A key part of the tourism industry is spreading the word about your events, activities and tours, however, many businesses forget about the potential using some SEO best practices can have for your ticket listings.
If you’re a small or medium sized business and you want to increase the likelihood that customers will find your listings, we’ve put together this small guide to show you why investing some effort into keyword research could increase your ticket sales.
What is keyword research?
Keyword research is the practice of adding specific terms users are searching for in search engines like Google to your website content. This allows Google’s algorithm to better match your pages with a user’s query.
How can keyword research help your business?
Many tourism businesses don’t pay enough attention to their ticket listings and only include minimal, essential information in the event description. Search engines like Google value detailed content and the longer your content is, the easier it will be to fit more keywords in there.
When you include more relevant and specific information in your ticket listings it’s much more likely you’ll rank on Page 1 of Google for a specific keyword, such as “mini golf in Liverpool”.
Performing keyword research also allows you to tailor your content to specific keywords or simply tweak existing content so it ranks better, gains more website traffic and ultimately increases your ticket sales.
How to perform keyword research
Keyword research is all about identifying what pain points users are having and what questions or phrases they are likely to search for when looking for answers.
This is where you’ll need SEO tools at your disposal to see keyword trends, their monthly search volumes and whether they are considered easy or difficult to rank for. The higher search volume keywords aren’t always the best choice as often those keywords will be extremely difficult to rank for. Small and medium sized businesses will have better success rate targeting lower ranking and more long-tail keywords as it will be much easier to succeed at getting your content noticed.
Once you’ve identified your target keyword, it’s best practice to ensure your primary keyword is included in the title, meta description and first paragraph of your ticket listings, plus a few times throughout the page content. This way, it makes it much clearer to search engines what your page is about and whether that best answers a user’s query.
It’s important not to accidentally start keyword stuffing. Rather than adding multiple keywords into the same page so it becomes overloaded and unreadable, it’s best to choose a primary keyword, then 2-3 supporting keywords you’ll use in the body content. Google can now spot when keyword stuffing occurs, so it’s important not to overdo it. Sticking to a small set of keywords for each page is the key to success.
What are the best tools for keyword research?
Answer the Public
Answer the Public is a keyword research tool that allows users to discover what people are searching around a particular topic. Answer the Public will present you with three wheels of keywords based on questions, prepositions and comparisons for a varied data analysis around searcher intent. This is a great starting point for any campaign as it can immediately tell you some of the topics and pain points users have been having, which can feed into further analysis and potentially become blog titles.
The thing to keep in mind with Answer the Public is that you are limited to three searches a day without a paid subscription. So ensure that you type in a very broad term in the search bar such as “mini golf”. Sometimes if you go too specific with keywords or phrases, it might not pull up any results and you could risk losing your chance to use this tool for the entire day.
SEMrush or Ahrefs
SEMrush and Ahrefs are both an all-in-one tool for improving online visibility and discovering marketing insights. They are probably two of the best keyword research tools at your disposal and something that can unlock many insights during the content marketing strategy process.
For businesses committed to implementing an SEO strategy, it’s worth investing in a paid subscription for SEMRush or Ahrefs. These tools can guide you through keyword research, current website health, backlink analysis and more.
Keyword Planner
In order to gain access to Keyword Planner, you first need to set up a Google AdWords account. From there, you can access their “Get search volume and forecasts” tool. This is a really good tool for all stages of the keyword research journey, it allows you to list a number of keywords in one go and get access to their search volume, three month change, year on year change and competition levels to evaluate how hard it would be to rank for a particular keyword. Since keywords play an important role in ranking your content, you can still check out some additional blog post ranking tips for more success.
It is also a good idea to use this tool when finalising your list of keywords to ensure you’re choosing the right kind of keywords.
Keywords Everywhere
Similar to Answer the Public, Keywords Everywhere is a handy tool to have and is free to use. It is a Google plugin that you can download and add to your browser. The main benefit of this tool is that it will appear whenever you search a query in Google.
For example, if you were to search “mini golf”, down the right hand side of the page, you will see data that is pulled from the plugin.
It will show you how difficult it is to rank for the search terms such as “booking system” based on SEO difficulty and further categorised into on-page and off-page difficulty.
The downside to Keywords Everywhere is that it requires a paid subscription to see the search volume for any of these queries, however, you can gather a list of keywords that you believe might have potential into a list and run them through Keyword Planner or SEMrush to check the search volume and ranking difficulty.
When it comes to beginning your SEO journey, there’s a lot to take into consideration. Ultimately, investing some time into researching your industry, related topics and user queries is what can set you apart from your competition. Keyword research allows you to get your brand and experiences in front of potential new customers and drive higher conversion rates.
For a more comprehensive guide to beginning your journey with SEO, download our Essential SEO Guide for Tours and Activities…
