There’s lots of insightful stuff in Epiphany’s report into the travel sector so we’ll just dwell a while on three conclusions from the study.
While these might be obvious to some seasoned search engine marketers they could help others make some tweaks with real benefit.
Starting with one of the more obvious – travel companies aren’t taking advantage of images and videos in search. That’s the press release line and the following Epiphany chart paints the picture.
Recent posts on Tnooz have also illustrated the importance of rich visuals in driving traffic and generating travel bookings.
Anyway, with the exception of a few companies, namely TripAdvisor and Monarch, the majority of online travel companies are performing poorly when it comes to incorporating images and video as part of the search engine strategy. Enough said.
The second take away is around organic search visibility with data in the report drawn from Searchmetrics.
In the age of the long tail, travel companies know relevant keywords are, well, key so the visibility rank and number of organic keywords used is interesting e.g TripAdvisor ranks first with almost 730,000 but TravelSupermarket is 3rd with almost 76,000.
As Epiphany concludes it’s difficult to compare companies with different activities or a wide product offering with other more niche suppliers but it’s also good to observe that thousands more keywords doesn’t mean higher visibility.
Some of the smaller players are achieving a good ranking through various techniques such as keywords with high volumes and generally effective SEO.
The study goes on to show the spread of organic keywords from page one to 10 and how by moving keywords up a few positions travel companies could drive visibility and more traffic.
EasyJet, for example, has 19% of its keywords on page one and 20% on page two while Skyscanner at 53% has the highest percentage of keywords on page one, probably, says Epiphany, because of a targeted SEO campaign around content creation and links.
The final take away is on social media visibility and while the travel sector is making a lot of noise it doesn’t seem to be translating when it comes to rankings for social visibility.
Epiphany concludes social sharing metrics are not yet impacting organic rankings but search and social should not be kept apart as consumers are increasingly influenced when making travel decisions by what others are saying.
For the following chart, Searchmetrics social visibility score has been used to show the websites’ presence in key social networks.
For overall visibility, TripAdvisor and lastminute take the top two spots with the UK’s big two operators as well as the likes of  booking.com and Expedia in the top 10.
Also, noteworthy is that two thirds of the top 30 most visible sites are online only players.
The full Epiphany Travel Sector 2012 report can be downloaded here.
NB: Super hero image via Shutterstock
Related posts:
About Linda Fox
In my experience (consulting to online travel businesses) the number one thing holding back their search rankings tends to be the quality of the code in their website. So many sites are badly put together, with code that is not semantic or well formed, using HTML elements as they were not intended etc and this can impact them more than they likely think. Fixing issues like this can see very quick improvements on search visibility and they are the kind of thing you fix once on each template and it rolls out across the site.
Also, you’d be surprised how many of these ‘top travel websites’ have duplicate content issues that they’re not aware of… Many of these caused by poor quality code in their UI layer…
I suppose what I’m saying is, before you invest tens of thousands of $/ÂŁ in SEO services, just get the basics right first… The ROI from getting your site ‘fit for search’ can be huge.
Well written Linda- Thanks for quoting Henry’s article again!
Even now, the travel agency industry has its pants down as far as images and video are concerned. The norm is no images, or small postage stamp sized; or at best 300×200 sized images accompanying descriptions of online inventory.
In the websites we’ve been building for clients, we’ve noticed that they’ve been getting TONS of traffic from image search in the engines, because we’ve been insisting those agencies accompany their online inventory with big beautiful photos and other media.
It’s literally night and day.
This situation has been largely the fault of the larger travel consortiums, mainly due to lack of technological smarts and/or inertia in their business models. Why? Because they are one of the primary distributors of travel products online.
@ Ericson
I could not agree more. Most in the industry are neglecting the power of visual content on many levels.
…not only do great quality visuals have the power to engage consumers with the site, those some visuals can be leveraged to drive traffic. Visual content has many stories to tell.
@ Linda -
Can you add more context re: “EasyJet, for example, has 19% of its keywords on page one and 20% on page two while Skyscanner at 53% has the highest percentage of keywords on page one…”?
What keywords are included in these percentages? Branded search terms? Some other type?
Thanks – enjoyed this article.
Thanks Pete,
nothing on specific terms provided but I’ll ask Epiphany to comment
Hi Pete / Linda,
The way the Searchmetrics SERP Spread works is that it includes any keyword that you rank for on page 1,2,3 etc, that receives some level of search volume. Those on page 2 onwards may well include brand keywords, but it’s more likely to be non-brand because (you’d hope) these companies are #1 for all of their brand terms already!
Having just checked Easyjet for example, they currently rank #13 for ‘cheap flights’, #11 for ‘cheap holidays’ and other page 2 positions for a whole host of hugely searched for keywords. Having a SEO strategy to shift keyword like that up just a few positions (onto page 1) will see a significant increase in visitors and sales for them relative to the effort & cost it’d likely need.
Andy