A Crash Course in Keyword Research for Travel Writing

The travel industry is highly competitive, and the best way to get seen amongst the rest of the competition is to target a specific area and audience. Keyword research can help you identify this niche by giving you insight into how many people are searching for certain terms and phrases, and help determine whether you can attract an audience by targeting these.

We’ve put together this post outlining how keyword research can help your travel company, explaining how to find keyword phrases, the best tools to use, and how to assess which phrases you should target. Get ready to take notes!

What is Keyword Research?

Keyword research is a big part of SEO, but it’s also just a useful way of gaining insight into what an audience is searching for. Put simply, it’s a practice used to find the exact terms that web users put into search engines when looking for information, services or products. 

By identifying the phrases that potential customers use to search for your product or service, you can create written content that matches these terms and will reach a greater audience. In the travel industry, this might include finding out which countries are being searched for by the most people as holiday destinations, whether hotels or hostels are more popular in your chosen location, or what kind of holiday activities your target audience is searching for.

Identifying keyword phrases is also incredibly useful when building a website, as if you aren’t including the terms that people are searching for then it’s unlikely any of your target audience will be able to find you online. Keyword research informs everything from URLs to title tags and landing pages and is essential if you want to grow your travel business and ensure your online presence makes an impact.

Whether you have specific ideas about the written content you want to produce or are just looking for more insight to develop your business, keyword research is not to be ignored.

The Longtail: What it is and How it Can Help

If you’re reading up on keyword research then sooner or later you’re going to come across people talking about targeting the longtail. This isn’t a mythical creature of the SEO world; it’s a group of terms that you’re going to get very familiar with if you’re looking for ways to get your site ranking on page one for numerous keyword phrases.

One of the most common mistakes that people make when approaching keyword research is to find the words and phrases that the largest number of people are searching for and pick these are the terms they want to target. But wait, I hear you cry, isn’t that what keyword research is all about?

Yes, it is. But it’s not as simple as just choosing popular search terms. The problem with these kinds of keywords, which are usually very short, open phrases that have thousands of searches each month, is that they are incredibly competitive and hard to rank on page one for. 

You still want to target these keywords on your site with landing pages, but they’re unlikely to be the content that gets you ranking. Instead, you want to create travel content that targets longer, more specific keyword phrases that fewer people will be searching for, and which you’ll have a much better chance of reaching page one with. These phrases are what we mean when we talk about the longtail. 

To illustrate what we’re talking about, consider you’ve got a travel website that sells holidays in Croatia, and you’re doing keyword research to inspire some more content for your site.  

• The term “Croatia holidays” gets 17,000 searches a month from the UK alone
• There are over 40,000 search terms that include the word ‘Croatia’

Even if most of those other terms only have 10-50 people searching for them every month, if you feature a lot of those phrases you will still be able to get a high number of users coming to your site. Instead of putting all your energy into trying to rank for “Croatia holidays” you could create content around the longtail phrases such as “cycling in Croatia”, “best party places in Croatia” and “Croatia in October” which your target audience might still be searching for, and which will generate a high number of website visitors together. 

It’s a tricky concept to get your head around at first, but once you start your keyword research you’ll start to get an idea of which high-volume phrases to avoid, and which longtail phrases are bound to bring you organic traffic.

Keyword Topics and Phrases: What’s the Difference?

Our favourite approach when it comes to finding longtail keyword phrases is to first identify keyword topics, and then use a keyword tool to generate related phrases from this. This helps you to map out all the keywords that are relevant to your website and niche, and decide how you are going to incorporate these into your content. 

Using a Croatian holiday website as an example again, you might identify from an initial search that “islands in Croatia” is a good topic to feature on your website. Longtail phrases you might then generate from this include: 

• “best islands in Croatia”
• “most beautiful islands in Croatia”
• “islands in Croatia near Dubrovnik”
• “best beaches in Croatia islands”

Once you’ve got a good list of all the phrases within your topic, you can start to plan the content you’re going to produce to target these phrases. 

What Tools Do You Need for Keyword Research?

There are many free and paid keyword research tools that you can use to find this information and get started on creating optimised travel content. 

Some useful free tools are:

• Keywords Everywhere – A Google Chrome plugin that gives you keyword ideas when you type a search term into Google or other sites
• Answer the Public – A tool that analyses the autocomplete data from search engines and then produces keyword ideas from this data 
• Soovle – Enter a phrase and this tool gives you a range of keyword suggestions based on data from different sites 

There are a lot of free SEO keyword tools out there, and if you put in a lot of time you can generate a good amount of keyword data to work with. However, if you’re serious about optimising your site with keyword research then it is definitely worth investing in a paid keyword tool which offers much more detailed analysis and a wider range of keyword research features. 

