Skyrocket Your Travel Business with Marketing, SEO, and AI: Become the First Choice for Travelers Nationwide

How do you implement a travel SEO and AI-Engine Optimization (AEO) marketing strategy for your online travel agency (OTA) or travel company that actually works?

Green Flag Digital was founded on the success of catapulting a travel booking site from ~15K monthly visitors to over 100K over 4 years (more than doubling year-over-year), and keeping up with headwinds that have made big SEO gains increasingly tough to replicate.

Today, we can still command a slice of the market for up-and-coming travel and booking platform companies with fresh content that ranks in SEO and AEO (and digital PR, too).  Even the content that we don’t write, but just refresh, nets 30-125% SEO improvements for travel agencies. 

This isn’t the norm in an environment where over 400 OTAs are vying for eyeballs.

Our approach helps booking companies sail upstream against the efforts of huge OTAs (Expedia, Priceline, Kayak), which are spending millions on television and online marketing ads, controlling 95% of the OTA market.

How?

It’s true that the travel industry is awash with competition at a time when ontologies of content marketing are evolving fastest. Yet those who can market their travel company properly, and bring in new customers at a reasonable acquisition rate, stand to make huge profits.

If you’re looking for a done-for-you solution, get in touch with us and make faster progress toward compounding gains.

However, you can also do a lot of it on your own. Here’s your roadmap.

First Things First: Strategy for Travel SEO

Strategy sets the tone for a marketing program. For CEOs and VPs, this means setting parameters around budget and, therefore, expected KPIs, as well as areas that stand to benefit most from budget and attention. 

Here are our top 4 foundational keystones to help you answer the following questions:

1. How much of my budget should go to a content and SEO program at all?
2. How does AEO change how I do SEO?
3. How will I expand other areas of SEO/AEO as I progress?
4. How do I capture the complete customer journey?

#1 Your Tools and Budget Are Your Secret Sauce

First, Budget for SEO Among Marketing Channels

First, analyze your marketing channels. Which are performing best right now?

For CEOs looking to hire in skill areas, look into the best ways to create a lean team.

Then get clear on the value of your SEO upfront, and if it’s not a top 3 priority compared to your other opportunities, make sure you’re allocating the budget accordingly. Said simply, you should put 80-90% of our budget into your top 3 highest alpha-generating focus areas, but don’t ignore secondary and tertiary areas completely. 

For example, some tour operators and flight scanners will cast wide nets, capitalizing on price volatility and booking urgency. Others rely on premium experiences and top-notch customer service, opting not for search volume, but relying on targeted ads and a small set of luxury-connoted keywords. 

See our SEO budgets post for more on how this applies to marketing channels. 

Second, Consider All of SEO’s Parts

Even within “SEO for Travel Agencies,” leaders aren’t managing a single entity. They should budget unevenly, based on business model and niche.  

Digital Strategy	Small Travel Co. ROI (12 mo)	Medium Travel Co. ROI (12 mo)	Large Travel Co. ROI (12 mo)	Notes
SEO & Content (evergreen + guides)	1.5-3.0x	2.0-4.0x	3.0-6.0x	Compounds over time; 6-12 mo ramp
Digital PR & Link Building	1.0-2.5x	1.5-3.5x	2.5-5.0x	Supports SEO + brand demand
Paid Search (non-brand, BOFU)	1.2-2.0x	1.5-2.5x	2.0-3.0x	Constrained by CPCs & inventory
Paid Social – Prospecting	0.8-1.5x	1.0-2.0x	1.2-2.2x	Works best with strong creative/UGC
Paid Social – Retargeting	3.0-6.0x	4.0-8.0x	5.0-10.0x	Scales with site traffic volume
Email/CRM & Marketing Automation	3.0-8.0x	4.0-10.0x	5.0-12.0x	Lifecycle + repeat purchase leverage
CRO & Landing Page Optimization	3.0-10.0x	5.0-15.0x	8.0-20.0x	ROI per $ of testing/implementation
Partnerships / Affiliates / OTAs	1.5-3.0x	2.0-4.0x	2.5-5.0x	Pay-per-performance, lower risk
Influencer Collaborations (tracked)	0.8-1.8x	1.0-2.2x	1.2-2.5x	High variance by creator fit
Programmatic / Display / YouTube Awareness	0.6-1.2x	0.8-1.5x	1.0-2.0x	Upper-funnel assist; attribution sensitive

Quick takeaways

• Small travel companies: lean on SEO/Content + BOFU search + retargeting + email, sprinkle Digital PR for authority.
• Medium: layer in more Digital PR and prospecting social as SEO foundations mature.
• Large: still drive non-brand search + SEO, but you can afford brand building (programmatic/YouTube) and extract outsized ROI from CRO due to scale.

