This is a viewpoint by Wulfric Light-Wilkinson, chief commercial officer at Quill.

Holidays may be all about rest and relaxation, but the online booking process for consumers, by contrast, is often complex and laborious. The vital information that travellers are looking for is scattered around the web across a multitude of websites.

Poor user experience and incomplete, inaccurate or out-of-date content adds frustration into the mix.

On average, UK travellers make over 120 visits to various different travel sites before booking – for Americans and Canadians it’s even higher at 140 and 161 respectively.

Online travel bookers are also increasingly device-agnostic, with 94% of US leisure travellers switching between mobile and desktop as they plan a trip, interacting with 700+ digital touch points and conducting 52 online searches over the course of 5-6 months prior to booking.

In this context, and with the unprecedented levels of online competition, travel firms struggle with differentiation and cut-through. Streamlining the booking journey – providing the information the customer needs at each stage of the process – is the surest way to keep them on your site and increase conversions.

There are several key types of content that online travel businesses should be focusing on to expedite the booking journey.

Stage 1: Destination discovery

 The starting point for many holiday bookings is deciding where to go, often with a top-level generic search for a destination-related topic, for example ‘best places to go in Italy’ or ‘cheapest city breaks in Spain’. According to research from Google, 51% of consumers use destination-related search terms when first starting to plan a holiday.

With that in mind, inspirational destination recommendation overviews and guides are a crucial tool, both from an SEO perspective – in terms of capturing traffic for high-volume searches relating to destination discovery topics – and helping browsers to decide whether a destination ticks their holiday boxes.

These guides need to provide genuine value to the user. They should be detailed and authoritative, covering useful logistical details such as local currency, transport options, airport locations and weather, as well as more inspiring aspects of the destination.

Importantly, guides can and should should also be enriched with internal links that direct users on to the next stage of their booking journey, including hotel, resort and excursion pages.

To maximise the SEO performance of these pages, there are a number of granular considerations travel businesses should bear in mind in the context of Google’s ongoing changes to its SERP functionality, including:

• Structured data and dynamic features:

Google has been steadily introducing a raft of dynamic features to its results pages, ranging from simple additions such as trending tweets to local packs, image packs, knowledge panels, reviews, shopping results and related questions.

Content that is surfaced within these features is positioned more prominently on results pages, and therefore yields a higher click-through rate – making these positions highly valuable.

To take advantage of this opportunity, travel brands need to be optimising web pages with ‘structured data’ – on-page markup that enables Google to better understand the information on the page, and then use this information to surface the content in the most appropriate position within search listings. By producing content that lends itself to these dynamic features – and then optimising pages with structured data – brands can secure top billing in search results to increase organic traffic.

• Featured snippets and voice search

Also referred to as ‘instant’ or ‘quick’ answers, featured snippets are just one of the dynamic features rolled out by Google; typically surfaced in response to simple question queries starting with terms such as ‘what’ and ‘where’. These content snippets (which usually appear in the form of a short paragraph or bullet list) have taken on a new level of significance with the emergence of ‘conversational commerce’ and virtual assistants such as Alexa and Siri to search and shop online.

Now, when consumers use a voice assistant to conduct a ‘what’ or ‘where’ search, the featured snippet is the content that will be audibly read out to users in response to their question.

Again, given the brand visibility and traffic benefits associated with securing this position, it’s important that pages are optimised with content and structured data to maximise this potential.

• Mobile-first and page speed

As of this March, Google began its rollout of mobile-first indexing for domains, meaning that the search engine has started prioritising the mobile versions of websites over their desktop counterparts for indexing, caching and ranking in its search results.

In a closely related move, the prior launch of Google’s ‘Speed Update’ this January has also meant that pages with slow loading speeds that deliver a poor experience on mobile are now seeing their rankings drop as a result.

Travel companies therefore need to know that, from a technical and content perspective, all pages must be constructed through a mobile-first lens to avoid a future decline in traffic and rankings.

Stage 2: Trip planning

Once the customer has decided broadly where to go, the next step is usually considering the finer details of flights and accommodation. Browsers often kick off this process with searches for slightly more specific destination-related terms, for example ‘top hotels in Kos’ or ‘flights from London to Stockholm’.

To that end, it’s hugely important that online travel businesses have a robust SEO strategy that includes intelligent use of category and landing pages to capture organic traffic from these valuable searches (which demonstrate a high level of intent to purchase).

To deliver a meaningful traffic uplift, category pages must be optimised with high-quality category description or guide content that genuinely informs and helps users – nudging them forward to specific hotel pages or flight comparisons, for example – while also being enriched with associated key words, phrases and synonyms that indicate relevancy to Google.

Pages should also be optimised according to the same principles discussed above, factoring in the importance of structured data, featured snippets and mobile-first optimisation.

This guide to spa hotels in Northern Ireland from Trivago is a highly targeted piece of guide content that serves a dual purpose of improving SEO metrics while providing expert recommendations and driving the user forward to the next step in the booking journey: a hotel price comparison.

Stage 3: Decision-making and conversion

At the latter stages of the purchase journey, once the consumer has settled on a destination and the logistics of their trip, the final decision is often where exactly to stay – which is where accommodation descriptions play a pivotal role in driving conversions.

Price and location will always influence the consumer when it comes to accommodation decisions. But description content remains influential and should be as detailed as possible, anticipating and answering the most common queries that consumers are likely to have.  Details such as the dimensions and features of rooms, style and atmosphere of the hotel/resort, dining and entertainment options, check-in times, house rules and any inclusive perks (for example, free Wi-Fi). This hotel page fromThomas Cook is a good example.

For optimal performance, travel brands should also ensure hotel pages are enhanced with a range of imagery (and ideally even video) to capture the potential bookers’ imagination. It’s also important, from an SEO perspective, to avoid the trap of simply recycling boilerplate copy supplied by hotels – as this is likely to be duplicated on a multitude of pages around the web, negating its visibility potential in organic search results.

Takeaways

In today’s hugely cluttered travel market, the key to beating the competition lies in offering the best possible customer experience and streamlining the purchase journey to remove friction. Unique, informative, search-optimised content that acts as a navigational compass and answers your customers’ key questions is absolutely key to achieving this objective – ensuring your website doesn’t become just another discarded browser tab among hundreds.

This is a viewpoint by Wulfric Light-Wilkinson, chief commercial officer at Quill.

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