Website traffic is ultimately your number of opportunities at generating qualified leads and sharing your brand while selling your products and services and building relationships.
The basic gist of this- the more people come across your site, the more potential customers you will have, which, in turn, helps you generate additional revenue.
But, increasing the traffic to your website is not a piece of cake, especially for travel websites.
Travel niche, much like the rest of others, is becoming increasingly competitive, with new ones popping up every day. Thus, simply putting out your website on the internet is not enough to garner many customers.
Your website must cater to the needs of your clients and add to the user experience. Plus, a great website with valuable plug-ins helps your customers navigate your website easily and interact with your site with ease.
Thus, the WP Travel Engine offers some of the most useful and important travel website features to incorporate into your travel website.
Out of all the characteristics of a good website, garnering traffic is the crucial factor in determining if the website/travel business is successful.
For this, there are numerous ways to drive traffic to your site, but not all methods will get you the proper kind of traffic. Moreover, trying out all the methods that are out there can sometimes be counterproductive.
A good travel website can combat most traffic-related difficulties with our tried and proven solutions.
Let’s dive into some of the tested strategies to boost your site’s website traffic.
1. Make Getting More Traffic Your First Priority
Running a travel website can lead you to have a lot in your hands. It can be difficult to prioritize what to focus on when you have to look after every aspect. Should you focus more on your social media? What about growing your email list? Should you also be pitching guest posts? It can be a bit inordinate at times.
That is why it is best to start from the roots. What was the purpose of starting your travel website, and what did you want to accomplish with it? The various aspects of your travel website, like your blog, are a primary platform for communicating your message with the world.
While your email list and social media are also important, they are supplementary tools. Your ability to grow other areas of your business depends on the traffic. If you want to pitch your website to tourism boards, they will want to know how many page views you get. The traffic also matters if you want to qualify for ad networks. Traffic, as such, is like the lifeblood of any successful website.
The only way they are used to getting traffic is from Google, Email, and popular social media like Facebook. At the same time, while Google has eclipsed other search engines, there are a number of alternatives that are used as well, such as Bing, Yandex and DuckDuckGo among many others.
But a majority of website owners will say that maintaining a steady increase of traffic for the website is difficult when considering that Google often changes its SEO options. As mentioned, there are a number of alternatives you can use beside Google, but since Google is the most popular and widely used search engine, it is often the dominant tool that people resort to using.
It takes a link or a share in the right place to help with this. As it turns out, there are few things as gratifying as seeing a huge incursion of visitors arriving at your site because of something you did.
Even so, there isn’t a definitive winning formula for acquiring traffic, as every platform has its strengths and weaknesses. Moreover, you need to know that the most important thing is not the number of visits, but their quality. The key is to attract visitors who become followers, subscribers, or even better, customers!
Likewise, having a great website with valuable plug-ins can also help your customers navigate your website easily and interact with your site with ease. For this, the WP Travel Engine offers some of the most useful and important travel website features that you simply must incorporate into your travel website.
2. Write an Attractive Headline
You probably know that 30% of clicks are attracted by the article in the first position of the search result. And, about 18 percent to the second position, and so on. However, if you pull through to the first page of Google (even if you are at the bottom), you can get more clicks than websites ranking above you if you have an attractive headline. In cases like these, Google interprets this as indicating that your article is better suited for that search and will move you up.
Examples of “bad” headlines-
– My backpacking trip in Everest for two weeks
– Exploring the South of India
– Hiking in Peru
Example of “good” headlines:
– How to hike to the Everest Base Camp for under $15 per day
– Top 10 things to do in Northern India
– How to hike the Huayhuash Circuit in Peru on your own
Write a headline that will make the reader curious. For example, the reader can think, “how did they achieve it on a $15 budget? What are the best 10 things to do in Northern India?” etc.
3. Write Good Content
This is a key step in the process of increasing traffic to your travel website, but it is not as straightforward as simply writing a good article. Once you have picked a keyword to write about on your site, you must make the article stand out from the others. This is where SEO comes into play.
Have you ever wondered what SEO means and what it can do for your travel business, especially in the process of making good content? It is less complicated than it seems, and once you understand how to utilize it, you can utilize it for free to attract fresh customers to your website.
When you ask Google any question, it does an inspection for definitive sites with content that matches the keywords in the question you typed. That is why most website owners create their content with keywords in mind so that their page will have a higher chance of showing up in the results — and that’s search engine optimization (SEO) in a nutshell.
It brings about 59% of the traffic for most websites and is the requisite to aiding potential customers discover your business when they plan a trip. Additionally, having a good ranking on search results can bring you free traffic from precisely the people you would like to reach- customers who are actively researching travel websites.
