93% of Americans plan to travel in 2024 according to the U.S. Travel Insights Dashboard, a report prepared by the U.S. Travel Association in collaboration with Tourism Economics.
A travel business would be a viable venture in 2024. However, 68% of travel and leisure sales are conducted online, making a travel website essential for your business.
How to Design a Travel Website
A well-designed Travel website will get your agency flying. If you want to start a travel agency, a website will get your business off the ground.
1. Determine Search Intent
Search intent is the primary reason why a user launches a search query.
Determining search intent is not as simple as identifying if:
- The user intends to buy.
- The user intends to look for information.
- The user intends to find a particular website.
For your website to move up Google search rankings, you’ll have to tighten up search intent and be more specific about what the user wants.
- Is the user looking for a specific brand, key features, or model?
- Does the user prefer to conduct research by reading blogs or watching videos?
- Does the user prefer a travel website with translation, 360-degree room views, or videos?
We’ll write a more informative article about search intent in the future.
For now, we’ll give you a few tips on how to determine search intent.
- Use a keyword research tool with a filter feature. Play around with the search parameters and see which keywords rank high for a travel business.
- There are keyword research tools that filter based on SERP. You can use the SERP filter to find keywords that rank well based on snippets or FAQs.
- Run a Google search and see which websites rank high.
For example, “best travel website 2024,” “top 10 travel destinations for americans 2024,” or “average travel budget for americans 2024.”
Explore the top three websites. Identify their common features and Unique Value Proposition (UVP).
Unless you determine search intent, your optimization strategies might fail if the keywords are irrelevant to the intent.
2. Choose a Good Web Host
For a restaurant, you need to rent space that provides piped-in gas, an exhaust system, drainage, sufficient water pressure, electricity, and proper waste disposal.
If your space doesn’t have those facilities, your restaurant will run into a host of problems.
The same goes for your website.
You want to run your website on a site that gives you enough power, sufficient server space, fast loading time, reliable uptime, dependable security features, and 24/7 customer support.
A travel website will have a booking engine, videos, images, blog pages, and plugins that can slow it down.
You want to get a web host that can support the demands of your users.
Price is an important consideration. However, it shouldn’t be at the expense of website effectiveness.
Your web host service provider might give you the best price but if the platform can’t adequately support your website, the income lost from foregone sales will outweigh your cost savings.
3. Go for a Custom Website Design
Can you build your website?
Yes.
You can find website builders with free templates and “drag and drop” features that make it possible for you to design a website.
The more important question is: Should you build your website or hire a professional web designer?
If you’re investing in a travel business website, invest in a professional web designer.
In business, first impressions last.
54% of users will leave a website if it loads more than five seconds. Will you take a chance using a template with unnecessary code or loading your website with too many plugins that slow it down?
Professional web designers have the knowledge and experience to build your website properly.
They run several tests to ensure the functionality of your website before it’s turned over to you.
Lastly, a custom website is proprietary to you.
Can you imagine if another travel agency used the same template as yours?
One design element that you might not prefer to customize is images.
It’s okay to use stock images for your website. Stock images are shot by professional photographers. You’re assured of beautiful, high-resolution, and high-quality images adorning your web pages.
Stock images are also inexpensive and save you time from developing customized images for your website.
4. Prioritize Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) involves a series of processes, techniques, and tactics to help your website become more visible to search engines.
How does SEO work?
Search engines utilize web crawlers or bots to scour the net for content that’s relevant to a user’s search query.
Once a crawler finds content that’s relevant to the search intent (there’s that term again!), it indexes the web page and explores other links embedded on the page.
Whenever a search query is launched, the search engine ranks the pages in its database according to its algorithm. That’s the page you see a few seconds after sending out your query.
Suffice it to say, that without SEO, your website will be as visible as Point Nemo – the most remote place on earth.
What are the qualities of an optimized website?
- Mobile-responsive Design: The website will easily set up, and adjust its layout and content to fit the size of any screen.
- Fast-download Speed: If your web page doesn’t download in under three seconds, the probability a user leaves (the bounce rate) increases from 32% to 123%.
- Excellent Navigation: A website that’s easy to navigate will entice users to explore the other web pages.
- High-quality Content: Your blogs, videos, images, and graphics must help users find solutions or information they’re looking for. To be useful, content must be relevant to search intent.
- Fully functioning Website: The parts of your website – the CTA buttons, social media icons, links, and other features – must be working 100% of the time to ensure excellent User Experience (UX).
These qualities are constant ranking factors in Google’s ever-changing search algorithm.
If you want to learn more about optimization, we can schedule you for a free 30-minute consultation.
5. Invest in a Reliable, Functional Booking Engine
A booking engine is a type of Software as a Service (SaaS) application used by businesses in the hospitality industry to help customers reserve flights, rooms, transportation, and other accommodations online.
Not all travel websites have booking engines because they can be complicated to manage, involve complex code, and slow down website speed.
However, a well-designed and properly managed booking engine can help your travel engine ring up sales.
Remember, the customer is on your website. The booking engine can close the deal for you. It turns your website into a one-stop shop for travelers.
