Starting a travel blog in 2024 offers an exciting opportunity to share your journeys and tips with the world.
However, simply writing about your travels isn’t enough to attract readers and rank high on Google.
In this guide, we’ll cover the practical steps you need to take to create a travel blog from scratch that not only showcases your adventures but also boosts your Google rankings.
Let’s dive in and get your blog ready to capture the attention it deserves.
5 basic steps to take to create a travel blog
Here are the 5 essential steps to start your travel blog.
- Choose a niche – Select a specific aspect of travel that you’re passionate about and that has an audience. Examples are budget travel, luxury travel, solo travel, or travel with pets.
- Pick a domain name – Choose a memorable, easy-to-spell domain name that reflects your blog’s focus.
- Select a blogging platform – Use platforms like WordPress for flexibility and control. Consider hosting options that provide reliable uptime and customer support.
- Design your blog – Customize your design to reflect your brand and make navigation easy for readers.
- Create essential pages –These are “About”, “Contact”, and “Privacy Policy” pages.
Creating a website is just half of the work. SEO takes much more time and effort.
How do you do SEO for a travel website and get search results?
Here are 6 top actions (tips) for you to get your travel blog to search results.
Don’t get bogged down in buying backlinks
Google is not just changing its algorithms. We are confidently moving into the future, where websites will occupy the leading positions with relevant content. We will not find websites with poor content that bought +100500 backlinks.
There are many cases when quality long reads, bringing 80% of traffic according to the Paretto rule, were indexed and reached the top of search results long before the site started buying links for them.
So, what links have more value for a travel blog?
Links from social networks, articles on niche websites, press releases, and expert comments for small portals are more valuable. Search engines are already smart enough to consider the link itself and its environment. Let the links be single, but they will be of high quality.
Live content is better than optimized fluff
Use the semantic core wisely. If you stuff the text with all your keywords, it does not guarantee you a top ranking, but with 100% probability will piss off the client. Dissatisfied visitors will leave the site and reduce your rating in the eyes of search engines (behavioral factors).
So, how do you write the travel content?
An interesting and soulful author’s text always wins over a faceless optimized fluff. Three or four mentions of keywords are enough to fit them into the text organically. Stories with a direct occurrence of the keyword and indeclinable endings – this is the last century. Search engines are interested in readable content.
Bookatrekking is a hiking website that puts a lot of effort into creating content and describing hiking destinations with organic keywords. Just analyze their article about Mercantour. It is written in live language without using too many keywords.
Thanks to a profound structure, it fully answers all the possible questions of the visitors. Images and videos help make their articles even more comprehensive and live. Inserting tour options helps visitors familiarize themselves with hiking tours and buy in several clicks.
30 low-frequency keywords are better than 1 high-frequency keyword
Work with low-frequency and high-frequency keywords. Most likely, your competitors have already densely processed HF, and to get at least in the top 10, you will have to make a significant effort. Collect less popular semantics. You can easily get to the first positions with it.
But you may have questions like, “Why must I use LF keywords if they will bring me few visitors?”
Simple math. Get to the top for 50 low-frequency queries and get 50×20=1000 visitors in a couple of months. Or you can fight with HF keywords competitors for half a year.
Working with low-frequency does not cancel the optimization for high-frequency keywords. On the contrary, thanks to improved behavioral factors, LF keywords become a stepping stone to promoting HF semantics.
Old school still works
Classic travel SEO schemes like careful meta tags, image attributes, SEO-friendly URLs, and internal linking still work great. If you don’t know where to start, start with them. Do everything according to the tutorial; it won’t be worse.
There is a sea of information on the web. You only need to sit tight on any SEO forum for a week to find the basic principles of SEO optimization, which have not changed for the last 10 years.
Your code must be clean
Check your site through popular programs like PageSpeed Insights to find junk in the code that prevents pages from displaying quickly. Your site’s speed affects how much interest your customers have in it.
And if I’m not a programmer, how do I follow code optimization guidelines? There is no secret here. Either learn or contact a specialist.
Fast indexing through social networks
A proven way to significantly speed up the indexing of new pages is to post a link to the page on social networks after article publication. This will not only give you a quality link but also help search engines rank you.
So, should I start my own group on Facebook?
Not necessarily. You can post links from your personal account. It’s even better if you can do it through specialized tourism groups. Check only their activity (groups with bots you do not need) because if you present your information “tasty”, you will get fast indexing and traffic.
Conclusion
Optimizers can really use the motto of assassins because what worked for one can fail on your project. There is no universal method. Try them all: black, white, rainbow. Your task is to get into the search engine results and keep a place there. However, if you decide to promote the site with doorways, trash traffic, and links from porn websites, be prepared for a ban and think through a strategy to get out from under it.
If there is no guarantee, you may turn to a paid optimizer. It’s a matter of your budget. But if you are going to, don’t choose a specialist from the advertising. Look for recommended SEO experts. Basic SEO can be done by any webmaster who has spent a little time studying the topic.
