10 Dos And Don’ts For Building A Successful Travel Website
If the building blocks of your tourism website aren’t properly assembled, you’ll struggle to get the site to rank as well as it should.
Your website is one of the most valuable assets you can have as a travel brand.
Potential customers can browse available packages, read testimonials from previous guests, and get a taste of the experiences on offer through engaging imagery and text.
The benefits of designing a site from the ground up are widespread when it comes to ranking high on search engines.
Whether you are a new travel brand that needs a website to start your business journey, or are redesigning your site to reap the benefits of a custom design, here are ten dos and don’ts for building a successful travel website.
Do you want to start with search engine research?
Every well-ranking website design begins with search engine research.
Before you decide on any of the pages or content that is going to be included on the site, you need to know which factors will affect how your site ranks on search engines.
The topics that landing pages are focused on and the kinds of questions that content needs to answer are influenced by the topics that are researched and the target phrases that are used.
They are built to make it easy for search engines to understand the intent of the people they’re searching for.
It’s one of the reasons why using a website builder template or trying to cut corners with website design can be a problem.
Unless the website for travel is specifically designed to be search engine friendly, you will be in a bad spot from the start.
Don’t choose a bad hosting platform.
It can be tempting to choose a generic hosting platform if you want to get a new travel website up and running quickly.
These are often advertised as simple ways to build a functional website, and while this is true on the surface, there are a lot of problems that lie beneath.
When you use drag-and-drop website builders to build a website, you end up with a lot of unneeded code and dependency in the site’s back end.
This affects how long it takes for pages to load and how smoothly the site runs, which will stop the site from ranking highly on search engines, and potentially frustrate users that want to book a holiday or make a purchase
Bad platforms can limit the features you can add to your site later on.
It can stifle creativity when you are trying to come up with the best travel website design, but it can also haunt you in the future when you can’t expand your site.
Do you make use of stock image databases?
I recommend that you opt for a custom-built design for your travel website, but it can be expensive and time consuming.
The good news is that there are a lot of ways you can modify the template on the site to make it look different.
The photos on your travel website are an important visual element. Eye-catching, immersive images are a great way to encourage users to picture themselves on a trip or in your accommodations, and one of the key ways you will engage them.
It is possible to have unique photographs on your website, but it is not always possible if you are building a website for a different location. There are lots of stock image databases you can use.
Unsplash is a great choice if you are looking for free stock photos. Pexels and nixay are both good, but they only have a limited selection of images to choose from.
If you’re looking for more variety, paid sites like iStock and Shutterstock have reasonable prices.
Don’t try to cut costs with a bad booking system.
There is a booking system on many travel companies’ websites. Some booking platforms can have a negative impact on a site’s search engine ranking.
It is important to do your research into the best kind of booking system for your travel website, as many can be difficult to use, time consuming to update, or are just built with a lot of unnecessary code that can slow down this section of the website.
Some of the best booking software for travel businesses can be found in this list.
The WP travel engine.
Travel pay outs.
Woo tour.
In some cases, you may be better off building a custom booking system that is easy to modify and let customers book what they want.
If you’re already investing in a unique travel website design, building a custom booking system is another cost. It’s likely to save you a lot of time and money in the future by making this booking system simple and specifically designed for your brand.
Plan in time for content creation.
Content creation may be included in the website design package that you pay for.
It is important to consider how long this is going to take because many brands prefer to write their own content.
Once you have a plan of the site structure and how many pages are going to be built, you can begin writing content.
If your designer asks you to write the content first so they can design the pages around this, it might be a good idea to see template designs for different landing pages.
If you want your travel website to rank highly when customers search for your offering, you need to research the topic first.
This gives you a list of popular, relevant phrases that you can include in your travel website content that will help the site to rank higher and ensure that genuine interested web users are arriving on the pages they’re looking for.
Ahrefs is one of the paid and free research databases that I like the most.
These databases often have a tool that allows you to enter a word or phrase and then create a list of related words and phrases.
You want to focus on the phrases that indicate the user is looking to book a trip, visit a location, or get a recommendation.
It is a general phrase with broad intent, but it is also likely being searched for by someone planning a holiday.
