SEO and Tourism: Optimising Websites for Travel and Tourism Companies

Introduction to optimising travel and tourism websites

At a time when the Internet has transformed the way consumers book their travel and search for information about their destinations of choice, it has never been more crucial for travel and tourism businesses to optimise their websites. Search engine optimisation, better known by its acronym SEO, plays a vital role in this process.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website by improving the visibility of your website to search engine users. In other words, SEO involves specific changes to the design and content of your website that make it more attractive to a search engine.

Why is SEO crucial for travel and tourism businesses?

SEO is particularly essential in the travel and tourism industry for a number of reasons. Firstly, an optimised website makes it easy for users to find the information they are looking for, which can increase engagement and ultimately conversions. Secondly, an optimised website can increase a company's visibility on search engines, which can introduce the brand to new customers. Finally, an optimised website is also more likely to appear at the top of search results, which can lead to greater credibility and trust from consumers.

How to optimise a travel and tourism website for SEO?

Optimising a travel and tourism website for SEO can involve a variety of tactics, including keyword research, image optimisation, quality content creation, link building and other on-page and off-page optimisation techniques. Each of these strategies aims to make the website more attractive to search engines and more useful to users.

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Understanding search intent in the travel sector

When someone types "romantic weekend in Prague", they are signalling a disguised transactional intention; they want to book, but are still exploring the options. Conversely, the query "weather Prague February" is purely informational. Distinguishing between these levels of intent is the cornerstone of an effective SEO strategy for an agency or tour operator. Expedia, for example, has segmented its pages to respond to specific queries: guideather, holiday ideas, hotel comparisons. Each segment targets a distinct intent, increasing the likelihood of appearing for a broad spectrum of keywords and pushing the user further down the conversion funnel.

Understanding search intent requires an in-depth analysis of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Keep an eye out for Google Flights, the Local Pack, People Also Ask, etc. If a query systematically triggers a local pack, this is a strong signal of the need to optimise the Google Business Profile, even for a brand operating mainly online. French tour operator Lastminute.com has improved its visibility on "flight + hotel" queries by adding virtual points of sale to the local pack, doubling its local organic traffic in less than a quarter.

Keyword research: combining volume, seasonality and sales margin

In tourism, not all visits are worth the same. The keywords "cheap flights Paris-Bangkok" attract a large volume but a lower unit margin than "14-day luxury tour of Thailand". When Airbnb first took off, it cross-referenced Google search volume data with booking figures and the average basket per destination; the team then prioritised the creation of landing pages for high-margin destinations, even if this meant temporarily sacrificing cities with high volumes but lower average baskets.

Think about timing too. Use Google Trends or Semrush's "seasonality" reports to predict the rise in "all-inclusive skiing" queries between October and January and offset the drop in season by pushing cross-seasonal content ("off-season wellness breaks in Chamonix"). Cruise lines like MSC Cruises, publish articles on Mediterranean ports of call from November onwards, so that these URLs have time to be crawled and ranked before the spring explosion in demand.

On-page optimisation: more than just title, Hn and meta-description

Deep semantic structuring

A "Visit Lisbon in 3 days" article should cover the districts, the gastronomy, the cost of transport, as well as related sections (planning tools, exchange advice). Booking.com uses tagging <h2> for "Top attractions", then <h3> for each attraction: "Tram 28", "Miradouro da Senhora do Monte", etc. This granularity encourages the display of jump-to links in Google and increases CTR.

Meta tags and rich snippets

In the journey, schema.org markup TouristAttraction, Flight or Hotel is crucial. Rich results from aggregateRating boost click-through rates: according to a study by BrightEdge, the presence of stars in SERPs increases CTR by an average of 37 % for the tourism sector. For example, TripAdvisor has been systematically tagging reviews since 2015, obtaining stars on millions of URLs and double-digit organic growth, despite Google's entry into the reviews market.