So how exactly does SEO fit into your marketing plan to bring in more traffic to your travel website? Well, a digital marketing strategy mainly consists of five essential elements:
Website, Social media, Email marketing, Business listings (Google My Business, TripAdvisor, etc.), and the Content (for example- your blog posts). You have to take into consideration the quality of the contents as well. While it is easy to share a 300-word article and post it in all the places mentioned, you will most likely never get to the top of Google with 300 words of short content. Better is always the enemy of the best!
Your website acts as the main hub for all your online marketing efforts, and your website is where you will want to begin using SEO techniques. But once you possess a keyword strategy, you can also use those keywords in your social media posts and business listings. Using similar keywords in your business listings and social media posts can help search engines recognize your expertise, giving you more chances to be found in search results.
Your Keyword Strategy
Keywords are the major components of the strategy. Travel is a huge category and a very competitive one at that. The best way to garner more traffic is to have a tight niche and a concrete customer base.
Unlike smaller businesses, Enterprise-scale businesses can spend large sums of money to reach the top of Google searches for broad keywords- like “travel planning” or “tours.” That is why small businesses are better off using phrases called “long-tail keywords.” Long-tail keywords consist of phrases of three to four words specific to your travel business/website. After all, what you offer may not be interesting to all travelers; you only need to attract those who are a good fit precisely for you.
The next step in the SEO Strategy is to think like your customers. Keywords are only valuable if a customer types them into a search engine, which might then lead them to your site. For this, you have to roleplay sometimes to find the right phrasing. You can pretend you are your very best potential customer and imagine what you might type into a search engine. How would you react to seeing your business listed in the results?
The next important strategy to use is to be precise. Carefully choose keywords that will more likely put you in front of the right customers. For example- if your travel business is location-specific, you can include all location names’ variations. You can also name what you do, like tours, cruises, hotels, or tour packages. Descriptive words, like bargain, luxury, family, kid-friendly, adults, and adventure, among many others, can get you in front of the right people. You can also brainstorm related terms, for a good keyword strategy can include many phrases that can all be related.
Once you have a list of capable keywords, you can then place your keywords at the right spots in your content, like the Page title, Headline, the Intro of your content (first 200 words), as well as in Subheadings, Image titles, and “alt” tags and Image captions. You should also sprinkle the keyword throughout the body of the content. Placing keywords in as many places as possible is called optimizing the page without it becoming awkward to read.
At the same time, the addition of keywords at places that do not require their addition can lead to something called “keyword stuffing”- which can be bad for SEO. Thus, we should use keywords properly, placing them at suitable positions without overdoing it. To generate more traffic, you should optimize your HomePage and the website’s Services page with your core keywords. Moreover, every time you add a blog post, you should optimize it around a different keyword related to your core keywords.
This way, when Google and other search engines look at your site, they will acknowledge what each page is about and how it adjusts into your site as a whole.
4. Optimize Your Content with LSI Keywords
It is no secret that SEO is the best way to drive traffic to your travel website. However, that said, most SEO strategies simply don’t get you as much traffic as you would like it to. One of the reasons is because of Google’s Hummingbird algorithm that changed everything about old-school SEO. Instead of only inspecting keywords, Google now understands topics. Google announced that “Hummingbird affects 90% of all searches”. That is a significant percentage. The question now is- How do you make sure that Google understands your content’s topic? The answer is- LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) Keywords.
LSI keywords are words and phrases connected with your target keyword. For example, let us imagine that you just created a post about social media. The LSI keywords in the blog would be words and phrases like: Facebook page, Twitter, LinkedIn, Viral content, and Pinterest, among others. And when Google recognizes these LSI keywords in your content, they say, “Great. This content is definitely about social media”.
How do you find LSI keywords? A great free tool for this is called LSI Graph. This tool offers dozens of LSI keywords related to your topic. You can then just sprinkle these LSI keywords into your post.
5. Maintain a Regular Posting Schedule
You may think it would be a good idea for your travel website to post once a week or every two to three days, or as per your preference. That is all fine, but you have to make it orderly and systematic. This way, your readers will be aware that you post regularly on certain days, for example. You can create a good relationship with your reader this way (thereby developing loyal and regular traffic).
6. Compare Results
For this, you can enter your keyword into Google and look at the ten articles on the first page. To take in important takeaways from them, you can read and analyze them and think about writing a better article. You can get inspired by some of those articles and add new and more updated information, new ideas, and new experiences while creating your content for your website. The goal is to write a comparatively better article, or at least better than most of the top 10 articles on the search engine’s first page.
