Travel blogs are all about excitement and, well, traveling…duh.
Many travel bloggers don’t just aim to make their readers’ vacations better, but they want their own experiences to thrive as well.
If you plan on making your travel blog a primary source of income while you play digital nomad across the world, then traffic is one thing you can’t live without.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been a proven method for generating a boatload of highly targeted traffic to websites for years to come. So many businesses use it, even law firms like one400 seo!
While it has definitely evolved over time, the result of SEO – that sweet, sweet traffic – has remained the same.
It’s now almost 2017, and the same old SEO strategies don’t work anymore. The game has changed a bit, and if your travel blog wants to keep the traffic streams open, you need to revamp your approach. Consider hiring an agency such as Raleigh Digital SEO, or go it alone. The choice is yours – but be aware, going it alone is very difficult. I’ve hired agencies in the past, and still do for certain parts of my SEO.
In this article, I’ve listed my 3 best, modern SEO tips that travel bloggers can use to their advantage this year.
Aim for Quality over Quantity
Internet marketing gurus like Noah Kagan of SumoMe and Brian Harris over at VideoFruit know a thing or two about modern SEO. That’s why every post they write for their businesses is nothing short of spectacular.
Search engines like Google are ranking websites higher for longer, more in-depth content. This is quite different than the old strategy of just publishing a bunch of smaller articles.
The latest research reveals that you should be aiming for at least 1,500 words or more when writing content for your website. This will help you rank higher for broader, more popular keywords, and for a ton of long-tail keywords.
Don’t just take my word for it though, use an SEO analyzer tool to spy on your main competitors. When you get the results, you will probably find that their highest ranking content is usually the most in-depth.
Only Write Useful and Relevant Content
The old days of writing phony content containing a high volume of targeted keywords are dead. Nowadays, Google knows when people are trying to game the system, and they’re getting penalized for it.
This is a good thing for you as a travel blogger. It means that giant corporations with huge marketing budgets have to abide by the same rules as you. The content you produce for your audience actually has to be relevant or useful, or else you face being dropped from the rankings.
When writing for your blog, make sure you do enough research so that you know the content you write is something your audience cares about. That way, when people search for those keywords, something useful and relevant to them actually pops up.
That’s SEO working as intended, and it’s about time things have turned out this way.
Only Link to High Authority Sites
This last tip is a short one, but powerful nonetheless.
Backlinks are still an effective strategy to boost your site’s SEO rankings, but you can’t just be throwing around links to anyone.
Search engine crawlers are looking specifically for material that links to already high authority websites. The reason for this is that those websites have proven to be useful and relevant to their markets. This is how an SEO Company knows that their work has paid off, when this crawling shows successful improvements in SEO ranking. By linking to them, you show the search engine lords that you know your stuff and are linking to other useful sources
So for the final tip, continue to use backlinks, but only link to high authority sources. A good rule to follow is to shoot for sites with a Domain Authority of 70 or greater. The Moz toolbar is a great way to measure this without much extra effort.
Conclusion
Trust me, I know the last thing you want to think about as a travel blogger is SEO. You want to stay focused on enjoying life and sharing your experiences with your loving audience.
That said, SEO is something that’s crucial to securing long-term traffic to your website. It’s theory changes often, so you need to make sure you’re always on top of your game. If you still need help with SEO, contact a site like https://mediafortress.com.au/seo/ who will be able to help you out! Follow the methods above and you’ll be well on your way to success as a travel blogger.