Channel Mix Scenarios

Channel	Small Co. %	Medium Co. %	Large Co. %
SEO & Content	35	30	25
Digital PR	10	15	15
Paid Search (non-brand)	25	25	25
Paid Social – Prospecting	5	8	10
Paid Social – Retargeting	10	8	10
Email/CRM	5	5	3
CRO & Landing Pages	5	5	7
Partnerships/Affiliates	3	3	3
Influencer	1	1	1
Programmatic/Display	1	0	1

Assumptions (so we’re debating the same thing)

• Objective: maximize 12-month blended ROI while building durable demand (not just short-term bookings).
• Margins: healthy gross margins (30–60%) typical of tours/experiences; OTAs often lower.
• Attribution: last-click under-credits upper-funnel; we optimize to incremental revenue with holdouts/geo-splits.
• Gating factors: list size caps, Email/CRM; site traffic caps, Retargeting; content ops cap, SEO velocity; inventory/capacity caps, spend in peak season.

You’ll have to choose where to spend your energy: there’s technical SEO, keyword optimization, content creation, backlink generation, conversion optimization, and more.

For now, start by gaining clarity on the sub-areas of SEO within the travel industry. As you did with the broader marketing landscape, analyze your position in the market and in each specific area.

You’ll need many foundational pieces of the SEO puzzle before you see big results in saturated areas.

It’s the order in which you place these foundational stones that accelerates your wins.

How do you know you couldn’t excel quicker, or more significantly, in other areas left untried? When should you fortify winning keywords with backlink campaigns versus doubling down on new keywords?

Google did a study exactly on this and found:

“The modern customer journey is complex. So it’s important to focus on the key moments that can help inspire people to buy your product or service. We analyzed millions of consumer interactions through Google Analytics to show how different marketing channels affect online purchase decisions. What are the most important moments along the journey for your customers?”

Your biggest asset is knowing when and how you’ll reinforce your fledgling successes with other approaches, spreading out your budget without losing momentum.

#2 Forget Travel SEO, What About AEO?

AI has changed search. 

Travelers used to search for answers and followed links to get them.

Now, they search for the answer. It’s presented in the results, with no need to click. 

Well, of course. But what does that mean? Being the top listing no longer guarantees clicks, meaning that ranking is less important than it ever was. In fact, top-ranked sites are pushed lower than ever before, buried below the fold, under AI summaries and ads. 

So, today, SEO rankings may help increase your impressions, but what about clicks? They’re way down, to the tune of around 35% (with travel companies reporting even more gruesome traffic death knells). 

Today, with impressions sky-high and clicks low, marketers don’t have the ability to raise one, knowing the other will follow. 

The bottom line: traditional KPIs are out.

Today, our best tips for clicks are:

• Think long-tail. You want to give context in your content so that AI overviews present your detail-rich answers.
• Reconsider buttons and calls to action for LLM model readers. Your lead magnets and booking links need re-engineering for AI models.
• Develop new measurement tools. Yesterday’s measurement frameworks aren’t working anymore.
• Focus on structured information. Metadata and schema are becoming higher priorities today.
• Opinions are valuable. Think of the kind of “valuable” content that prevailed in an early-internet world without commercialism and where human creators offered experiences, opinions, travel recaps, and reasons why they recommended things.

Independent operators can source talent to interview customers, talk with travelers, and recruit tourists who can write about their experiences in more detail, with real stories and opinions.

CEOs and VPs of marketing can prioritize agencies that lean into long-form content and real experiences, including quotes, interviews, and sponsoring travel experiences. These content anchors will improve high-value clicks and undermine the competition’s generic efforts and fact-based SEO articles.

#3 Build a Full Funnel for Your Travel Search Engine Optimization

Your strategy should value the entire life cycle of your visitor, not just the traffic-grabbing, high-dollar keywords that fuel their first travel searches and wow stakeholders. 

When booking travel, the journey is long and meandering, as visitors cross-check many sites at once, looking at pricing, quality, trust, efficiency, fun, and many other factors. 

The need for reliable guides at every step is key to turning those highly trafficked articles into trust and, ultimately, conversions. 

What this means for you is that you need to be there every step of the way with new content for the user. This applies at an overall digital marketing level, where you want to map different channels to different stages of the customer journey.

Here’s what to do:

• List the “moments” of the journey to your product or service. Moments might include travel inspiration, broad planning around times and destinations, curating options, specific logistics planning, price comparison, etc.
• Make these moments the backbone of your marketing content stages. No more “top,” “middle,” and “bottom” of the funnel.
• Build content for these tipping points, with calls to action at each step.

#4 Take Command of Travel SEO’s On-Site Factors

If your travel brand has been around for a good while, has received press, mentions, links, and decent traffic, then it’s likely you’ll want to put a lot of your focus on things you can do on your website for quick wins.

Almost every site has some low-hanging SEO fruit that can be picked for quick wins. A few examples:

• Take your top 5 organic search landing pages, find out what’s making them work, and add some core SEO improvements to make them even better
• Find keywords your top pages are almost ranking for (positions 11-20) and optimize for those additional keywords
• Add in better internal links throughout the site
• Take your competing pages and set them up so the most powerful and best-converting page is the focus
• Bring together thematically similar pages with “content hubs”
• Test page title tags based on what is working in your paid search campaigns
• Rewrite title tags to evoke emotion for better click-through-rates
• Optimize pages for answer snippets by including succinct questions and answers on pages
• Create bulleted and numbered lists to try to rank for position 0 in search results with answer boxes
• Find no longer working redirects and dead pages, and redirect them to new ones
• Optimize your XML sitemaps and robots.txt 
• Improve site loading pages on the most important pages

For those working independently, start with SEO “almost there” articles ranking #11-50. Optimize articles, adding updates, new images and charts, novel data, and fresh takes. 

