It’s many people’s dream to make a career out of traveling the world, but it begs the question: do travel blogs really make money? If you’re serious about running a successful travel blog that drives traffic and matches people’s search intent, it certainly can with quality travel blog SEO!
Running an effective travel blog involves discipline to create valuable content and know how to get that content in front of the right eyes. If you want your blog to rank higher on search engines, you have to commit to doing solid research on search engine optimization and implementing those practices. This includes updating content, following trends, resolving technical SEO issues and more. Otherwise, you’re better off sticking to a journal for your travel stories.
If your goal is to maintain a highly ranked travel blog, Slam Media Lab (Slam) has the knowledge and resources to make it happen. At Slam, we’re all about helping people that want to learn how to start an agency and learn all the subsequent skills they need to keep their businesses running smoothly year over year. The fact is we know what it’s like to start and grow a business. Slam is an award-winning digital marketing agency that started during the pandemic and grew into a $2M business in just three years.
Moreover, we’re the #1 Hispanic marketing agency, so we’re familiar with working with mission-driven companies in fields like education, health, immigration, climate, technology, and more. Slam offers resources and information to anyone who wants it through our own blog, and we get at least 50% of our traffic from search thanks to our own SEO strategy when it comes to maintaining it.
We made it happen for ourselves, and now we want to share our skills, our knowledge, and—most importantly—our database of products and resources to as many people as possible that are on a similar track. You can check out our case studies to see for yourself how we’ve helped brands in the past with their digital marketing needs.
In the meantime, let’s talk about search engine optimization for your travel blog, so you can reach new heights with your marketing efforts and share your knowledge with the world.
Why Should I Measure SEO for Travel Blogs?
The majority of online traffic is driven by search engines, and it’s no secret that the internet is oversaturated with content on every front. It’s not enough simply to create content to share; you have to optimize it to compete with all the other content being shared in the same space. There are countless SEO benefits for small businesses like travel blogs.
For starters, following best search engine optimization practices is the best way to get your content in front of people, and the only way to do that is to measure SEO for your travel blog. Good SEO practices also improve user experience and the overall functionality of your site, ensuring visitors want to stay on your website once you get them there. Arguably the most important aspect of SEO is that it’s capable of creating brand awareness with people who have never heard of you before, allowing you to expand your reach and grow your following.
If you want to see where your content stands now, check out our SEO ROI calculator to track your efforts and ensure you’re investing in the right avenues.
How Do Blogs Work for SEO?
Maintaining a blog is advantageous on multiple fronts. For one, it gives you a space to share in-depth information about anything and everything with your audience, so you can effectively establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry. Staying in the know about what’s going on in your field demonstrates your expertise and will instill confidence in your audience that they can trust you to know what you’re talking about.
Updating your travel blog also gives you more chances to engage with your audience by then sharing your new content across social media channels to reach new eyes and start new conversations.
Moreover, regularly publishing new content that is optimized for keywords to your website helps with your overall ranking online, which will lead to more people seeing the things you’re sharing.
Optimizing content is a big task, but project management tools like Notion can help keep you organized as you progress with everything.
Moreover, there are a lot of SEO terms you should know if you want to do it right as well as a handful of different areas to hit when it comes to how to do SEO for a blog post, including:
- Link Building
- Page Indexing
- Search Engine Results Page (SERP)
- Adding Images & Videos
- Using Keywords
Link Building
One easy way to improve travel blog SEO is to include internal links and external links throughout your articles. External links, or outbound links, exist on your website and link to other sources on the internet. While it may seem counterproductive to lead people away from your site, it actually improves your visibility and demonstrates your reliability as a resource. In a Databox poll, the majority of SEO experts agreed that one of the most important factors for search optimization is external linking. (That Databox link is also an example of an external link we’re using to rank online!)
The good news is that writing for a travel blog lends itself nicely to adding backlinks. Odds are, you’ll be talking about a lot of different places to visit and things to do, so all you have to do is go one step further by giving people a direct path to those places or activities by linking directly to them.
In addition to linking to other websites, it’s important to link back to your own content. (You’ve already encountered a lot of Slam’s throughout this article so far!) Internal links allow you to share more of your valuable information with your viewers. Moreover, these links connect pieces of your content together and give search engines a better idea of the hierarchy of your site.
Internal links are useful for a few reasons:
- They help users navigate a website.
- They establish an information hierarchy for a website.
- They spread link equity (ranking power) around the website.
Another aspect of link building is backlinks. Backlinking refers to other websites linking to your content on their website. This is a form of off-site SEO that helps you rank higher on search engine results pages. By having other reputable sources link your content, it reinforces your authority and credibility to both consumers and the search engines.
