Five company blogs to inspire travel firms

Tom Mcloughlin, director of SEO Travel, shares some of his tips on successful blogging.

"Blogging is something most travel companies know they should be doing and will be working on in some way.

However, many companies don’t know the best way to approach their blog, and often put time into it but don’t see any results, which leads to them losing enthusiasm and giving up.

This post aims to highlight some excellent examples of travel companies blogging in the right away to give you some inspiration, proof that it can work and encourage you to persevere.

But first, some general principles to follow:

* Quality over quantity – don’t feel like you have to write three posts a week and churn out lots of short posts just for the sake of it. Spend more time on fewer posts that are of a higher quality.

* There’s more than one type of post – not every post is made with the same objective in mind. You could write one post which is aimed at driving from traffic in search engines that will be very long and in-depth. Then you might write something shorter that features lots of people with the aim of getting lots of social shares. Don’t get sucked into thinking there is one formula for a successful blog post.

* Promotion is king – every post you write should have a promotion strategy. You should think about this before you start. The reason most blog posts don’t get any traffic or social traction is not because it is badly written, but because the writer doesn’t have a promotional strategy in mind.

Use these examples as a guide to the types of content that are successful and the different things you can do with your blog to get value from it:

Hostelworld

Hostelworld do a great job of creating content that targets the informational phrases their customers might be searching for.

They then ensure that the posts they create are in-depth and truly the ‘best in class’, such as this post which earns them lots of visibility around people searching for places to go in Italy:

https://www.hostelworld.com/blog/best-places-to-visit-in-italy/

They also create posts which attract links to the site, which will improve the performance not just of the post in question, but also the rest of the site across the board. For example, the two posts below have attracted links from 40 different websites between them:

https://www.hostelworld.com/blog/best-nightclubs-in-the-world/
https://www.hostelworld.com/blog/the-50-weirdest-foods-from-around-the-world/

Boutique Japan

You don’t have to be a huge company to create really useful blog content that drives quality visits to your site. Boutique Japan are doing just that, creating in-depth posts that are well targeted to their audience and rank well for highly relevant phrases:

https://boutiquejapan.com/best-hikes-near-tokyo/

They also seem to be getting local bloggers to contribute content which will undoubtedly help with the promotion of the posts and getting the brand more visibility to the audience of the writer when they share it:

https://boutiquejapan.com/food-in-fukuoka/

Hoppa

Hoppa also create some really extensive and well targeted posts on their blog. But the main strength that stands out for them is their awareness of the importance of promotion.

They have crafted posts with a clear outreach strategy and this has led to posts getting lots of links and social shares. They create a lot of infographics aimed at getting high quality links and this has been really successful for them, with the post below attracting more than 40 links, including Business Insider and Lonely Planet:

https://www.hoppa.com/en/discover/the-most-expensive-holiday-destinations-in-the-world-and-the-cheapest

They also run a Blogger Spotlight series which is an excellent way to engage with bloggers and help increase your visibility on social platforms.

Audley Travel

As with examples above, Audley are also good at creating well-targeted posts to attract search traffic. They also have an extremely strong social strategy though which is aimed at engaging bloggers and their customers.

They run a series called #MyLittleKnown where they ask their customers to tag photos from their trips on their social profiles, and then highlight winners each month.

This is a good idea in itself, but they take it to the next level by inviting popular bloggers to come on board as judges, thus creating another channel for promotion:

https://www.audleytravel.com/blog/2017/september/mylittleknown-competition

Skyscanner

Skyscanner are a prime example of a company who are on top of their SEO game. They have created posts to target a huge range of the most-searched for phrases in travel at all stages of the buying funnel and their traffic continues to flourish as a result:

https://www.skyscanner.net/news/where-to-go-on-holiday-in-november

They also have the technical formatting of their posts nicely set up so they can benefit even more in the search results by being pulled into the featured snippet at the top of the results, even if they don’t rank in the top position.

You can see that it is not just big companies that can be successful with their blog. If you are creative, ensure every post has some form of promotional strategy and persevere then you can also reap the rewards that come from a successful blogging strategy."