For CEOs and marketing VPs with small teams, spend more time aiming to transform your content for the future of AEO, adding detail and more conversion-based description-focused pages and keywords. Build out hub and spoke articles that support one another and contribute to an experience-based and rich, descriptive body of work. De-emphasize impressions, instead working on depth and conversions.

#5 Add Link Building to Your Travel SEO

For one travel client, GFD’s digital linkbuilding campaigns scored 275+ links placed across 26 campaigns, averaging 10 links per campaign. In addition, the blog traffic grew from near zero to 5,000 visits a month in under a year. Links? That’s what made it happen.

For example, we put together this world map: Around the World in Perfect Weather for a client, and it was picked up by a software mapping company and a general interest men’s site, among others:

What are some examples of realistic link-building in the travel industry?

• Your CEO gets interviewed by the New York Times, Condé Nast Traveler, or some other huge outlet (this is the ultimate goal)
• A member from your team is interviewed on a podcast and gets linked to in the podcast notes
• You create an amazing data-driven infographic, and bloggers want to include it in one of their blog posts
• You create a travel calculator that gets shared and linked to
• You create the ultimate guide to a certain event, type of travel style, or country that becomes the definitive resource and is linked to
• You guest post for other websites, linking back to your own
• You reach out to sites with resource pages to include a link to your best resource
• Your company gets listed on your partners’ websites

There are hundreds of other ways to get links. 

The key thing is to focus on quality, and relevance, and ensure you’re getting enough of them. 

For CEOs, your own voice is a strong journalist-magnet. Prioritize being a destination for quotes about your industry. Build your personal brand.

For Marketing VPs, Consider managing a campaign to get your CEO interviews. But add digital PR and outreach to journalists, asking them to report on your findings. It builds SEO backlinks for all your content, but it also fortifies brand and is especially useful for challengers new to the market and taking on big players.

For independent operators, one-time investments that earn backlinks organically are easiest. Think about travel calculators, stats pages, and infographics.

Which leads us to the heart of link building: digital PR.

#6 Develop Links Via Travel Industry Digital PR

Digital PR and travel content are a match made in heaven.

In fact, the travel industry was one of the first to embrace the original version of content marketing and public relations.

You can generate your own ideas and produce your own content, or consider an outside team with experience creating linkable pieces and plenty of media connections. 

Here’s a brand new video showing some approaches for generating digital PR ideas in the travel industry:

In it, I cover:

• How Google News is the place to start
• What search terms to use to find campaign ideas
• Where recency search operator comes into play
• How to spot the travel brand in the news coverage
• Why bigger publications are easier to land on than small ones
• Intro to some frameworks that are popular.

#7 Plan for non-SEO Travel Content Marketing

Content marketing is a newer term, but the idea has been around forever. Perhaps more than any other industry, the travel industry has fully embraced content marketing earlier than anyone else.

Without repeating old stories, Michelin wanted to sell more tires, so they went around rating restaurants in France and creating Michelin guides. They distributed these guides to customers, who became familiar with their brand, and it all (eventually) resulted in more tire sales for Michelin. 

In other words, it worked.

The approach continues in the form of travel guides and brochures, which are standard content add-ons in the travel industry.

But there are other options if you get creative. When it comes to online content marketing for travel companies, here are some example types:

• High-quality blog posts on your company blog that aren’t attached to a keyword or SEO goal
• Guest posts on other travel blogs (hard to get but worth it)
• Infographics
• Videos
• Instructographics
• Interactive infographics
• Maps
• Visual data
• Product and service pages
• Long-form online travel guides
• Downloadable ebooks
• Email campaigns
• …and more

The hard part is to know where to invest your budget, when to do it, how to execute, how to analyze, and how to learn from your experience.

Ultimately, brand recognition, along with backlinks that buttress all other content’s SEO and AEO progress, pays off.

“Green Flag Digital did an amazing job catering each campaign to our audience and brand while still making the content interesting and attractive from a promotion standpoint.”

Campaigns like this landed the client links from top media including the New York Times

The goal of content marketing is to build your site’s visibility, traffic, and authority. It indirectly affects revenue, as content marketing generally focuses on the top-of-funnel and middle-of-funnel visitors, with a small portion focused on bottom-of-funnel visitors before they are handed off to your sales or customer service team.

Even when we don’t touch the blog, traffic tends to increase about 10% with consistent digital PR campaign work across 6 months. At a conversion rate of 2.0% and a lifetime customer value of around $15,000, that’s an increase of $1.5M in additional lifetime revenue. It really touches all aspects of content.

Joe Robison, Green Flag Digital

How does content marketing relate to other forms of marketing? Content marketing has a lot of overlap with search marketing, email marketing, and paid marketing, and they synergistically work together. They are all a part of your travel digital marketing strategy, which is then part of your overall travel marketing strategy. 

#8 Fold in Specific Travel SEO Strategies Related to Your Niche

There’s no broad “tourism marketing” or “tourism agency SEO” that speaks to all agencies any more than all women’s clothing companies speak to all women. Let’s break down what you need to amend in your strategy, whether you’re a tour operator or an agency.

Tips Specific to Travel Tour Companies

We’ve spoken broadly about travel marketing, but what are some aspects that are more important for travel tour operators?

You Own the Client End Relationship 

Compared to travel agents, travel aggregator websites, booking engines, etc, the amount of contact and information you have on a client is gold. You have their email address, phone number, preferences, and in-person conversations that you can use for future marketing and retention efforts.

As a tour company, you can better understand and anticipate your customers’ wants and desires than other travel businesses. Use this to your advantage.

Tour Operators Have Deep Knowledge of Destinations 

As the tour operator – whether you’re offering daily walking tours of the Coliseum in Rome, multi-week Safaris in Africa, or luxury trips to the World Cup every four years – you have deep knowledge of the destination.

You know more than Wikipedia about your trip. More than The New York Times. More than travel bloggers.

This is your number one advantage when it comes to content marketing, SEO, and the trust that visitors will place in you. If you don’t transfer the knowledge in your head and internal documents to your public website, you’re missing a huge opportunity.

Tips About Travel SEO for Travel Agencies

From what I’ve read online, travel agents have faced a ton of competition since the rise of OTAs and the internet in general. What was once the best way to book trips is now just one of many choices. That being said, travel agents still send a significant number of travelers to destinations around the world, and they’ll be around for a while.

To be completely honest, I wouldn’t bill myself as an expert in travel agency marketing, but from what I know from general travel and tour marketing, there are a few tips I think will help travel agents.

Focus on Depth, Not Breadth

Speaking from the perspective of organic search, and new clients finding you online, it’s very unlikely that small travel agencies will be able to compete with the big boys.

It’ll be a long road for you to ever earn organic traffic for “tours to Italy” – it’s just such a competitive term, and every Expedia and TripAdvisor in the world will beat you to it.

So instead of trying to earn traffic on a wide variety of topics, pick a few where you have a lot of expertise.

Refocus Your Website on Conversion and Design 

If you are depending on the internet to bring you sales, you must focus on your website.

Expect to spend a few thousand dollars to have it really well done. It’s an investment, and you shouldn’t be skimping on design.

If you’re not advertising on the radio or in phone books (and you probably shouldn’t be), make sure you’re directing that money to build your web presence, starting with your own site.

Write a Personal Monthly Email Newsletter

If you’re a small to medium-sized travel agency, your unique selling point is the help and guidance of travel agents, as well as the custom attention you offer.

You can extend that to monthly email newsletters that are actually helpful.

If you simply chose one of your most popular packages every month and wrote a list of questions and answers, you’d be better off than 80% of email newsletters. Too often, these are boring, stale emails that just encourage the receiver to go buy something.

Be sure to offer your unique knowledge that no one else has.

#9 Get Specific on Travel as a Whole

While tour operators have their own strengths and weaknesses relative to the industry, those in tourism face specific marketing norms and opportunities (as well as headwinds) compared to other industries. 

What does that mean for marketers? They’ll need to fold these nuances into their overall marketing strategies and content calendars.

#10 Don’t Forget Email Marketing: A Complement to Travel SEO Traffic to Retain Visitors Long-Term

If you acquire emails of past and potential customers, you’re sitting on a gold mine of value — and an entrance to a secondary moment in your customer’s journey. Estimates peg the value of each email address at $40, but if properly nurtured, they can be worth much more in the travel industry.

One of the best things we’ve done on travel websites we’ve worked on was to implement an end-to-end email marketing program. This program included both traditional email broadcasts (some call it “blasts”), and email marketing automation.

Travel Email Marketing Automation

One of the best ways to stand out is to be top of mind with your customers. Email marketing automation makes it that much easier than in the past.

Email marketing automation allows you to send the right email to the right person at the right time. Let’s put together a hypothetical list of people as well as their preferences:

As you can see from our very small sample size, every person is different, but with the right email marketing tool, they can be grouped, tagged, categorized, and sent the right email at the right time.

You could divide them all up into different lists based on their location preferences, travel frequency, budgets, and email preferences.

You may not be analyzing billions of data points, but you’re using the available tools to learn as much about your customers as possible so you can serve them in the best way.

When it comes to email marketing for travel companies, focusing on the right email to the right person at the right time is more important than in any other industry.

Tying it all Together: Travel Marketing Automation

There are so many moving pieces, things to remember, and subtle details are needed to build out a smooth travel web marketing campaign from start to finish, that it’s almost humanly impossible.

That’s just the truth. We wish we could shove the pieces of successful content marketing into buckets that categorize them and offer a follow-the-leader approach to executing on them. But reality is more complicated. It’s a multiplicity, a moving target. In travel, that’s more important than ever, because those complications and complicated ontologies open up spaces for marketing leaders to practice content marketing differently, at the right time, ultimately besting their opponents and winning big gains for their organizations.

One key way to surf the shifting sands of marketing is through frequently updated marketing automation tools.