There are plenty of link-building tools you can leverage to improve SEO and ensure you’re maximizing all your efforts. Here are some popular options:
In an Aira study, 51% of marketers say it’ll take one to three months to start seeing your link-building efforts, so don’t give up!
Page Indexing
Index coverage is another important aspect of travel blog SEO—specifically, on-page technical SEO. Before a page on your website can be ranked and visible to users, it has to be crawled and indexed. This process essentially goes as follows:
- Google discovers your URL through crawling.
- They examine the content on the page.
- They direct collected information to the index.
But what does this actually mean?
After Google crawls your site and discovers a webpage, they will perform a thorough analysis before adding it to a database of billions of pages—the Google Index. Once it’s in the index, it will show up in search results for the general public. As long as your page meets the ranking criteria, your webpage will show up.
This makes it all the more important to create relevant content that is easily digestible by these bots that crawl your site and the people that read it alike. Fully optimized content can even show up in search results as a featured snippet. This means Google will actually pull a few sentences from your page and show it on the SERP.
One of the best practices to follow is to refresh content consistently as it encourages more frequent indexing. Fortunately, updating content is a give-in for a blog, making it pretty straightforward to improve SEO for your travel blog.
Per a Statista report, 58.67% of all website traffic worldwide comes from mobile phones. This has led Google to move to mobile-first indexing, which ranks pages by the content seen on smartphones. When optimizing your blog, be sure to account for mobile design and cross-platform capabilities.
Search Engine Results Page
Search engine results pages, or SERPs, refer to the results that populate on a page in response to users’ search query. These pages include a mix of organic search results, paid Google Ad results, featured snippets, videos, and more. Your goal is to optimize your content for Google’s algorithm, so you can appear in those first few spots on the SERP. Even securing the #1 spot may not put you at the top of the page if paid ads will appear above you, so it’s all the more important to optimize content to stay as high up as possible in organic search.
Google decides organic results through a complex algorithm that has over 200 ranking signals. The algorithm itself is classified, but Google has confirmed some of the ranking factors. This includes:
- Off-page SEO signals (backlinks)
- On-page SEO signals (keywords)
- Site loading speed
- Brand presence and trust signals
When looking at SERPs, you also need to factor in “no-click searches.” As the name suggests, this refers to people landing on the SERP and finding the response there instead of having to click on one of the results. No-click searches are continuing to grow largely because of SERP features—especially featured snippets. This gives you all the more incentive to optimize your content for Google to crawl your site and pull information, so you’re the snippet that populates with search queries.
Adding Images & Videos
Including photos and videos is a great way to elevate content you’re sharing, especially when it comes to a travel blog. According to Venngage, over 50% of marketers agree that visual content is essential to their marketing strategy. These different types of assets help break up long blocks of content, improving readability and engaging site visitors for longer periods of time.
The addition of photos also gives you a chance to enhance your webpage through alternative text, or alt text. Alt text improves content by:
- Describing the image for people using screen readers.
- Making images accessible even when they can’t be displayed.
- Including more keywords and key phrases to boost SEO.
If you’re not confident in your photography skills, you can always create infographics and other visual content to give your content more flavor. With tools like Canva, you don’t even have to be a professional graphic designer to create simple, yet effective content. Last note: be sure to compress images to make your site load faster.
Using Keywords
When it comes to optimizing content, utilizing keywords is one of the best things you can do. Keywords refer to the most popular search queries users look up on search engines, and using them in your content will lead people to your website for their answers.
It’s not enough to just pepper these keywords throughout your content; you have to build quality content around them to secure a higher ranking because Google measures content for relevance. This means Google reviews your page and figures out how applicable it is to the keywords for which you’re ranking. This involves looking at:
- URL*
- Meta title
- Meta description
- Headers and syntax
- Internal links
- External links
- Backlinks
- Images & alt text
*When it comes to URL structure, keep the keyword as close to the domain as possible. Both search engines and users give more weight to the start of a URL, so having a keyword can improve the URL’s relevance.
Semrush offers a popular keyword tool to enhance your keyword research and ensure you’re fully optimizing your content. Plus, Slam has a simple, clean SEO keyword research template, so you can build out your strategy and come up with sustainable plans for your content.
Speaking of keywords…
How Do I Find Keywords for Travel Blogs?
Keywords are a driving force behind the ranking of your content, and you should use them strategically all throughout everything you post. In addition to optimizing keywords throughout the body of your content, you should also focus on:
- Titles
- Headers
- Subheaders
- Meta descriptions
- Alt text
The good news? Slam makes it easy for you to stay at the top of your search optimization game with our webflow SEO services!