We’ve been in the SEO game for many years now, and by far the best keyword research tool that we’ve come across is Ahrefs. We’re not being paid to say that; it’s the tool that all of our writers use and the one you’ll need to follow the rest of the advice in this post. 

The good news is that Ahrefs offers a 7-day free trial for $7, so if you’re a bit strapped for cash you can commit a week to do all of the keyword research you’ll need for a huge amount of travel content. You don’t just get a keyword tool with Ahrefs as well; you can also do competitor analysis, get data on different links, and see how well your site is already performing in several different areas. After 7 days with this tool, we reckon you won’t want to give it up.

However, if you’d rather continue using free keyword tools for your research, here’s a blog post from Ahrefs itself detailing how to do just that:

10 Free Keyword Research Tools

Ahrefs: A Quick Guide to Finding Phrases

If you have decided to go forward with using Ahrefs for your keyword research, then there’s a range of different features you can use to get useful data. 

The Keywords Explorer Tool

The Keyword Explorer Tool on Ahrefs lets you enter a ‘seed’ keyword and then generates a huge range of different keyword ideas from this. The tool we use the most with this feature is ‘Having Same Terms’, which generates keyword phrases that include your ‘seed’ keyword phrase, with the words in any order. 

You can narrow down these results further by setting a maximum search volume, a minimum number of words in a phrase, or highlighting phrases that include a certain term. You can also gain more ideas by looking in the ‘Parent Topic’ column, which shows the keyword topic that Ahrefs thinks each phrase is part of. These topics can then be fed back into the ‘Having Same Terms’ search bar to generate even more ideas, and so on…

This tool alone will be able to give you a huge list of longtail keyword phrases to get started with, but another great way to find competitive keywords is by using the Ahrefs Site Explorer Tool.

The Site Explorer Tool

The Site Explorer Tool on Ahrefs allows you to see SEO data for any website on the internet, and we’re particularly interested in the ‘Organic Keywords’ section. The best way to use this tool is to enter the URL of a competitive site for your business or the top site that comes up when you search one of your target keywords. 

Clicking on the ‘Organic Keywords’ tool will bring up all of the keyword phrases that this website ranks for, telling you how many people search for this phrase a month, and what position the site ranks for this keyword. Most sites generate pages and pages of keywords that will probably be related to the topics you are searching for, so it’s a great way to find longtail phrases that you can hopefully rank over similar sites for. 

You can repeat this process over and over again for all of the websites on page one for a certain target keyword phrase, and then choose another target phrase and keep going!

It’s also worth looking at the ‘Top Pages’ section of the Site Explorer Tool, which shows the pages on that website that are getting the most traffic. You can then click through to see the keywords that each of these pages are ranking for and bingo! Another wealth of keyword ideas to explore.

How Competitive Are Your Keywords?

We’ve already given some insight into how to judge whether a keyword is going to be easy to rank well for when we talked about the longtail, but you might still be wondering how else to know if you’ll manage to rank for a certain phrase. Unfortunately, the honest answer to that is you can’t know for certain. 

Ahrefs gives you a ‘Keyword Difficulty’ score based on data that tries to predict how easy it will be to rank for a keyword, but this isn’t particularly accurate. Sometimes tiny websites will be ranking on page one amongst much larger ones, and sometimes a keyword phrase can seem like a winner but only get you to page two.

The best advice you can follow is to try not to get too caught up in worrying about rankings, and just produce quality travel content that is relevant to your target audience and matches the content that is already ranking on page one. Following this advice consistently will produce results after a while, and user volume generated by longtail phrases will start to add up. 

Summary

If you only take one thing away from this post, it should be that keyword research plays a vital part in how well your travel website is going to rank on search engine results pages, and can have a massive effect on the volume of organic traffic you receive every month. SEO is one of the most reliable ways to grow your business, and the best news is that you can start learning how from the comfort of your own laptop!

Just seven days of keyword research can produce enough data to generate high-quality, optimised content for at least a year, providing results you won’t be able to argue with. Don’t just second guess what you should be writing about; let keyword research show you exactly how to answer the questions your target audience is asking and provide them with the travel content they’ve been looking for.

We’ve also written a guide for writing travel content that is optimised for SEO, so if you’d like to learn how to take those keyword phrases and turn them into exceptional pieces of travel writing, you can read that here.