Winter can be a slower time for many travel companies: the summer holidays are over, and consumers start to turn their attention to the upcoming festivities. But that doesn’t mean that you should also start to slow down on your marketing activities. In fact, the wintertime is the perfect opportunity to invest in SEO.
Why Invest in SEO in Winter?
It may seem counterintuitive to start spending your money on an SEO strategy during a down period for your company. Additionally, during the current difficult financial times for many people, where both consumers and companies have greater concerns about spending and budgets, it’s easy to see why investing in SEO doesn’t seem worthwhile. However, sales is a cycle and you can use SEO in slower times to help inform future content strategies and prepare for busier periods.
So, what are the main reasons and benefits for companies who want to put time into their travel SEO this winter?
You Need to Play the Long Game with SEO
Using SEO strategies to help boost your organic traffic and rankings can take some time to show improvements. In general, SEO turnaround is a lot longer compared to PPC, which can give almost immediate results. Therefore, if you remain consistent with your SEO throughout the winter, you’re investing into the future, and therefore by the time summer rolls around again and people are ready to book their holiday, your company can be much further up the search results, which means more organic traffic for your site.
Additionally, while consumers might be more conservative this year with their spending, next year could be a different story. So, if you invest in SEO now, you’ll also be in a much stronger position next year and have a whole year’s worth of data to compare your progress with.
SEO Doesn’t Have an On / Off Switch
Optimising your website or having a content strategy is an ongoing process. It’s not possible to suddenly pause your travel website SEO efforts and expect your traffic and rankings to stay the same. One of the reasons for this is because Google’s algorithms are constantly changing and updating to be more useful and efficient for users. The recent Helpful Content update and the September 2022 core update are just a couple of recent examples of Google’s updates.
So, by ‘turning off’ your SEO, you could have a negative impact on both your rankings and your traffic, plus the catching up work you would need to do when you turn your attention back. All of which are not ideal in the increasingly competitive travel landscape.
The same goes for your content strategy, which can also be a large part of your travel SEO efforts. If you suddenly stop posting regularly on your blog, or stop sending out your monthly newsletter, you’re harming your brand awareness. Even though your customers may not be buying from you or booking their holidays, when they do return, they’re less likely to remember you because you haven’t had a consistent presence.
Therefore, investing in SEO needs to be a slower ongoing process, rather than a start / stop idea that you pick and choose to do depending on the time of year.
Where to Start with Your Travel SEO
If you’ve now been convinced on why to invest in SEO this winter, you may be thinking about where to start, especially if you don’t currently have a strategy or have never considered it before.
Asides from on-page SEO and content, it is also important to think about technical SEO, as without it you can make it difficult for your site to be crawled and indexed, which will harm your position in the search results. In general, technical SEO tasks can be slightly more time consuming compared to on-page, which means that during busy periods for your business, these tasks can be neglected. Therefore, quieter times provide the perfect opportunity to get back on top of all the technical SEO that you’ve been pushing to the side and get you ducks in a row!
The main thing you need to know before choosing to invest in SEO for your travel website, is to know your goals. Do you want to increase organic traffic to your blog, are you interested in conversions, or is your strategy more focused on visibility? Once you know which direction you want to head in, then you can start thinking about targeting keywords or optimising your copy and metadata etc.
At Serps Invaders, we are experts in both global SEO and technical SEO, including keyword research, on-page optimisation, creating effective content strategies and site migration consultancy to name just a few.
Get in touch with us today, to learn more about the services we offer and how we can help your travel website improve its SEO strategy and gain more visibility in the search results, even in the winter!
Photo credit: Ross Parmly