If you compiled a list of relevant phrases, you can either write landing page content that includes these phrases, or create pages of blog posts that answer questions or focus on a topic with high search volume.
As well as using Ahrefs to find popular travel topics, you can also use search engines to find seasonal traffic.
Don’t forget title tags and meta descriptions.
When it comes to website content creation, you need to think about more than just the landing page text.
A website’s title tags, meta descriptions, and headings need to be carefully considered and written.
Every landing page needs a unique heading structure and you want to fit target phrases into each of them. This structure will make it easier for users to navigate a page and will help search engines rank each page more easily.
The title of the page is the first thing that should be used to create aheader structure. You can use the research to find similar phrases that can be used as headings.
For example, a page might have a title like ‘Luxury Family Safari Holidays’ with subheadings like ‘How to Book a Family Safari’ and ‘What to Expect on aSafari Holiday.’
When a website is loaded up on a browser, the title tags appear at the top of the screen, explaining the title of the page.
It is important that these are clear so that the user understands the purpose of the page and that they impact the page’s search engine ranking.
The brand name and sometimes a key phrase are included in title tags. To build on the previous example, the title tag could be “Luxury FamilySafaris”
A meta description is an element that summarizes the content of a page and affects how well it ranks for its target phrase. A concise description of a landing page and relevant phrases should be included in the meta description.
An example would be, “Witness a side of South Africa you’ve never seen before with a luxury family safaris holiday from M+J”.
Do you want to implement a sitemap?
A navigation point that directs how to get to each of the landing pages on your website is provided by a Sitemap.
Search engines need a way to quickly understand what the website contains if you want them to find you.
bots crawling your site to decide where to rank it on search engines will try and interpret your internal links It is best to have a sitemap in the early stages of your travel website.
You need to think about user experience when you build a sitemap.
Potential customers on a travel website will want to browse the experiences you have on offer, see pictures and videos of your service offering, read testimonials to gain social proof, and then look at how to book a trip.
If you want your website to be easy to navigate, you should design it so that internal links and calls to action are included.
Don’t link internally.
Internal linking isn’t a substitute for a sitemap, but it’s definitely something that you should avoid.
It’s a good idea to internally link landing pages to one another in order to direct users to different pages and keep them on your site.
Search engines like to identify the key pages on a site if there are lots of internal links.
New pages can start ranking for phrases faster by being linked with existing pages that already rank well.
It is very easy to put internal links in the footer of a website. If you want to reap the benefits of this approach, you should include internal linking on each landing page.
If the anchor text is not related to the page that it is linking to, the link will be seen as fake.
Do is to make your images look better.
There is more to it than just written content.
The size of the images on a travel website can affect how quickly a landing page loads and how well it ranks.
You shouldn’t compromise on image quality, but you should downsize each image before it’s uploaded to save space
Ensuring that the title and alt text of the image describe what it is can be used to improve it. Images should be relevant to each landing page so this alt text can be used to add more phrases.
Don’t use javascript elements too much.
There are elements that impact loading speed, but they can also cause problems with how quickly a landing page loads.
Both can be useful, but only if you choose the right one.
It is possible to add a variety of exciting features to a travel website, but it will be hard to load a page in under a couple of seconds if you overload it.
If you want to get what you want, you need to consider the benefits of each tool before adding them to your website.
Javascript can make a website more dynamic, but these elements are resource heavy and will affect how quickly a page loads.
If you use a lot of these elements on a page, you will lose the ability to use javascript if it isn’t enabled.
There is a summary.
If you don’t know what you want from a new travel website build, it can cost a lot.
It is recommended that you get a clear set of guidelines of what to prioritize and avoid when it comes to designing a new website for your travel company, so that you can make sure that your site ranks well on search engines and brings in lots of business.
There are dos and don’ts for travel websites.
Don’t use travel websites.
It’s a good idea to go for a bad hosting platform.
Stock image databases could be used.
It is possible to cut costs by using a bad booking system.
Time is of the essence for content creation.
Don’t use title tags or meta descriptions.
Don’t use Javascript elements.
There are more resources available.
The image is from REDPIXEL.PL