Strategic internal linking

Multi-destination tours often suffer from excessive URL depth ("/asie/thailande/circuit/14-jours/bangkok-chiang-mai-phuket ). Internal breadcrumb trails combined with an "Associated Destinations" module bring these pages closer to the root and boost PageRank. The tour operator Kuoni has reduced the maximum depth of its offers from 6 to 3 clicks, and has seen an average increase of 22 % in positions for long tail keywords in six months.

Editorial content: guides, storytelling and UGC

The long-form travel guides ("Ultimate Guide to Backpacking in South America") meet the E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust) requirements imposed by Google. Lonely Planet publishes 8,000-word guides that include immersive photos, interactive maps and downloadable lists. The result: an average time on page of 7 minutes and a bounce rate of less than 30 %.

Storytelling inspires confidence. Icelandair has created a content hub around Icelandic legends, linking each myth to an excursion: instead of a simple price argument, the company is selling a cultural experience. Articles entitled "Hunting Northern Lights with Local Storytellers" rank on near-zero competition queries and generate more than 400,000 visits a year, according to SimilarWeb.

UGC (User Generated Content) is a guarantee of authenticity. #Santorini's Instagram filters generate more than 10 million publications, and the Greek agency BlueVillas includes an Instagram feed on each villa listing. The fresh, geo-tagged photos enrich the content without duplication, improve social reassurance and prolong the user session: +18 % page views recorded on these listings.

Technical SEO: speed, Core Web Vitals and headless architecture

Cruise and holiday rental sites display heavy carousels of images. Lighthouse penalises pages with more than 2.5 s of Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). TUI deployed lazy-loading of galleries and automatic conversion of images to WebP; the LCP score fell from 3.8 s to 1.9 s, with a gain of 12 % on mobile organic traffic.

The move towards headless CMS is another trend. Platforms such as Strapi or Contentful allow content to be served via APIs, separating the front-end layer (Nuxt, Next, Gatsby) from back-office management. The French tour operator Evaneos has migrated to a JAMstack; the internal mesh is now dynamically calculated by a recommendation engine, resulting in a better distribution of the crawl budget and an increase of 18 % in indexed pages.

Local SEO and proximity search

Although many travel companies operate online, a local presence reassures the buyer, especially for expensive tailor-made trips. Terres d'Aventure claimed and optimised each physical agency on Google Business Profile: integration of high-resolution photos, weekly publications, FAQ. Result: the Local 3-Pack generated 25 % of offline conversions measured by the call tracking tool.

Online reviews are still decisive. A study by PhocusWire revealed that 95 % of travellers read at least seven reviews before booking. As a result, there needs to be an active response process; Airbnb responds to every negative review within 24 hours, demonstrating that feedback is taken into account. The responses, indexed by Google, create additional content and often contain long-tail keywords ("quiet area", "metro station 200 m away").

Internationalisation and hreflang tags

Tourism is intrinsically global. Poor multilingual management leads to cannibalisation. In 2018, Accor found that 17 % of its FR pages were indexed on Google Spain, diluting authority. The solution: consolidate the domain (accor.com) and deploy exhaustive hreflang mapping covering more than 30 languages and 50 regions (eg. en-ca, en-gb). A dedicated hreflang sitemap was submitted; in six months, inter-SERP duplication fell, and authentic Spanish organic traffic grew by 28 %.

You should also think about the cultural adaptation of content. While "honeymoon" literally translates to "honeymoon" in English, the intention behind it differs from country to country. In Japan, the popular query is "新婚旅行 格安 ("cheap honeymoon"), a price nuance that needs to be reflected in the copywriting.

Link building: partnerships, digital PR and responsible tourism

Qualified backlinks remain a powerful lever. The most effective strategy in the travel sector is content partnerships with tourist offices or NGOs involved in sustainable tourism. For example, Intrepid Travel works with the "Rewilding Europe" foundation; the foundation's annual report, hosted on a highly-trusted .org domain, links to Intrepid's "Balkans Wildlife" expedition page. Link authority: Domain Rating 78 (Ahrefs).