Note: this section can get a bit technical and advanced, so if you’re just starting out, you can bookmark this for later after you’ve applied all the online travel marketing basics.

If you think about it, your website is like a 24/7 salesman. It’s always working, always providing information, always ready to collect contact details.

But there are a lot of things the website can’t do that you need humans for. It can’t send out emails, can’t follow up with more information, can’t help qualify a lead to determine if it’s a good fit, can’t schedule a call in your calendar.

What helps fill in the gaps between your human marketing and sales staff and your “dumb” website is intelligent marketing automation.

Marketing automation sounds like a scary word if you’ve never heard of it, but in reality, these are the most important tasks it helps accomplish:

• After a lead fills out a form, automatically have an email send to them addressed to that person by name, custom-tailored for the trip they are interested in
• Automatically follow up with a lead within 5 minutes of them filling out a form, asking them to answer a few more questions
• Recognizing when a past customer is revisiting your website, so your sales team knows when to send a friendly check-in email
• Deliver brochures and downloads via email once requested, then follow up after a 2-day delay providing more information
• Connect your marketing software with your sales CRM so your marketing and sales teams are sharing customer details (never have that embarrassing email mistake)
• Automatically schedule calls on your calendar with automated follow-ups

As you can see, marketing automation software helps eliminate the most redundant, yet still important tasks. If you like answering emails at 3 AM in the morning instead of having software do it for you then I suppose you can do without it, but most marketers have welcomed this technological advance with open arms.

There are many different software services for marketing automation, here are a few of the top services:

• Entry Level: ActiveCampaign, HubSpot Marketing Free
• Mid-Level: HubSpot Pro, ActiveCampaign Enterprise, Center-LeadPages-Drip (one company), Zoho
• Enterprise Level: HubSpot Enterprise, Marketo, Pardot

There are countless other contenders that you can find with some research, but my top recommendation, if you can afford it, is HubSpot or ActiveCampaign.

If you’re on a budget and just starting out, ActiveCampaign or Drip is the best way to start, although HubSpot’s Marketing Free options is great if you plan on upgrading to HubSpot in the future.

Marketing automation is fairly new, but it truly is the future of digital marketing. There is a deluge of content being produced daily that we now have to compete with, there are more marketing technology offerings than ever, and our visitors have higher expectations than ever before. Without a grand strategy in place, we’ll miss a lot of opportunities, and your marketing automation software sits as the hub of that strategy (along with your brain).

Want to Learn More?

If you’ve found this helpful, we love working with clients in the travel industry – typically, tour operators and travel aggregation platforms are a great fit. Smaller travel agencies and advisors are tough for us to work with due to typical constraints, but mid-sized travel advisor agencies can be a good fit. If you’d like to hear what that entails, reach out below!

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Appendix 1: How do your potential clients find you in organic search?

If we look at travel keywords, we see hidden meanings behind each one. Each keyword has a specific intent. Google is trying to decipher what the user means behind each keyword, and what they want to accomplish. When a prospective customer starts their search for a travel company, they start searching in general terms. As they narrow down their search, however, they get more specific and closer to the final buying moment.
Here’s a quick example. Let’s say you want to go on vacation next summer. Here is a progression of searches you might find yourself using over the next 3 months as you plan and finally book your vacation:

1. “best places to visit in 2026”
2. “best countries to visit in summer”
3. “best countries to visit in summer 2026”
4. “best european countries to visit summer 2026”
5. “itinerary for best european summer vacation”
6. “best cities in europe to visit in summer 2026”
7. “best european travel companies for couples”
8. “goahead tours reviews”
9. “kensington tours reviews”
10. “goahead tours vs kensington tours”
11. “kensington tours italy reviews”
12. “kensington tours discount code”

In this quick example, we can see how over the span of a few weeks or months someone would start with broad ideas, and then slowly narrow down their search by deciding on a specific company and looking for that final discount code before booking.

In reality, the user may be doing dozens or hundreds of searches, opening many tabs at once, and doing a deep dive.

There’s a deluge of information available to the modern traveler, and travel companies need to provide a matching deluge of quality content optimized for search engines and humans.

What would that process look like from start to finish?

1) Here’s an example of keywords for a travel tour company selling tours in Munich, Germany:

As you can see, there are a lot of keyword options. It’s hard to know where to start.

2) Which keyword is best? Well, we can look at two other factors: volume and cost-per-click (CPC). Volume means the amount of searches per month, and CPC means the price of the keyword, or what someone would pay per click in Google AdWords through their auction system.

Now we’re starting to see where we can focus, and which keywords are more important than others.

3) But going even further and using this new info, we can now map customer intent & customer journey stages to these keywords.

This exercise turns a list of 25 keywords from just “good-to-know” information to an actual report that maps to your marketing funnel.

4) Going deeper we can create actionable ideas based on these keywords. Using this info, we decide what content to create.

This is far superior to just a spreadsheet with a list of keywords and data puke. What we have here is a list of things to do over the next quarter. Content to create, keywords to track, and how it fits into the customer journey.

What’s the ROI for ranking for these 25 keywords? Is it worth going through this effort? Well if we multiply monthly searches by what advertisers are willing to pay, we get this:

So for just these 25 keywords, there’s over $40,000 a month in organic traffic up for grabs.

