The travel industry pioneers – Hotwire, Priceline, Travelocity, TripAdvisor – are SEO juggernauts.With a massive amount of searches for vacation and travel planning, it’s one of the top categories online.And there’s a lot of money in SEO for them.In fact, organic traffic is the #1 source of traffic for travel brands:Just a few position increases for their strategic portfolio of keywords can mean millions of dollars in revenue.
So it’s fair to say they hire the best and the brightest of SEO talent to keep their traffic flowing.Knowing this, we can look to these sites for guidance for what’s still working in SEO today.And the results are surprising.They are still employing some traditional SEO practices that apparently are still working.Practices like text on the homepage; a bevy of internal links; and landing pages built for keywords.We’re going to look at what they’re doing – and we’re focusing on some basic principles that anyone can apply, not just companies with multi-million dollar SEO budgets.
1. Home Page Text
In my opinion, text content on the home page is one of the most overlooked SEO tactics.I mean, it’s been around forever, but plenty of sites ignore the home page and just use it as a pretty portal page.If you’re a paid-ads focused brand, or in the fashion industry – I get it.But for most sites that prioritize organic search, not enough are doing it.Hotwire takes advantage of the power of their home page’s link equity, and juices it up with keyword-rich text:
2. Home Page Internal Links
For most websites, the home page will be the single most-linked-to page on the site.So with all of this link equity on the home page, are you helping it flow to your most important commercial pages?Likely not.Most websites – large and small – do have their most important pages in their main navigation, but they’re likely missing out on linking to some key pages because of limited space.Travelocity has one of the most extensive home page internal link structures I’ve found in my research.It’s quite aggressive:
3. Internal Links in Footer
There are mixed messages given by commentators in the SEO industry about how optimized and ambitious you can get with footer links.Some say they’re a good way to ensure your key pages are linked to and crawled.Others fear that the links are either devalued, completely ignored by Google, or can send unwanted signals.Hotels.com has no fear and goes straight for it with exact match anchor text:
4. Text on Every Important Page
Do these huge travel sites even have the ability to hand-write content for every page on their site?It seems like a Sisyphean task – there are just too many pages.Nevertheless, on critical pages that are extra valuable, yes these brands will custom-craft content to rank higher. On less important pages, database-generated content will fill in the gaps.Kayak has taken the time to create text and faqs on their U.S. to Ireland flights page:

5. Landing Pages Built just for Organic Keywords
This strategy works oh-so-well. Perfectly pair up keywords with landing pages and scale it up.This is SEO 101, but what makes companies like Enterprise experts as this is the pure volume of pages required to create and manage.They nail it in this example and rank #1 for their Boston page:

6. Click-Worthy Title Tags
I love title tags – they’re so basic, but so controllable and powerful at the same time.They’re one of the best elements to A/B test for SEO because you can experiment with a large swath of them at once.If you believe in click-through rates impacting rankings, then that’s even more of a reason to optimize these to the fullest.Googling “hotels in paris” we see all of these brands have pretty well-optimized title tags:
7. Exact-Match Domains
This is a hard one to determine the impact. Google has clearly rollbacked the impact of exact-match and partial-match domains in recent years.But they do still have some positive signals, if not used in a spammy way.The proof is in the pudding:
