Six travel companies getting their marketing right

Tom Mcloughlin, founder of SEO Travel, has pinpointed six travel companies that are getting their marketing right – and he says you can ‘borrow’ their ideas.

"Deciding where to spend your marketing budget is always a challenge, especially if you are outsourcing to third parties and unsure of what you will be getting for your money.

One way of working out the best approach is to look at who is doing good things and ‘borrowing’ some ideas!

I’ve been analysing the industry to find some companies that are excelling in some form of their marketing activity that others can learn from. You can see a sample of some of the best ones below, with a route to some more at the end of the article.

Villa Plus

Villa Plus have got their link building activity down to a fine art. With a combination of traditional PR, competitions, blogger partnerships and charity link-ups they have developed an exceptional link profile over the past year.

Their study of embarrassing parents on holiday was particularly effective, gaining coverage in the Mirror, amongst other places.

Santorini Dave

Dave is a fine example of how to structure your site and combine it with great content to perform extremely well. He has gone above and beyond with the quality (and quantity) of text on his pages, and these are all linked together effectively in ‘hub’ pages that clearly shows to Google what topics he is an authority on.

Check out his Santorini page for an example of what you should be aiming for with your content, and how to structure ‘hub’ pages.

TravelBird

This is a fine example of how a small company can get fantastic coverage and links on a wide variety of top-tier websites using a creative approach.

TravelBird have used content marketing incredibly effectively, with projects like their ‘Most Instagrammable Tourist Attractions‘ getting coverage on more than 150 websites.

Unfortunately they are not currently combining it with great content for traffic, but they have a fantastic foundation to build on with the coverage they have gained so far.

Adventure Alternative

If you ever doubted the impact you could have by resolving technical SEO issues, then Adventure Alternative should convince you. By resolving thin and duplicate content on their site, improving page speed and making a variety of other technical fixes their rankings have soared and traffic is more than double what is was at the same time last year.

Area Vibes

If you’re not averse to a bit of controversy, then writing negatively angled content can be a great way of getting links and shares.

Area Vibes have taken this approach, with their Most Hated Celebrities on Instagram post being shared more than 30,000 times. It’s something they’ve used many times on their blog and seen a lot of success, playing on the fact that social media in particular embraces a bit of negativity!

Many brands won’t want to risk this style of content, so if you’re prepared to it’s a great area to make the difference and compete with bigger brands.

HostelWorld

I’ve written previously about the importance of separating your content into different areas and not trying to make each piece of content everything to everyone.

HostelWorld have found this balance perfectly, with carefully crafted content to attract links, like their Hoscars series, and content aimed at attracting traffic like their Best Nightclubs in the World piece.

This combination has resulted in their traffic consistently improving and further emphasises the importance and effectiveness of this approach.

If you can combine a mixture of technical excellence and creative ingenuity in 2018 then you’ll be well on the way to success. Hopefully these examples have inspired you to take a new approach, or convinced you an old activity still has value.

If you’re interested in more examples to stir your creative juices then I’ve pulled together 15 more to learn from on the SEO Travel blog which you can read here."