Search Marketing For Travel - ABTA | 2019

Search Marketing for
Travel.
Your digital growth partner.

Organic & Paid
Search - The
Fundamentals.

— SEO & PPC - understanding the basics
— The importance of SEO and content marketing
— The changing nature of SEO & opportunities for
travel businesses
— Ad vs content ratio
Agenda.

— Understanding basic concepts behind SEO & PPC
— Gaining an intro to key concepts for content
marketing
— Understanding ways to ‘move the needle’ when it
comes to SEO in the travel market
— Understanding best practices for ads, and how we
can ensure we’re following best practice
Learning Objectives.

SEO - Intro.
Input
Output
Algorithms

Crawling
Indexing Ranking

PPC.
Paid search advertising has a similar result as
SEO, in the sense that the ultimate goal is the
same. To capture relevant traﬃc (and
conversions) for our websites.

The diﬀerence is that with PPC, you pay to
appear in the search results, and you can
choose exactly what phrases and words you
want to appear for.
PPC.

PPC oﬀers much more control over targeting
and enables you to appear for your desired
keywords and searches almost instantly, but it
comes at a (ﬁnancial) cost.
PPC.

How do SEO & PPC Fit Together?

Create eﬃciencies
through sharing of tasks
(keyword research,
audience research etc).

Save money on
expensive terms.

Expedite growth
through a constantly
moving strategy.

Search Strategy
Combined Search
Combined Search
Keyword Targeting
SERP Optimisation
Data Sharing &
Testing
Intent Driven
Search Strategy
SEO PPC
● Crawling, Indexing & Ranking Approach
● Topic Clustering & Semantic
Optimisation
● Technical SEO, Content Optimisation &
PR Focusses.
● Branded search campaigns
● Non-brand search campaigns
● Google shopping campaigns
● Display remarketing campaigns
● Display user acquisition campaigns
● Video awareness campaigns

Our PPC and SEO team work with you to
understand your commercial goals and
keyword objectives.
We then plan which search terms we’ll need
to have improved visibility for, if we’re going
to encourage more users to your site, to buy
your products.
If we don’t have any existing search presence
there at all, our PPC team will build a campaign
around this, ensuring your brand has
immediately visibility for that term.
Whilst our PPC campaign is running for your
search term, our SEO team are working to
ensure your website is suitably optimised to
appear for this term. This is a long-term
process, and could take some time.
We begin to see your organic search listings
appear on Google and climb up the rankings.
We review this continually to see how organic
search performance increases.
Once we’ve reached a comfortable level with
our organic search listing (for example, position
#1) we take a ‘benchmark’ to see how much
traﬃc we’re getting from both the organic and
paid search listing for that term, and the total
advertising cost.
We then begin to trial restricting the PPC ad
spend for this term, all the while keeping an
eye on those traﬃc levels, before looking to
move away altogether.
We can then utilise this PPC spend to move
onto another search term that your brand
doesn’t yet have an organic presence for, and
the whole cycle begins again!
Combined Search
Process

SEO & Content Marketing.
How to get the greatest ROI.
Best-in-class content:
— Engages users
— Positions your brand eﬀectively
— Gains traction with wider sites (useful for link building)
— Guides users to a particular action
— Generates an ROI

Rules to live by.
We’ll go into copywriting in more detail later, but ﬁrst we’re going to
touch on some general rules which will help you to create eﬃciencies
in your SEO & content marketing campaigns to gain the best ROI.

1. Quality >
Quantity.

2. Start with
your
audience.

3. Divide &
Conquer.

4. Structure is
everything.

How has SEO changed, and where are the
opportunities for travel businesses?

The travel market is an
anomaly.

Competitor landing
pages still work.

RIP Sponsored Posts.

The opportunity lies in
proposition.

“...there is no question that this is a new
type of algorithm update that aims at ad
heavy, low value content created with the
purpose of generating ad revenue.”
Search Engine Roundtable, commenting on the FRED Update

Ad vs content ratio.
Google’s Fred update actively penalises sites with poor quality
content or heavy/interruptive usage of ads on pages.
The best way to achieve the perfect medium is to refer to the Better
Ads Standards, which give you the exact guidelines to ensure that
you’re not falling foul of ad guidelines for your content.

Key
takeaways.
1. SEO involves controlling what we feed in to
Google’s algorithms
2. PPC enables you to appear for your desired
keywords and searches almost instantly
3. The best way to get value out of PPC & SEO is to
run them as ‘search’
4. Quality, targeted content is better than quantity
5. We should all be following the Better Ads
guidelines where possible

Content Strategy.
Creating unique, engaging
and relevant content.

— Understanding core copywriting principles
— Learning how to perform basic keyword research
— Understanding how to optimise for YouTube
— Understanding how to roll out personalisation on
your site

— Copywriting - top tips
— Latest on keyword research
— YouTube optimisation
— Personalisation & Retention
— Blogs & website content
Agenda.

Each piece of content you
create should have...
— A clear audience
— A focus on topic & key terms
— An easy to follow, logical written structure
— A place in your site structure
— A goal/key take-out
Ultimately, writing great content comes down to being able to...

...tell a story.

Don’t
— Focus just on your product/service
— Over exaggerate
— Over use exclamation marks
— Patronise readers
— Write without your user’s vocabulary
in mind
Do
— Always check spelling & grammar
— Speak the language of your user
— Back information up with data where
applicable
— Focus on the user - speak to their
context & not your service - be helpful
— Read your copy back (multiple times,
out loud)
𐄂
✓

Research is key.
The dos and don’ts that we’ve just been through all broadly
relate to one thing - knowing your user inside and out.
Creating an avatar is a good ﬁrst step, but to create highly
eﬀective copy, you should also:
— Collect feedback from them to gain a deeper
understanding
— Analyse the way they speak using their interactions
at various touch points

Keyword
research.

Keyword research is the process of ﬁnding the right
keywords that you’d like your site to appear for in
search results.
When researching keywords, we need to pay attention to:
Search Volume
(how many times they’re
searched per month)
Intent Relevance to your
product / service / brand
Competition
Level

Challenging the norm.
Keyword research isn’t as simple as it used to be. It’s now
less about individual keywords, and more about topics.
As natural language processing has evolved, so has our
need to think of more than just keywords. One of the
biggest shifts has been towards the use of co-occurrence
for keyword research.

Co-occurrence refers to keywords and phrases that are often
seen used in close proximity to each other in content.
Search engines identify phrases that are frequently used
together and use this as part of their algorithms.
To put this simply, search engines will expect to see certain
phrases grouped together for certain topics. If these are not
seen grouped together, they may see content as less relevant.
Co-occurrence.

Tools of the trade.

Everybody researches
keywords diﬀerently...
My research methodology is quite simple:
1. Identify your tool of choice
2. Consider top level keywords/topics that you want to go after -
perform keyword research for each of these
3. Break your top level topics into silos, then research queries for
those silos
4. Map keywords to intent, and therefore type of page they’ll need
5. Map their place in the site structure

YouTube
Optimisation.

You might already know...
… that YouTube’s algorithms are somewhat akin to Google’s earlier search
algorithms. They still place heavy importance on:
Keywords in titles
and descriptions
Click through rates
on videos
Session duration /
watch time
User engagement

View velocity
View velocity refers to how quickly users view your content after it has
been published. It has been proved to have the largest impact on
video rankings.

YouTube Keyword Research.
YouTube keyword research isn’t too dissimilar from traditional
keyword research. To ﬁnd your target keywords, you still
have to research:
— Search volumes
— Related keywords
— Search intent

YouTube Keyword Research - Platforms.

YouTube Optimisation Tips -
Keywords.
— Use your keyword in your title, and keep it
under 60 characters
— Use keywords & related keywords in your
description
— Use VidIQ to ﬁnd related tags for top ranking
videos for your keywords, assess search
volume for each and include the better ones

YouTube Optimisation Tips -
Engagement.
— Create a thumbnail that matches your title to encourage CTR
— Keep users on YouTube through end cards, series playlists and
suggestions in videos
— Promote your videos as much as possible across all platforms
— Hook users in your first 20 seconds - it’s the same concept as
headlines & leads in on page copy
— Plan your videos thoroughly - poorly planned content struggles
to keep users’ attention
— Edit your videos with different cuts, transitions & visual effects
to keep viewer interest

Why just stop at YouTube?
YouTube videos aren’t just discoverable through YouTube - they’re also visible in Google Search.
Optimise for them here too by:
Analysing SERPs for your target keyword. If it contains a video - there’s an opportunity
Analyse keywords/competitors for these videos, and create video content to replicate their success

Personalisation
and Retention.

Direct address always wins the game.
Personalisation gives us the opportunity to:
Speak directly to our
audience.
Connect with our audience on a
deeper level through contextual
references.

Personalisation Technologies.

But we shouldn’t always
rely on automation.

Blogs and
website content.

Landing pages or blogs?
There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to when to use blogs or
landing pages, but my personal preference is:
Landing pages
for evergreen, bigger
content.
Blogs / Posts
for reactive / topical content.

Featured
snippets.

What is a featured snippet?
Featured snippets are used to describe the prominent answer boxes that provide
snippets of content from a site directly in search results.
They usually appear in direct response to a query, and have been nicknamed
‘position 0’ by many in the industry.

Why do they matter?

How to optimise for them.
— Research potential featured snippets, and take note of
the structure present for each (is is free form content?
Bulleted lists? A table?)
— For each query you’re trying to achieve a snippet for,
ensure that you are 100% in tune with the intent
— Use schema markup
— Test consistently
— Cut out ambiguation - use NLP to help with this &
deﬁne clear relationships between concepts & entities

Introducing...

Natural Language Processing.

Beyond keywords.
Natural language processing takes content analysis to a
whole new level.
We used to be able to get away with researching related
keywords for text, now we have to do more.
Ditch the keyword-only focus, start focusing on topics,
entities and relationships in your content.

Google’s NLP API
Google’s NLP API has a demo aspect that allows you to
subject individual pieces of content to natural language
processing algorithms.
It’s a one-at-a-time process, but it can be opened in
multiple tabs and used as a comparison tool (albeit a clunky
one).

Key
takeaways.
1. Traditional copywriting can teach us a lot about
how to write content for web
2. Keyword research is more than just picking the
most searched for keywords
3. YouTube optimisation is based on keywords and
engagement - not dissimilar to search
4. Personalisation should be achieved through a
mixture of tech and copywriting
5. Pages are easier to optimise than posts, so
should be used for your most important content

Interactive Exercise
The NLP tool in action.

Technical SEO
Best Practices.

— To understand how to structure your site eﬀectively
— To understand the basic concepts of mobile ﬁrst
SEO
— To change our perceptions of crawl budget, and
how to understand/optimise it

Website structure.
Site structure is an often overlooked, but an extremely important part of technical SEO.
Google is an information retrieval system at its core, and information retrieval systems rely
on logical structures and content groupings to gain a deeper understanding of data.

Data points needed.
Site structure should never be an afterthought, and it
should never be implemented without research. The
two key areas you must explore ﬁrst are:
— Your target keywords & their ‘children’
— Competitor site structures

Keywords.
In an ideal world, keyword research would be conducted
in full before any site structure is planned & ﬁnalised.
It’s not good enough to guess - map out all of your
potential keywords, understand the terms that relate to
them and could be seen as ‘children’, and structure your
site accordingly.
Unfortunately, most keyword research is done
retroactively, so where do we go from there?

Competitors.
Competitor research is a key part of most areas of SEO.
Search engines deal with algorithms, and naturally there
will be some competitors that satisfy these algorithms
better than others.
Let go of your perceived competitors, and open your mind
to those ranking for your target terms. Treat this on a
SERP by SERP basis and reverse engineer.