7. Build Quality Links
While writing good content is undoubtedly a huge part of the strategy to bring in more traffic to your site, it will not work if you don’t have a quality backlink on your content. Your website is worth nothing online without links, and you will show on page 38 of the Google results without them.
To have good quality links embedded in your content, you can utilize guest posts. You can write an article for another blog so that you can obtain more followers and views and, most notably, links from an important blog similar to yours. It is one of the chief ways to get a powerful link to your website content. After launching your website, you can contact other bloggers in your niche and write guest posts for them. It is a good way to start building relationships with other bloggers, and this way- you can let people know that you exist in your scene and get some quality links.
8. Partner with Influencers
Modern customers, due to the fact that they build parasocial relationships, tend to trust influencers like their own friends. Thus, partnering with influencers can let brands venture into an already established community of potential customers in a facile manner, and acquire clicks away from platforms like Instagram back to their websites.
Among the many platforms that influencers use, Instagarm is perhaps the most famous, with over 1 billion active monthly users. Over time and with effort, you can draw-in your target audience and turn visitors into followers to increase website traffic by teaming up with niche influencers. Moreover, influencers can also create authentic Instagram content while promoting your website link that can help increase qualified leads.
9. Use Search PPC (Pay-per-click) Ads
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is where you pay a network every time someone clicks on your ad. A successful PPC campaign can lead to improvements in the advertising quality score, which can then lead to reduced pay per click costs over time. While it can get a bit intimidating at first to pay for advertisements, PPC ads can provide you the opportunity to reach a percentage of your target audience that were formally unreachable.
If you fixate on traditional SEO only, it won’t matter how high you rank on search results- a sizable percentage of people will likely never see your content gleaned on a natural search query. One of the main reasons to give PPC a try is that it is predictable, unlike SEO strategies where the result is largely out of your hands. With a good PPC campaign, how much you spend is directly correlated with your website visitors, with the search engine algorithm being less of a determining factor.
10. Publish More List Posts
There is no way around it; when it comes to driving traffic to your travel website, list posts work the best. As mentioned, BuzzSumo analyzed a million articles and found in the same study that list posts excelled far ahead from all other content formats.
You can create a list, like “Top Highest Paid Travel Bloggers that Make Thousands of Dollars” or something similar, then put in links into those features. You can also create lists, feature other websites, and let them know that they have been featured in your post. This is an excellent way to:
1) Make relationships with other travel websites,
2) Get backlinks, as some of the blogs will upend a link back from their website to yours, and
3) Get new traffic and potential followers.
Most bloggers/websites will also share your article on their Facebook, Twitter, and other social media accounts. Hundreds of their followers can go to your post, bringing you more traffic.
Likewise, an organized architecture and good internal links will let Google know which articles on your website prioritize others. For this, you should create internal links from one article to another. You can add three or four internal links from each article linking to another arcticle related in some way. Because Google doesn’t place much importance on the footer’s links, it is recommended not to add many footer links.
11. Social Media
The best perk of using social media is that they help you directly connect to your target audience. You can correspond with your audience, get their response and reaction in real-time, and improve your customer experience. Compatible engagement with your audience can increase your social media and website traffic. This also improves the company’s perspective and audience opinions.
Pinterest is an incredible tool for generating traffic for your travel website. You could say that Pinterest works like Google in some ways. People search for keywords on Pinterest and then find a photo related to those keywords. Then they click on the image and go to your website. This means that the person is interested (because they are looking for those keywords), and if they like what you have written on your website, you might gain a follower.
Correspondingly, while Google is the largest search engine and the top source of traffic for many blogs, it still has issues, like slow-loading speed, anywhere from 9 to 24 months, to trust your site and start showing your posts on search results. You need time to build up your domain authority. The higher your domain authority, the easier it is for your travel website to rank on the first page of Google.
Building your domain authority, however, is lengthy and time-consuming. And this is where Pinterest comes in. Pinterest levels the playing field because it doesn’t care about your domain authority. A brand new blog/website can get traffic from Pinterest from day one, unlike Google. You can actively promote your top 10 posts on Pinterest using manual pinning and automating your pinning for other posts using the Tailwind scheduler.
Use “Click to Tweet” Links
This is among the best ways to garnet more shares. Twitter is an easy platform to use, and with its practicality, you can gain traffic quite easily. In fact, Click To Tweet Links is one of the main reasons the top Google posts have a high share rate.
So how does it work?
Well, after writing your content, first find something “tweetable” in it. This can be anything — a bite-sized tip, strategy, quote, or even a statistic.