Yes, you can go deeper into this and analyze:

• Keyword difficulty
• Actual expected clicks for each keyword and basket of thematically related keywords
• Total search potential
• The cost to create each asset
• Resources needed to beat current competitors’ ranking for these terms
• Etc.

The list goes on, but hopefully, this gives you a taste of the research involved, just to know where to begin. See more luxury travel keyword ideas here.

SEO for the travel industry is challenging. You must be thinking like the consumer, giving them what they want, integrating SEO with your overall content and marketing teams, showing ROI, and also focusing on the technical and behind-the-scenes factors that can make or break your search strategy.

It’s tough, but with the right game plan and customized strategy for your site, it’s all about following the map and executing it well. And faster than your competitors do.

Breaking down travel SEO further, we can broadly speak to it in two ways: things you do on your website, and things you do off your website.

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Appendix 2: What Makes the Travel Industry Different from All Others

1. Travel Marketing is Seasonal

Whether you’re focusing your travel services around specific events or specific destinations, there are going to be differences depending on what you serve. When looking at your website traffic and leads, you have to keep this in mind and time it correctly. It matters more in this industry – more than many others.

You may look at search volume estimates for an event or travel destination this month and not be impressed with the metrics, but if you look at it over the length of a year, you’d be impressed when the monthly spikes come in. You can find this data with Google Trends and Google Keyword Planner. We also have a list of travel trends ideas here to get you started.

Pro tip: Capture Leads During News Coverage

News and media outlets focus on what’s happening now. That means if your event or trip is happening in 6 months, it’s unlikely to get coverage now. The coverage will happen while the event is going on. This changes depending on the nature of your business offerings, but seasonality is definitely important.

For example, I worked with a company that offered Running of the Bulls tours in Spain. That happens in early July every year. Rather than seeing a traffic spike 2-3 months before, when it’s the best time to book, often the traffic spikes happen during the event. Most of the traffic is from people who are reminded of the event and want to go the following year, so this is an absolute PRIME time to capture their attention. If nothing else, capture their email address so you can market to them 6-9 months later.

Reversal: In the dead of winter, you can bet that consumers are thinking about their warm summer plans; this is a given. So you also need to account for news and media covering topics in the present for planning future trips.

2. High-Cost Travel Products

Regarding standard monthly expenses, traveling is expensive. Even if you’re just taking a plane to a nearby city for a few days, the vacation will cost a few hundred dollars. What this means is it’s a high-touch sales process. Almost every potential traveler is not going to call your company and book on the spot. It happens, but as the length and price of your packages increase, you should expect longer and longer sales cycles.

The key thing to understand, and many travel veterans may roll their eyes at this simplification, is that selling travel services online is much different from selling a book online. You can’t expect a one-call close, and you can’t expect most visitors to purchase a $4,000 package on your online shopping cart.

Pro tip: Allow Monthly Payment Plans

If there’s one thing we can learn from infomercials and car dealers, it’s that monthly payment plans work like gangbusters.

Many consumers don’t like to do math, so make it easy for them. Show them exactly how much they’ll be paying monthly, and suddenly that dream trip is a lot more affordable.

You can extend this even further by offering online calculators that instantly show them the pricing, and allow online deposits to be taken.

3. Consumers Will Do Thorough Research

Armed with the power of the internet and unlimited choice, consumers know more about your business than your friend does.

This means that your sales teams are no longer the only source of information as it was in times past. Which is good news because you’ll no longer be paying your sales and customer support to answer simple questions. But it also poses a challenge because you have to do more work to educate the customer about your offerings, or someone else will.

Pro tip: Answer All Questions with a Giant FAQ Page

One of the highest trafficked pages on a client’s website for a trip was their FAQ page. That’s because Google is rewarding long and thorough content, and consumers love this.

Right now, open up your email and find the 10 most common questions that prospective customers ask you about your travel products. Write out helpful 2-5 sentence answers for these questions, and post this on your website today. Track it for the next 8 weeks, and you’re almost guaranteed to receive new traffic to this page like never before.

4. Reviews are Extremely Powerful

Put yourself in a traveler’s shoes for a moment – you’re spending a lot of money and time, taking off work, rearranging the family’s schedule, and much more – all to have a little bit of fun. Do you want to risk all of that on a company that has so/so reviews? Most likely not.

What this means for the company is that you have to believe in your product and take care of your customers to the extreme. You also need to engender brand loyalists and brand advocates as much as possible.

There’s a challenge with certain platforms, like Yelp, that may hide your best reviews and only show negative reviews. This is a challenge that many businesses face, and we just have to work harder to overcome this.

Pro tip: Make Requesting Reviews Automatic

Are you automatically asking for reviews after a trip is complete? You can do this with your marketing automation system. It will take a bit of planning and configuration, but you can set up an automated system where two weeks after your client returns home from their trip and is all settled in, they’ll automatically get an email from you asking about their experience and if they can leave a review.

5. Trust is Key

Are you responding to calls and emails as fast as possible? Are you walking customers through the process? Are you empathetic to their needs?

Relating to the reviews, customers essentially trust you with their lives, depending on the location. They trust you not to sign them up for a dangerous tour, sketchy hotel, or non-tested restaurant.

They trust you to put their best interests in mind. It’s a lot of responsibility, and we need to remember that always.

Pro tip: Show Trust Symbols on Your Website

Trust symbols are awards, badges, or even antivirus software logos that help consumers trust your website and brand a little bit more.

It also includes micro-copy: helpful little informational text that guides them through the process of booking and requesting quotes on your website.

6. This is a Discretionary (Yet Fun) Purchase

When times are tough, consumers tighten up their spending. Although we may view travel and vacation as a necessary part of life, many who are watching their budget will cut out travel before they cut out alcohol or gambling, for better or for worse.

So when the economy is good, travel interest may soar, but when the economy is in a downswing, it can really hurt travel operators and agencies.

It’s important to plan for this, be aware of the economic conditions, and tailor marketing and products to react to the overall macroeconomic environment.

Pro tip: Use Analytics Tools to Determine Your Demographics

You may have a good sense of the demographic profile of your current clients, but is there a hidden audience visiting your web properties that you’re not aware of?

Using tools like Google Analytics, Segment, Mixpanel, Facebook’s tracking pixel, and others, you can get rich demographic information that will help you understand your risk level for economic turbulence and how to plan for this.

7. Market Disruption and New Opportunities

What was popular then isn’t as much now. In the 1980s, no Americans dared venture to vacation in Vietnam or even Thailand; today, both locations are growing rapidly.

World markets are opening up yearly. Cuba is open today when it was absolutely closed off only a year ago

Beyond the binary opening and closing of countries are lifestyle decisions. Tour companies dedicated only to athletic tours are growing. There are tour companies dedicated only to the largest bucket list events around the world, or obscure annual celebrations.

You can use the principle of the first-mover advantage to be the first to act on these opportunities and grab market share before your competitors do.

Pro tip: Use Google Trends to Predict Demand

Google Trends is the pulse of the internet. It graphically displays what’s trending and what’s dipping in consumer search demand. Keep an eye on your space and the new opportunities popping up with this tool.

When you spot an opportunity, you can test market response by throwing up a landing page or blog post and keeping an eye on web traffic.

8. Consumers are Cutting out the Middleman

Just like travel agents have seen a drop in numbers since the advent of online discounters, consumers can probably cut out your service eventually. As foreign countries become more industrialized and globalized, consumers might be less afraid to do it on their own, and book their trip directly with locals at a fraction of the price.

The counterbalance to this is to offer something they can’t put together on their own. Is it your local guidance? Do you have connections they can’t get? Access they can’t get? Extra amenities to make it all a more seamless process?

Pro tip: Use Surveys to Determine the True Advantage of Your Service 

What you think is the most important part of your service may be wildly different from what your customers value.

You may think that your access to difficult-to-acquire tickets is your differentiator, when in reality, your customers just want to have a good time and get perfect service. Or it may be the opposite – you’ll never know without polling your customers.

9. There Are Emotional Components to Purchases

I’ve heard reports from the field of tour participants saying they would pay double the price for what they received on the tour. What was it? Convenience and ego.

A tour guide took a video of a tour participant Running with the Bulls and the participant wasn’t aware of that. Afterward, when they saw the video, it blew their mind. If you’re leading tours, can you take photos and videos that show the tour member doing something they want to post on social media? That’s the ultimate proof.

During the same event, we provided access to the front of the line for the running of the race. While everyone else had to wait on the streets for two hours, our members were drinking coffee and enjoying the view. Can you provide that level of access to something that your customer can’t get on their own?

Pro tip: Surprise and Delight

“Under-promise and over-deliver” may be an overused expression, but it’s rooted in human nature. If you can think of one or two extra perks to deliver to your clients that they weren’t expecting, that could be the kicker that brings them back to you next year.

10. Social Media Infiltrates

Social media grew rapidly for a few years there and was only a novelty in the beginning. Now we can’t ignore it. As it matures it becomes more and more a part of consumers’ decision cycles, another outlet for information and research. They may not purchase directly from social media, but if you can gain more exposure by being in more places at once, well that counts for something.

Pro tip: Don’t Try to Use all Social Media Channels

For advanced travel organizations, yes you’re expected to be everywhere all the time. But for organizations in the growing stages, you don’t have the expertise or bandwidth to tackle all platforms at once.

Go to where your audience is, and focus on that social platform until you’re the expert, then move on. If your clients are older, focus on Facebook. If they’re younger, focus on Instagram. If they’re teenagers, focus on Snapchat.

There’s no perfect answer for everything, but think of your audience first, and meet them there.

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Appendix 3: Defending the Channel Mix

Assumptions

• Objective: maximize 12-month blended ROI while building durable demand (not just short-term bookings).
• Margins: healthy gross margins (30–60%) typical of tours/experiences; OTAs often lower.
• Attribution: last-click under-credits upper-funnel; optimize to incremental revenue with holdouts/geo-splits.
• Gating factors: list size caps, Email/CRM; site traffic caps, Retargeting; content ops cap, SEO velocity; inventory/capacity caps, spend in peak season.

