Advice for a UK travel agent web site please

[garyfromdurham]

Hi

I am not a SEO expert so would appreciate some advice for John, a friend of mine please.

John owns a very popular group of travel agents in England but his online presence is not very good.

Cheap Holidays | Late Deals, Package Holidays, Long Haul Holidays

When anybody types in holidays to popular destinations (Sharm El Sheik, Dubai, Majorca, Tenerife etc) on Google, Johns site does not rank very high at all sometimes being buried 8 and 9 pages deep which is not good for a busy travel agent.

Any advice would be gratefully received.

Thank you

Gary

[birdman87]

I would also be very interesed in an answer to this.

Is the holidays niche just too difficult to enter??

Any big sucesses on this forum at all?

[garyfromdurham]

Originally Posted by birdman87

I would also be very interesed in an answer to this.

Is the holidays niche just too difficult to enter??

Any big sucesses on this forum at all?

I don't think that the holiday niche is too tough to enter if you are specific about a certain destination.

That is the problem with this site.

The owner has a chain of offline travel agents which are very successful but does not have a strong online presence.

His site is not being listed when people are searching for holiday destinations.

If anybody has any suggestions I can pass on I would be very grateful.

Thank you.

Gary

[ebiz101]

I think you need to perform some off page activities for your site like link building, social bookmarking for your targeted keywords to get high rankings.

[DrGUID]

Think long tail niches. Think hotel names, resort areas. Think tourist attractions near your resorts. Put plenty of photos up.

I do quite well on my travel pages of my personal site, although it's been around since '99.

[Andy Marco]

Hi Gary,

The main problem your friend has with the site is the site structure which isn't great in terms of helping Google determine what types of holidats and destinations the site offers.

Just a few pointers;

1. He needs to be a lot clearer as to what he offers in terms of holidays. Is he offering cheap holidays or holidays to more exotic locations. The wider the site offering the harder it is to rank well for any of the main search terms you're trying to target.
2. Ideally for each country you are targetting you need a dedicated landing page thats is content rich and which then leads to all the country / resort specific locations and offers. e.g at the moment you have a destination guide for each main coutry. The URL should read /holidays-turkey.phtml rather than /dest_turkey.phtml. This immediately gives Google a better understanding of what the page and content is about.
3. Following on from that each offer would flow from that country specific page e.g. /holidays-turkey/offer1 etc. etc.

Unfriendly URLs / page names that don't mean anything to anybody are far too common unfortunately. Whoever designed the site just didn't understand the importance of a good site structure when it comes to ranking on Google.

Hopefully that helps a little anyway :-)

[KenJ]

Hi Gary

• I would identify the holidays you really want to sell and make money with.
• Then research keywords relating to these destinations.
• Then build back links focused on this set of keywords.
• Once you have completed the first destination move onto the next one.

You can grab a lot of long tail traffic this way.
The big guys in the market are winning the battle for keywords like

"Cheap holidays Spain"

You need to focus on more specific keywords like

"Cheap self catering holidays Spain"
or "Cheap hotels barcelona"

These are made up examples but you get the idea.

kenj

[garyfromdurham]

Originally Posted by Andy Marco

Hi Gary,

The main problem your friend has with the site is the site structure which isn't great in terms of helping Google determine what types of holidats and destinations the site offers.

Just a few pointers;

1. He needs to be a lot clearer as to what he offers in terms of holidays. Is he offering cheap holidays or holidays to more exotic locations. The wider the site offering the harder it is to rank well for any of the main search terms you're trying to target.
2. Ideally for each country you are targetting you need a dedicated landing page thats is content rich and which then leads to all the country / resort specific locations and offers. e.g at the moment you have a destination guide for each main coutry. The URL should read /holidays-turkey.phtml rather than /dest_turkey.phtml. This immediately gives Google a better understanding of what the page and content is about.
3. Following on from that each offer would flow from that country specific page e.g. /holidays-turkey/offer1 etc. etc.

Unfriendly URLs / page names that don't mean anything to anybody are far too common unfortunately. Whoever designed the site just didn't understand the importance of a good site structure when it comes to ranking on Google.

Hopefully that helps a little anyway :-)

Thanks for the tips so far. I really appreciate them.

I agree that the person who designed the site doesn't understand SEO.

It cost a fortune and has had thousands of pounds thrown at it.

Hays travel itself, is one of the biggest travel agents in the UK with a turnover of millions.

Up until a year or two back they had an advertising budget on Teletext for a million pounds per year.

However, no matter how much they have thrown on to their online venture it is not having the same success as offline and teletext marketing.

I will certainly pass on the information so far.

Thank you

Gary

[Andy Marco]

No worries,

Well tell you're friend that in exchange for his Teletext advertising budget I'll come and help him with his website. Seems more than fair to me! :-) (worth a try!)

All the best anyway.