Digital PR campaigns also use proprietary data. Kayak published an interactive "Flight Hacker Guide" with previously unpublished data on low-cost flights; the campaign generated over 600 media links (Forbes, CNN, Le Monde) and positioned Kayak on ultra-competitive queries ("when to book your flight"). The key: to offer journalistic content, not just a promotion.

KPI monitoring and attribution

Tourism SEO often has a long, multi-device conversion cycle. Make the most of Google Analytics' assisted conversion and data-driven attribution models. A van rental company, Indie Campers, discovered that 40 % of conversions from the last Google Ads click had been preceded by an SEO visit within 30 days. Armed with this insight, the brand increased the content budget (road guides) by 30 %, resulting in an overall growth of 18 % in Y/Y bookings.

KPIs are not limited to traffic and positions. Follow: average time between first visit and reservation, session depth, micro-conversions (newsletter subscription, adding to basket). The Hilton hotel chain measured that a 0.3 s reduction in Time to First Byte (TTFB) generated an 8 % increase in sessions viewed. Correlations that demonstrate the clear link between technology and revenue.

Emblematic case studies

Airbnb: hub architecture by district

Instead of focusing solely on cities ("Paris", "Rome"), Airbnb has divided each major city into neighbourhood hubs ("Le Marais", "Trastevere"). These pages, enhanced with mini-guides, are positioned on hyper-localised queries ("Le Marais flat", 12,000 searches/month). The addition of information on average prices per night, updated daily, keeps the content fresh and sends signals of vitality to Google.

Ryanair: the SEO vs. SEA duel

For a long time, Ryanair has invested heavily in Search Engine Optimisation (SEA) to compensate for its poor organic content. In 2021, the company launched a "Try Somewhere New" blog and translated 15,000 articles into 7 languages. After 12 months, organic traffic quadrupled, saving €8m in Adwords budget per year. The ROI of the content justified the hiring of a 30-strong in-house editorial team, proving that SEO, even for a brand with a high profile, remains a profitable channel.

Emerging trends : Conversational AI, voice search and Web3

The rise of voice assistants is changing queries, making them conversational ("Alexa, find me a direct flight to Marrakech in April"). FAQs structured in JSON-LD are gaining ground. Marriott is experimenting with tagged "speakable" pages SSA (Speakable Specification for Article) to enable Google Assistant to read extracts aloud. Preliminary result: +5 % of traffic from devices integrating Google Assistant.

Generative AI (ChatGPT, Bard) is also influencing travel planning. Complex queries are summarised in a single prompt: "10-day itinerary for Sicily slow travel". Tourist sites therefore need to provide clear structured data to feed these models. GetYourGuide has published a public API for its catalogue of activities, enabling certain AIs to recommend its products. This channel already generates 2 % of its total sales.

As for Web3, some start-ups are integrating NFTs as proof of experience or decentralised tickets. Although marginal, the subject offers link opportunities in the tech/media spheres, useful for SEO: each mention in a crypto magazine adds a backlink that is often very authoritative (e.g. CoinDesk DR 90).

Actionable checklist for your travel company

- Map the intentions (informational, transactional, navigational) of your funnel.
- Prioritise keywords according to volume, seasonality and margin.
- Implement Schema.org: Hotel, Flight, TouristAttraction, FAQ.
- Optimise speed (LCP < 2.5s, CLS < 0.1).
- Deploy a hreflang sitemap and monitor international cannibalisation.
- Create long-format E-E-A-T friendly guides and promote UGC.
- Establish content partnerships with tourist offices, NGOs and the media.
- Measure conversion assistance and adjust the budget between SEO and SEA.
- Anticipate voice search and prepare your data for generational AI.

Conclusion: the sustainable competitive advantage of tourism SEO

In a sector where the cost per paid click is sometimes as high as €8 on queries such as "air ticket New York", SEO offers a less volatile and better qualified source of traffic. Travel companies that invest in understanding intent, content quality and technical performance benefit from a cumulative effect: each indexed page acts as a digital asset generating recurring bookings. By mastering both local granularity and international reach, combining storytelling and structured data, you create a resilient web architecture, ready for Google's evolutions, from voice search to conversational AI.

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