If you’ve committed to invest in a booking engine, ensure that it functions properly for the benefit of its users.
6. Develop a Content Creation Strategy
We briefly touched on the importance of having high-quality content on your website.
There are many benefits to consistently creating amazing content:
- Enhances your reputation as an expert in the industry.
- Provides users with a steady source of relevant information.
- Establishes your brand as a qualified service provider in the travel industry.
- Builds trust with your audience.
- Increases the sales conversion rate of your website.
- Boosts your search engine ranking.
- Improves UX.
However, you just can’t create content on a whim. You must have strategy and purpose.
Here are tips on how to develop a content creation strategy that will deliver results:
- Find out the topics your audience is interested in. Keyword research can help uncover high-ranking topics in the travel industry.
You can check your website and social media analytics to identify the types of content that have the highest engagement levels.
Likewise, check the social media posts of other travel websites. Take note of the posts with the most likes, shares, and comments.
Run surveys on social media and through email marketing. Ask your followers if there are topics they would like you to cover.
- Find out how your audience wants your content delivered. Do they prefer more videos or blogs?
Does your audience prefer long-form or short-form content? Does your audience like graphics? Are they responsive to your newsletters?
- Find out which social media channels are most active. Social media is an effective medium for delivering content – but not all will deliver results.
Review your social media analytics and analyze the engagement levels of each social media channel.
Which channel has the highest number of followers? Which channel hosts content with the most views, shares, and likes? Conversely, which channels are performing below expectations or lagging?
Spend more time and resources on social media platforms that are delivering results.
Assemble a content creation team composed of writers, editors, an SEO specialist, and a graphic artist.
The SEO specialist is responsible for conducting keyword and topic research, preparing the content writing brief, setting up the content creation process, and tracking the performance analytics.
Content creation takes time and effort. As the proprietor of the travel agency, your time is best allocated to running and growing the business.
To save time and money, outsource content writing to third-party agencies with the knowledge and experience in creating content.
In that regard, keep us in mind!
Our work in the field of digital marketing has received citations and recognition from UpCity Marketplace and Clutch.
7. Include a Blog Page
Blogging must be part of your content marketing strategy.
The benefits of blogging cannot be overstated. Blogs have been proven to be an effective driver of website traffic.
Look at the latest statistics on blogging:
- 77% of Internet users or roughly 4.08 billion people read blogs daily.
- A business website that includes a blog page generates 55% more traffic.
- 54% of Fortune 500 companies have a blog page on their website.
“What should I blog about?”
Follow our tips from the previous to find out the topics your audience is interested in. However, “How-to” articles are an excellent go-to choice for blogs.
77% of survey respondents say “How-to” blogs are their favorite type of content.
Here are examples of How-to articles you can write:
- How to Save Money While Enjoying Your Vacation
- How to Plan Your Family Vacation
- How to Visit Disneyland on a Budget
- How to Find the Best Restaurants in a New Country
- How to Avoid Gaining Weight While on Vacation
Try to blog two to four times a month. Post your blogs on your social media pages. Don’t forget to include a backlink to your travel website on the blog and the lead-in post.
8. Incorporate a Sitemap
When a user lands on your travel website, he wants to find what he needs immediately:
- Flight schedules
- Airline ticket prices and special deals
- Recommended hotels
- Recommended tours per destination
- Customer support details: Contact number, email, and chat service
- Transportation arrangements
- Travel Advisories
- Traveler reviews
The user knows how to review and book flights and hotel accommodations. He knows how to contact customer service if he has questions. He knows where to find the best deals so he can compare them.
A sitemap on your website does the same thing for search engines. It helps the crawl bots understand your website: what it’s about and where to find content the user is searching for.
Without a sitemap, the crawl bots won’t be able to index your website and rank it on the search engine results page.
9. Include Internal Links
If you noticed, we included links in this article that will take you to pages and blogs on our website.
Internal links help keep the user on your website. They’ll get him to explore other web pages that are relevant to his search intent.
Internal links can lower the bounce rate – or the frequency a user clicks out of your page – and improve your website’s search ranking.
Follow the same internal linking strategy for your travel website.
- Link them to the Contact page with sign-up forms.
- Link them to direct sources of information. For example, if your site users want to learn more about Visa applications, include a link that takes them to the page with the required information and processes.
- Link them to blogs and types of content that provide the information they’re looking for.
Internal links keep the user engaged on your website. The longer the user stays on your website, the higher the probability of getting a sale.
Conclusion
Although consumers prefer to transact online, maintaining a brick-and-mortar agency is a good idea. It legitimizes and professionalizes your business. Consumers won’t think you’re running a fly-by-night operation.
A travel website will introduce another stream of revenue, improve customer experience, and keep your agency open 24/7 and accessible to anyone with Internet service.
It will help build your brand, enhance your online presence, expand your market reach, improve your reputation as a resource, and set your travel agency apart from your competitors.
If you don’t have a travel website or if your current website hasn’t delivered results, contact us, and we will help steer your business back on course.
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