Don’t be invisible

Tom Mcloughlin, founder of travel marketing agency SEO Travel, shares five tips on how to improve your website’s visibility.

"You’ve had a beautiful website built, populated it with all your fantastic products and are ready for the masses to come and enjoy it. But there’s one problem, no-one knows about you.

Getting traffic to a website is the single most challenging thing that travel companies have on the web. Competition is fierce, and if you’re not doing something particularly out of the ordinary then you can’t rely on ‘going viral’.

There’s no doubt that building up traffic and awareness of your brand is a long-term slog, but there are things you can do immediately that will help give you a push in the right direction.

These things take time, but don’t let yourself be outfaced by the challenges and amount of options out there, just get started with the five things below and the ball will start rolling. Do these things and in a month’s time you will undoubtedly be getting more traffic to your website…

Move to https
Google has said that https is a ranking factor and it is only likely to get more influential. It also plans to highlight sites that are not on htpps as ‘insecure’ in the search results in future.

This is a slam dunk of the kind Google doesn’t usually hand out – make the most of it. Make sure you implement it correctly with this guide.

Invite guest writers
What’s better than getting traffic from content you don’t even have to write?!

Turn guest blogging on its head and invite people to write for your site rather than you writing for theirs. You get free content for your site that can drive traffic from search engines in future and, if you pick your contributors carefully, you’ll get social traffic when they share the post once it’s published.

Pro tip: Search for medium level bloggers who don’t yet have a huge profile and are clearly active writing guest blogs for other sites. They’re clearly on the lookout for guest writing opportunities, and you can offer that in return for them sharing the post once it’s live.

Improve your page load speed
How quickly your pages load impact how they rank in Google and other search engines. It also improves the experience for users who are becoming ever more impatient when browsing the web.

Put your website into Google’s tool here and follow the recommendations it gives to help your site load quicker. The main offenders are usually:

* Image Optimisation
* Caching
* Server Response Time

Mention influencers
You don’t have to get influencers to write content on your site to get them to share it. Just including them in your own content somewhere can sometimes be enough if you do it in the right way.

When writing blog content for your site incorporate links and mentions of influential people within the industry (bloggers, journalists, other companies etc). This could be quotes they have made in other articles, links to their website content or highlighting them as someone great to follow.

Then once you’ve published your content email them to tell them you featured them and thank them for their great advice/post/existence. Don’t ask them to share it, their ego will take care of that…

Pro tip: Write an extensive list post that includes lots of people like ’37 Travel Bloggers You Have to Follow on Twitter’ or ’43 of the Best Travel Photographers on Instagram’. The more people you feature, the more chance of getting lots of juicy shares and referral traffic back to your post.

Cut the chaff
People are often surprised to find that having lots of content isn’t always a good thing. If you have lots of pages on your site that aren’t of a high quality, this can actually hurt your overall site’s performance, even the performance of good quality pages!

Do a content audit of your site, and check your Analytics to find posts that are getting little to no traffic.

Take that list of pages and decide if it is ‘evergreen’ content that would be useful long into the future if you improved it, or if it is old content that will never be useful (e.g. a 100-word blog post about the company Christmas party four years ago).

Then delete and redirect the pages you identify as being garbage, and get to work improving the ones that have potential.

Depending on how big and how old your site is, this process can have a huge impact on your overall performance and help the genuinely good pages on your site perform much better, without actually changing them directly at all!

Bonus tip: go big!
Having said more content is not necessarily a good thing, longer content definitely is. When you are writing blog content for your site, ensure it is best in class and extensively covers the topic you’re addressing.

Ideally you should be aiming for at least 2,000 words for key topic areas (though this may vary depending on the topic). Your posts should be broken up with lots of sub headers and images, as well as links to other resources on your site and elsewhere on the web (especially influencers remember).

You’d be better off writing one post like this each month, which you can then promote, than churning our five short posts quickly that don’t offer anything above and beyond the other content that already exists on the web.

There you go, six for the price of five! These are all things you can go and put into action right away, and if you do so then in a month’s time you’ll be well on the way to getting more traffic and the ball will be rolling™

You can follow Tom Mcloughlin on Twitter here for regular tips, or read his case study on getting 11,304 extra visits in two weeks with content marketing here.