We’re all familiar with the five stages of travel: dreaming, planning, booking, experiencing and sharing. But did you know the key to your destination’s success in meeting travelers in all 5 stages through search is your content?
Google is increasing its focus on customer experience over standard search engine optimizations, and have set their sights on content strategy. That means your destination needs to provide not just more content, but quality content in engaging ways. Writing content to simply have an updated blog will no longer keep your site ranked throughout the traveler search funnel.
You will need to start becoming the solution for every stage of your potential visitor’s journey, while allowing them to interact and connect with the content. Creating content that solves their travel problems, motivates them to book, and connects them with the destination on an emotional level— that’s the way to win them over.
TIPS TO A BETTER CONTENT STRATEGY:
- Begin your content journey with the questions your travelers commonly have and build your content strategy around answering those questions.
- Take it one step further and adapt to your target audience’s voice to engage the user and guide the user to the next action.
- Change the way you do keyword research. Understand your visitors’ intent of the keywords they are searching. What do they ultimately want answered?
- Find innovative ways to deliver your content - content maps and experience maps – to engage your visitor.
- Use video to tell your destination’s story, connect to locals, and show a visitor what a trip to your destination could ultimately be.
- Quality over Quantity. It’s better to write one excellent blog every few months than a superficial post every two weeks.
- Add non-traditional calls to action on the first touch pages from search to lead to next steps/ new thoughts within your website. This will keep your visitors engaged and utilizing you to be proactive through their planning/booking journey instead of being reactive to their searches.
After you do all that, start preparing for what’s next. One big potential opportunity is voice search. Although voice search has been the big buzz word over the last two years, traditional search is still leading the way for booking travel. However, more and more people are using voice search for local businesses, and it’s a great way to reach your target audience in the experience stage. It will keep them engaged through to their visit. Even hotels, like Marriott, are adding Amazon Alexa to their room amenities allowing visitors to utilize voice search while traveling.
For more innovative ways to stay relevant with your audiences, drop us a line. We can help you become the leader before competitors get ahead of you.