Why this mix by channel

SEO & Content — 35/30/25% (small/medium/large)

Defense: Travel decisions involve heavy research; content compounds and reduces CAC over time. Smaller firms tilt heavier (35%) to build an owned demand engine; as orgs scale, the percent shrinks (not the dollars) because spend diversifies.

Risk control: If SEO velocity outpaces indexation or quality, reallocate 5 pts to CRO/retargeting for a month.

Digital PR — 10/15/15%

Defense: Links and authority fuel SEO and brand search. Medium/large convert PR into rankings faster thanks to existing content depth and technical foundations.

Why not higher? PR is lumpy; 10–15% keeps cadence without starving performance channels.

Paid Search (non-brand) — 25/25/25%

Defense: Always-on BOFU capture of existing demand. Non-brand CPCs are high in travel, so ~25% is often the efficient frontier; pushing past it tends to tank MER.

Note: Brand search is a small keep-lights-on cost and not modeled here.

Paid Social – Prospecting — 5/8/10%

Defense: Scales once creative is proven and you can tolerate a longer payback. Larger brands monetize awareness better (word-of-mouth, direct visits, brand lifts), so they earn a higher share.

Paid Social – Retargeting — 10/8/10%

Defense: Among the highest immediate ROI in travel (cart/lead recovery, itinerary revisits). Percent is gated by traffic volume; ramp pre-peak planning windows.

Email/CRM & Marketing Automation — 5/5/3%

Defense: ROI is huge but the cost base is small; you’re funding tooling, creative, and lifecycle ops rather than media. As budgets grow, percent naturally shrinks while dollars rise.

CRO & Landing Pages — 5/5/7%

Defense: CRO multiplies every dollar in paid and organic. Larger sites see outsized lift (more traffic = more test power), so they earn a slightly higher percent.

Partnerships / Affiliates / OTAs — 3/3/3%

Defense: Pay-for-performance channel useful for filling inventory and expanding reach without ballooning fixed CAC. Keep steady and grow partners selectively.

Influencer (tracked) — 1/1/1%

Defense: High variance; 1% is a test-and-learn fund. Scale winners into prospecting budgets; avoid over-indexing before validating incrementality.

Programmatic / Display / YouTube Awareness — 1/0/1%

Defense: Assist-heavy, brand-building media. Small/large can justify a toe-hold; medium often better off compounding SEO/PR first.

Size-based logic

• Small: Heavier SEO (35%) builds a moat; retargeting + non-brand search funds the ramp with cash flow. Minimal awareness until unit economics are proven.
• Medium: Authority improves; increase Digital PR + prospecting to expand TAM while SEO keeps compounding.
• Large: Greater CRO leverage and balance sheet to invest in brand; keep BOFU backbone strong.

Sanity-check math (illustrative, not a forecast)

• Small: ~2.56x blended 12-month ROI
• Medium: ~3.33x blended 12-month ROI
• Large: ~4.61x blended 12-month ROI

Guardrails & reallocation triggers

• Paid search: Non-brand MER < 1.5x for 4 weeks after pruning and LP fixes → shift 5 pts to SEO or CRO.
• Retargeting cap: Frequency > 8/week or CPR rising > 30% WoW → move 2–3 pts to prospecting or refresh email creative.
• SEO throughput: Content queue > 6 weeks or publish-to-index > 14 days → pause 3–5 pts and fund CRO tests.
• PR cadence: No top-tier pickups in 8 weeks → move 3 pts to partnerships until a new angle is validated.
• Seasonality: 4–6 weeks pre-peak, add +3–5 pts to retargeting + non-brand; post-peak, return those points to SEO/PR.

Measurement plan

• Retargeting: 10–20% holdout audiences; compare lift vs. natural returners.
• Prospecting: Geo-splits by DMA to isolate contribution.
• SEO/PR: Attribute assists with position-based or data-driven models plus brand search and direct traffic lift.
• CRO: Track per-variant revenue lift and apply to traffic that hit those surfaces.
• Portfolio KPI: Optimize to 12-month MER/payback with channel guardrails (CAC by route, occupancy/capacity, gross margin).

When to change the mix

• Thin margins / high CPC niche: Pull 5 pts from non-brand search → SEO/CRO.
• Heavily repeat purchase (local experiences): Add +2–4 pts to Email/CRM and retargeting.
• Cash-constrained startup: Shift 3–5 pts from PR/prospecting → SEO and retargeting for faster payback.
• Venture-backed land-grab: Borrow 5–8 pts from SEO/CRO → prospecting + YouTube to buy reach; accept longer payback.

Bottom line: The mix prioritizes cash-efficient capture now (non-brand + retargeting), compounding value (SEO/PR/CRO), and calibrated exploration (prospecting, influencer, programmatic). It’s conservative where variance is high and aggressive where travel delivers dependable ROI.

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Updates Log

• November 5, 2025: Review of content and grammatical fixes made throughout, by Joe Robison.
• October 8, 2025: Total rearrangement of many sections, moved longer-form sections to the appendix. Reviewed for quality and grammatical issues by Joe Robison.