After finding something “timetable,” you can then create a Click To Tweet link. For this, you can head over to ClickToTweet.com and write your tweet. The tool will generate a unique link for you. Finally, include that link in your
Other Social Media
Utilizing Social Media to gain traffic is a trick as old as everything else. It is quite easy to get traffic from Facebook to your blog or website (while it might not be the best traffic). Many people may read and interact with your post on Facebook just because they are bored at the office and want entertainment, not because they are interested in the post. Thus, if you are focused in getting free traffic from Facebook, you can send requests to many travel groups and leave links.
Similarly, Reddit also works. You can join groups and leave links to your posts on Reddit. Some groups on the site are very active, and sometimes you can get hundreds of visits in a matter of minutes.
content. Whenever someone clicks on the link, they can get a pre-written tweet for easy sharing.
12. Take Action
You can start with good keyword research using Moz Explorer, Long Tail Pro, ahrefs, or Semrush. Take time to create high-quality content, better than others, if you wish to be on the first page of Google. Build good links to your posts and, most importantly, open an account on Pinterest and create catchy Pins!
For more traffic, check out new networks like Reddit, and also consider dropping low ROI activities. This can be a part of your traffic growth plan. If you manage your entire website yourself, it might be beneficial to drop low Return on Investment (ROI) activities. These can take up a good chunk of your time for small or insignificant results.
With ROI, you can figure out which activity works best for you and drop those that don’t. For the sum of effort it takes to do ROI activities, the return traffic can be abysmal. For you, ROI activities may be Facebook share threads or perhaps commenting on other blogs. While these strategies might work for others, they may not be working as well for you. In such cases, you can instead focus on what your audience wants and work on that.
13. Use Content Transformation
Content Transformation is simple; you can simply convert one of your blog posts into another format (like an ebook, video, infographic, or podcast). This way, you can squeeze even more value out of the content you created for your website. You can turn your post into a YouTube video and gather traffic. Moreover, you can go for Podcasts too. Podcasts are exploding, with one survey finding that 26% of Americans regularly listen to podcasts. You can participate in other people’s podcasts as a guest as well.
14. Host a Giveaway Contest
People love free stuff; no surprise there!
Why not use free stuff to get more traffic? To increase traffic, you can host a giveaway contest. The way this works is- you encourage your readers to enter the contest. Your visitors need to enter their email addresses to participate (which you then add to your email list). To boot, you can also incentivize people to share your content with their friends. Those shares that people do will drive more traffic to your website and help you grow your email list.
15. Add “Share Triggers” To Your Content
Content can largely succeed or fail based on Share Triggers. So what exactly are Share Triggers? They are specific elements in your content that make it more likely for people to share it. For example, one of the most powerful examples of Share Triggers is clickbait articles by Buzzfeed.
Love them or hate them, BuzzFeed is a master of Share Triggers, with appropriate information gaps utilized in almost every article to generate clicks, shares, and more reader engagement. Share Trigger is the idea that we share things that make us look good. After all, it is an indirect part of our reflection. So make sure that you include something akin to share triggers in your posts. This works best if you push for long-form content. According to the survey conducted by BuzzSumo, which analyzed a million articles, they discovered that long-form content garners more shares and backlinks than short posts (<1,000 words).
16. Optimize for Google’s Mobile-First Index
After Google rolled out their “Mobile-First Index,” the search engine now accounts for the mobile version of your site initially. It also corresponds to Google largely ignoring the desktop version of your site.
How do you perceive if your site is mobile optimized? Well, for this, Google created a free tool- the Mobile-Friendly Test. This practical tool tells you if your site is adequately optimized for mobile devices or not. It also gives you specific recommendations to make your site better.
17. Improve Your Organic Click-Through Rate
As mentioned before, if you want more traffic from Google, you don’t necessarily need higher rankings. Instead, you can focus on improving your click-through rate (CTR). For example, let us say that you rank #3 for your target keyword. And your CTR is 4%. If you can double that CTR to 8%, you can double your organic traffic without improving your rankings.
What’s more, CTR is also now an important ranking signal in Google’s algorithm. So when you acquire a higher CTR, you will also improve your search engine rankings. To improve CTR, you can add a number to your title (like “21” or “98%”). Writing a compelling meta description also helps with this. You can also test different titles and see which one gets the best CTR. For this, it’s best to use highly emotional titles. Also, you need to incorporate your keyword in your URL to improve this aspect.
Conclusion
In order to grow your travel website, you need to be vigilant and continuously experiment on what strategy is functioning best for you and what is not. It is a constant trial-and-error method that will determine which factors are best for your website. Nevertheless, the strategies listed above are sure to help you generate more traffic to your travel website!
If you want to read more useful articles related to Travel, you may check the following:
- How to Build a Content Marketing Strategy for Travel Industry
- How to Do SEO for Travel Website– Step by Step Guide
- How to Make Money from Travel Blogs
