Search Strategies That Are Industry Specific (Part 3)

Richard Baxter from SEOGadget – Travel SEO

How people search for flights in the UK

There are 6 main categories of keywords in terms of flights:

- generic (flights, cheap flights)

- destination (eg “flights to new york”)

- routes – v important (eg “flights from london to new york”) look at all the different variations eg “london to paris” is different to “paris to london”. A little trick is route based keywords are far less competititve than others and so therefore easier to target because not many people optimise for them.

- Brand (“easyjet flights”)

- Departure (eg “flights from manchester”)

Take your keyword lists and put all variations into Google Keyword tool – over a large scale of iterations you end up with a huge target long tail graph.

Then you can play around with new longtail variations of different types of keywords eg “cheap easyjet flights from Gatwick to Malaga”

How this translates into site architecture

You can map each ‘type’ of keyword against different levels of your sitemap architecture – eg hompage -> generic,

Site indexation issues

The problem with mapping out this kind of country based architecture is that you end up siloing pagerank down through your main destinations but there are ‘neighbour’ countries/categories that dont have much juice. To get around this you could use crosslinking (nearby/similar/recently reviewed suggestions/most popular). Also learn from bloggers – use tagging as a way to spread internal juice to pages that don’t traditionally get power.

Analysing competitiveness and competitor linkbuilding strategies

Richard pimped out Open Site Explorer to show how you can look at competitor backlinks. As a great example Kayak tools such as Top Pages on Domain are really useful for finding out about things they have had success with.

Phew! That was intense – years of experience at CheapFlights condensed into about 15 mins – crazy!

Make sure your Search Engine Optimisation is set up correctly. Any Web Design company worth their salt will advise you on the best methods