store function
These are huge sites with several thousand (or even tens of thousands) pages with the function of selling tourist services. These include: websites of travel agencies and tour operators, for example 1001tur.ru, hott.ru, mgp.ru, travelata.ru, tui, ru, coral.ru, anextour.ru and many others (See below Fig. 1), booking systems for hotels (ostrovok.ru, booking.com) and air tickets (aviasales.ru, momondo.ru).
The main competitors of these types of sites in search engines are the largest aggregators of tours, hotels and tickets, such as Travel.ru, Yandex. Travel, tury.ru.
On the websites of online travel stores, each direction should be described in detail: countries, resorts, hotels, routes, tour programs, etc. There are convenient navigation and a search form for tours based on a variety of criteria.
Features of promotion of travel online stores
This type of site is characterized by a lack of seasonality - the activity of tourists is present throughout the year. Extremely high competition in the niche (the main competitors are tour aggregators) requires huge and continuous budget infusions for traditional marketing activities on the Internet (SEO and contextual advertising) - from half a million rubles a month. This turns promotion into a fierce battle of budgets.
In order for the websites of agencies and travel booking systems to get a chance to become the leaders of search engines or show a contextual ad in search, without spending all the money on it, you need the following:
- revise the list of promoted keywords (remove super-expensive general queries like "tour to italy" and expand the core due to the list of cheap, yet accurate conversion phrases, such as "sightseeing tours to italy", "tours to italy in November 2016", etc..d.);
- use additional promotion channels that are less occupied by competitors, namely content marketing. An effective, well-designed campaign will reduce the cost of a click by 10-50 times, gaining a wide reach of the target audience, numbering hundreds of thousands of interested users.
Tourist Information Site
A site of this type can be a multi-page resource about tourism in various directions (tonkosti.ru, tripster.ru, tophotels.ru, tonkosti.ru, tourister.ru, votpusk.ru and similar) or a small site dedicated to a particular country, resort, type rest, hotel.
In terms of functionality and business model, two types of niche sites can be distinguished: with a booking function (excursions in the city, sale of hotel rooms, for example mos-holidays.ru, rekaonline.ru, velesclub.ru, caphotel.ru) (See below fig. 2) and purely informational nature (for example travel.ru, tourister.ru, torome.ru, peterburg.ru) (see below fig. 3).
Information sites are monetized through affiliate programs (links to booking sites) or advertising.
Features of the promotion of information travel sites
The main bets should be placed on the quality of content and design. This is necessary to bypass those players whose sites are a creation of the early 2000s. Hooking a tourist at first sight is your goal, and it can be achieved through modern techniques in web design. Tourism is a social sphere, and a beautiful and convenient travel site will be shared, recommended to friends, which will give an additional influx of free traffic.
For promotion in search engines, it is necessary to select 3-5 broad in meaning queries for the main page, for example "hotel in the center of Moscow", "hotel 3 stars Moscow", "hotel outside the city for family vacations" and so on in the same vein. Internal pages are optimized exclusively for targeted queries that correspond to their content ("walking route of one day St. Petersburg", etc.).
Recommendations for optimizing all types of travel sites
Consider seasonality
There are high dates for each direction, and this is important to consider when placing contextual advertising and conducting an SEO campaign. For example, in the summer you can reduce the budgets for the promotion of queries that are popular in the winter (skiing, Caribbean beaches, Christmas trips to Europe, etc.). And by the New Year season (two to three months before the rush demand), on the contrary, actively start promoting them, increasing the effect through additional advertising channels (promotions in social networks, publications in urban communities, videos on YouTube channels about leisure and travel) …
Give full information on the site
It is important that the site answers questions that customers may have (for example, how long the flight takes, how a visa is issued, possible dress code in the country and rules of conduct, interesting places to visit, etc.). All this needs to be covered in the content of the relevant sections and pages of the site.
Set the task to copywriters correctly
If you want the texts on the site to “sell” your product, you need to give copywriters more than just a list of keywords. Describe the plan, structure of the text, points to be disclosed, give links to sources of information. Check the finished text so that it doesn't turn out that the famous German Neuschwanstein Castle suddenly moved to Slovakia. Yes, unfortunately, logical errors in the description are not uncommon.
Use the specifics and magic of numbers in the Title meta tag
This page HTML-code tag is responsible for the phrase that is displayed in the page tab in the browser and in the site description in the search results. Very often it is simply a set of keywords - "Last minute tours to Tunisia, vacation in Tunisia at last minute prices." This is a bug due to which the number of visits to the site is reduced. The text in the Title should contain a coherent sentence that is understandable and encouraging to view the content. For example, as in the screenshot below (see below fig. 4). The numbers in the ad (for example, the price) give about a 30% increase in clicks.
Save company resources
Website search engine optimization is often outsourced, which is quite difficult to control. If you have your own marketing department (or just a full-time marketer), they may well cope with SEO and contextual advertising on their own through software solutions. For corporate needs, you can use the PromoPult online marketing multiservice. Automating the setup of advertising campaigns allows even a layman to start a promotion from scratch in a couple of hours. In your hands and under your strict control remain: SEO, context, PR, reputation management, analytics of advertising campaigns and, undoubtedly, the expense of every ruble from the budget.
Summary
It is impossible to imagine a business in tourism without inconceivable expenses, including on marketing. But money can be spent in different ways: investing a million, and returning two, or generally just a donut hole. Modern methods of online promotion allow you to more than beat off every invested cent. Apply the time-tested tools correctly, improve your product site, and the result will not disappoint you.
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