SEO for Travel Companies: Ranking Where Bookings Actually Happen

The travel industry has an SEO problem nobody talks about: most agencies optimise for the wrong keywords.

They chase “best beaches in Thailand” and “top 10 things to do in Rome” because the search volume looks impressive. Then they show you a traffic graph going up and call it success.

Meanwhile, your booking calendar stays empty. The traffic is real. The revenue isn’t.

The Booking Intent Gap

Here’s the disconnect. There are two types of travel searches:

Inspirational searches — “best places to visit in Europe,” “family holiday ideas.” High volume, low intent. These people are dreaming, not buying.
Booking-intent searches — “boutique hotel Queenstown availability,” “Bali surf camp book online,” “guided Milford Sound tour price.” Lower volume, but these people have their wallet out.

Most travel SEO campaigns focus almost entirely on category one. It’s easier to rank for, the traffic numbers look better in reports, and agencies can point to growth without actually growing your business.

The shift that matters: optimise for booking intent first, then backfill inspirational content that funnels readers toward those money pages.

What Booking-Intent Travel Keywords Look Like

Booking-intent keywords share common patterns:

Price modifiers: “cost,” “price,” “rates,” “how much”
Booking modifiers: “book online,” “reserve,” “availability,” “dates”
Comparison modifiers: “vs,” “or,” “compared to,” “which is better”
Specificity: Named locations, specific experiences, dates, group sizes
Commercial modifiers: “best,” “top rated,” “luxury,” “budget”

A hotel in Bali should rank for “Ubud boutique hotel with pool book online” before they worry about ranking for “things to do in Ubud.”

The first query has maybe 200 searches per month. The second has 12,000. But the first one converts at 8-15%. The second converts at 0.1%.

Do the maths. 200 searches at 10% conversion = 20 bookings. 12,000 searches at 0.1% = 12 bookings. And the booking-intent page costs a fraction to create and maintain.

Technical SEO Issues Specific to Travel Sites

Travel sites have unique technical challenges that most generalist agencies miss entirely.

Image-Heavy Pages

Travel runs on visuals. But every hero image, gallery, and destination photo adds load time. A typical hotel page with 15-20 high-resolution images can take 8-12 seconds to load on mobile.

Google’s Core Web Vitals penalise this aggressively. The fixes:

WebP/AVIF format with <picture> fallbacks — saves 40-60% file size
Lazy loading everything below the fold
Responsive srcset — don’t serve desktop images to mobile
CDN delivery for static assets, ideally edge-cached near your target markets

Pagination and Faceted Navigation

Hotels with hundreds of rooms. Tour operators with dozens of destinations. Activity providers with daily departure options. All of this creates complex URL structures that confuse search engines.

Faceted navigation (filters for price, date, location, rating) generates thousands of URL variations that can cannibalise your main pages. You need:

rel="canonical" pointing filtered pages back to the main category
noindex on low-value filter combinations
Strategic robots.txt rules to prevent crawl budget waste
XML sitemaps that include only your canonical URLs

Schema Markup for Travel

This is the single biggest quick win most travel companies miss. Proper schema markup gets you rich results in search:

Product schema with price and availability for bookable experiences
FAQ schema on destination and service pages
Review/Rating schema (aggregate ratings for properties)
Event schema for seasonal activities, festivals, departures
LocalBusiness schema for physical locations

A listing with star ratings, pricing, and availability badges in the search results gets 2-3x the click-through rate of a plain blue link. That’s free traffic from your existing rankings.

Building Content Architecture for Travel

The structure of your site matters as much as the content on it. Travel sites need a clear hierarchy:

Homepage
├── Destinations
│   ├── Country/Region pages
│   │   ├── City/Area pages
│   │   │   ├── Individual property/experience pages
│   │   │   └── "Things to do in [area]" guides
│   │   └── "[Country] travel guide"
│   └── Destination comparison pages
├── Experience types
│   ├── Adventure / Luxury / Family / etc.
│   └── Activity-specific landing pages
└── Blog (supporting content)
    ├── Seasonal content
    ├── Itinerary guides
    └── Practical travel tips

Each level supports the one above it with internal links. City pages link to their country page. Experience pages link to destination pages. Blog posts link to both.

This creates topical authority — Google recognises that your site comprehensively covers travel topics and rewards you with better rankings across the board.

Seasonal SEO Strategy

Travel is seasonal. Your SEO strategy should account for this, but not the way most agencies handle it.

The wrong approach: Create “summer holiday” content in June.

The right approach: Publish summer content in January or February. Search engines need 3-6 months to crawl, index, and rank new content. By the time people start searching for summer holidays (March-April), your pages are already established.

Build a 12-month content calendar mapped to search demand curves:

Month Published	Content Theme	Target Search Peak
January	Summer/peak season destinations	April-June
February	Easter & spring break trips	March-April
March	Adventure & outdoor activities	June-August
April	Autumn getaway guides	August-September
July	Christmas & New Year travel	October-November
September	Ski season & winter holidays	November-January

This means your “off-season” is actually your most important content production period.

What to Do Next

If you’re a travel company sitting on a site that’s either invisible on Google or ranking for all the wrong keywords, here’s where to start:

Audit your keyword portfolio. How much of your organic traffic comes from booking-intent keywords vs. inspirational queries?
Check your technical health. Run a Core Web Vitals test on your booking pages specifically. If LCP is over 2.5 seconds, you’re losing rankings.
Implement schema. If your pages don’t have structured data markup, you’re leaving rich results on the table.
Map your content gaps. What booking-intent keywords do competitors rank for that you don’t have pages for?

Or skip the guesswork. Get a free damage report and we’ll show you exactly where the gaps are — and what to fix first.