Using the Right Keywords for Better SEO for Travel Blogs
Knowing how to choose keywords for SEO will make marketing your content much simpler, and the good news is there are plenty of resources that are designed to help you do just that. The fact of the matter is you can’t simply pick the most popular words and expect to show up on the first page of the SERP. You have to account for the fact that you have competition no matter where you’re focusing your marketing. That’s why in-depth keyword research is so important for any cohesive travel blog SEO plan. Slam’s keyword research template helps keep you organized as you’re conducting this research, so you can stay on track with your SEO strategy over time.
You should also check out these free and freemium keyword tools:
Understanding Keywords vs. Long-Tail Keywords
Utilizing keywords is a surefire way to have your content rank higher, but you should also take it a step further to include long-tail keywords, or key phrases. This refers to not just the noun, or object of the search, but also some modifiers to describe it. Backlinko did an analysis of 306 million keywords and found that 91.8% of all search queries and long-tail keywords.
Due to this conversational way people search for information, search engines have incorporated key phrases into their algorithm to yield better results for users. When forming your keyword strategy, be sure to consider these longer phrases, too.
How Do I Measure Travel Blog SEO?
Regularly reviewing content is the best way to optimize performance over time, but only if you know what to research. There are a wide range of technical SEO tools to leverage for your travel blog SEO as well as technical SEO audit tools for analyzing the success of your efforts. You can also use Google Search Console to track SEO efforts, including search traffic and performance, and resolve issues to improve visibility. Once you have that information, you can plug it into our SEO ROI calculator to get the insights you need for your travel blog.
Some aspects of technical SEO focus on user experience such as:
- HTTPS Implementation
- Mobile-Friendliness
- Site Speed
- Structure
On the other hand, some are more about optimization. This includes:
- Competitor/Market Analyses
- Keyword Research
- Rank Tracking
- Site Audits
You can use agency SEO report tools to track key metrics and get a clear idea of where your strategy stands. Plus, it includes a helpful SEO tutorial to guide you through the process. If you’re not sure where to start with your existing website, perform a technical SEO audit with Slam. Our Technical SEO Audit Template makes it quick and easy. That’s why we use it with all our clients!
Let’s look at some of the most important SEO metrics to look at regularly to maximize your marketing efforts.
Click-Through Rate
Click-through rate (CTR) refers to how many people have clicked on one of your ads divided by how many people saw the ad in the first place (clicks / impressions x 100 = CTR). This value is recorded as a percentage and measures the effectiveness of your advertising efforts. If you’re running any form of paid advertising, calculating CTR is a must. Not only will it help you improve your ad rank and evaluate your current campaigns, but it’ll also help you be more cost efficient in the long run.
Conversions
A conversion can mean many things depending on your goal for sharing your content. Typically, it means someone has downloaded your content, installed something, signed up for a newsletter, or purchased something. When it comes to monetizing a travel blog, conversions may look a little different. Some potential conversion events to track for better travel blog SEO include people:
- Agreeing to sponsorships or brand partnerships
- Finding you through online advertisements
- Sharing contact information for email correspondence
- Signing up for courses or workshops
- Hiring you for travel planning services
- Downloading your travel guides
- And so much more!
Customer Lifetime Value
Customer lifetime value (CLV) measures how much you can earn from an average customer over the course of their relationship with you. To measure this metric effectively, you should look at the total average revenue generated by a customer and your total average profit. You’ll be able to figure out how your average readers interact with your content and refine your strategies to improve those interactions across your entire target audience.
Total Monthly Keyword Volume
Total monthly keyword volume (TMKV) shows the popularity and potential impact of ranking for a given keyword, offering deeper insights into trends within your market. It’s shown by the estimated number of searches for a keyword in a given timeframe. There are different factors that can influence your keyword volume, including:
- Current events
- Customer search intent
- Seasonal trends
- Your competitors
Schedule a FREE website audit with Slam to see where your website stands.
Stay in the Know About Travel Blog SEO and More with Slam
Managing SEO for a travel blog is a multifaceted responsibility, and it can look a little different depending on the nature of your blog and your goals for it. That being said, you can count on Slam Media Lab to have the knowledge and resources you need to optimize your travel blog SEO no matter your mission.
Whether you’re learning how to start an agency or how to continue growing it, Slam is here to guide you through every new challenge and opportunity you face. Check out our blog for more helpful digital marketing tips, tricks, resources, and more. You can also stay up to date about what we’re up to here at Slam through our newsletter.
Check out these related resources by Slam:
- Nonprofit SEO Can Boost Your Traffic and Keep Your Org Evergreen
- Webflow CMS for Blogging: A Comprehensive Guide for Content Production & Growth
- Small Business SEO Tools [Tips, Resources, List]
- Get More Customers Through Small Business Local SEO
- Nonprofit Fundraising Made Easy with a High-Conversion Website
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