While bookings may be low for the time being, now is an excellent opportunity to optimize your site for improved rankings in search engines. Making improvements now can help you reach a wider audience and set yourself up for success in the future. Staying active online is still essential, and a content strategy optimized for search will help you adapt to the “new normal”.
We’ve compiled the 5 most important tips from Searchmetrics’ presentation to our affiliated partners to help you improve rankings and increase bookings when travel picks up:
1. Always deliver the right content to your audience
From searching to booking, travelers go through different steps in their journeys to book the best experience possible. According to Think with Google, there are 4 steps in a customer journey:
- Dreaming Moments
- Planning Moments
- Booking Moments
- Experiencing Moments
Look for search terms that most correlate to your product. For travel experiences, the planning phase is where we see an opportunity to engage with your potential customers.
2. Don’t forget images
Google Images search is the most used search engine after web search. For travel, images can be particularly inspiring and engaging for your audience.
When creating imagery content, do the following to optimize your images:
- Write descriptive copy for URLs, alt text, and captions.
- Compress and cache images to optimize for page speed.
- Consider alternatives to JPEG and faster image formats such as WebP.
- Use a content delivery network.
3. Make sure your content is optimized for your customer’s search intention
To match your customer’s search intention, make sure you register your business with Google My Business. This will enable you to land in the local pack and listings of Google.
It is important that your address and contact details are up-to-date on your website, as these will be pulled on Google listings automatically.
4. Use a FAQ mark-up to appear at the top of the rankings
To take up as much space on the search engine results page (SERP), use an FAQ Mark-Up. This will enable your business to be listed at the top of the rankings under sections like “People also ask.”.
5. Check the UX playbook for travel by Google
The UX Playbook for travel written by Google has set up a list of best practices. We’ve listed their recommendations for the booking phase, which should help you convert customers once they’ve finished planning. Consider the following: :
- Show the end price through the entire process.
- Guarantee security (use different security signals which will make the customer feel secure and comfortable while booking).
- Show the progress of the entire booking phase at the top of the page.
- Enable easy payment via mobile phone. Consider a payment API.
- Create a sense of urgency to increase conversion rate (Example: 10 users are looking at this offer).
For more information and to see the full presentation, check out the recording here and presentation here.