An ontology encompasses a representation, formal
naming and deﬁnition of the categories, properties and
relations between the concepts, data and entities that
substantiate one, many or all domains of discourse.
Ontology • noun

Something to note about ontologies is that they don’t always stay static.
Relationships between entities evolve, and new ones are discovered over time.
It’s also unlikely that you’ll 100% nail your site structure with your ﬁrst attempt.
Test absolutely everything.

Mobile First.

What is it?
Mobile ﬁrst indexing refers to Google moving
away from their historic model of using
desktop content for indexing and ranking.
With the rise of smartphone usage, it now
makes sense for Google to use mobile
content for this instead.

Dec 18
50% indexed
As of December 18, Google confirm that
around 50% of the web have been switched to
mobile first indexing.
Jul 19
Mobile first indexing for all new sites
Google announce that as of July 1st, 2019, all
new sites will automatically be indexed using
mobile first.
March 18
Mobile First Index rolls out
After testing in December 2017, the mobile first
index rolls out to a small batch of ‘mobile
friendly’ sites.
Jul 18
Speed update
Google roll out the mobile speed update,
designed to impact only the slowest loading
mobile sites
Mobile first timeline.

Who should, and
shouldn’t worry (as much)

Shouldn’t worry
— Responsive sites
Should maybe worry
— M dot domains
— Dynamically served sites

Beyond the panic.
Fundamentally, mobile ﬁrst index doesn’t really change
the way in which we should think about SEO:
— Users still come ﬁrst
— Relevance is still a factor
— Algorithms still look for the same signals

Page speeds.
Site speed has always been a factor for desktop, so it’s
unsurprising that it is for mobile.
Google’s mobile speed update only aﬀected the slowest of
sites, but we should always try to make our mobile sites as
fast as possible regardless.
The best way to audit site speed on mobile for the biggest
gains is through Google Lighthouse.

AMP and PWAs.
If you’re looking to further optimise your site speed,
AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) can sometimes be a
good option. If you’re using WordPress, there are many
plugins that can help to implement this.
If you want to take your site to the next level, then
PWAs (Progressive Web Apps) are where you should
be looking to.

Crawl Budget.

If you ask Google...

If you ask
SEOs...

So, we need to change our
understanding.

Start with log files.
For any technical SEO, log files are an absolute must have piece of data.
Log files, or web server log files are records of the interactions that user
agents have with your website, and are stored on your server.
They can tell you who visited your site, when they visited, how they got
there, and much more.
They do need to be configured correctly, and this is something that your
web team can help you with.

Screaming Frog
Log File Analyser.
Screaming Frog Log File Analyser is one of the best, and
most cost effective log file analysis tools available.
It allows you to turn those log files into something
digestible, and to create actionable next steps from the
data that they provide.

Bonus...
Screaming Frog Log File Analyser integrates seamlessly
with their SEO Spider tool, and you can match URL data
with log ﬁles.
Connect the SEO Spider with GA, GSC and other APIs,
and you have a completely full picture of all of the URLs
on your site.

Log file analysis basics
— 404s and 500s
— Frequently crawled URLs
— Page size comparisons
— Traffic & bot correlation
— Log file & URL data discrepancies

Understand your directives.
Things that don’t affect crawl budget:
— Noindex tags
— Canonical tags
Things that do affect crawl budget:
— Robots.txt rules
— Redirects/htaccess file rules
𐄂
✓

Shift away from crawl budget, and
towards crawl eﬃciency.

Key
takeaways.
1. Site structure should be planned using
keywords and competitor research
2. Planning a site structure is all about creating
relationships
3. Mobile ﬁrst isn’t as scary as you might think
4. Crawl budget is ‘overrated’
5. Log ﬁle analysis doesn’t have to be overly
technical

Thank You.

Search Marketing For Travel - ABTA | 2019

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