Today’s travellers are savvier than ever, and they want to make informed decisions about their holiday experiences.

A new age of traveller is here – one that doesn’t rely on OTA and trade agents to plan and book for them. Where once their first touchpoint with your business may have been a confirmation email, these days it’s long before money has even changed hands.

Now, more than ever it is imperative to ensure your website offering is up to scratch, delivers excellent brand visibility on Google and provides customers with the content they need, when they need it to allow them to book. The secret to all of this? An integrated Content & SEO strategy.

Content Marketing or SEO: Why You Need Both

SEO (search engine optimization) refers to the process of making your website more visible on Google, therefore increasing not only the quantity of (FREE) traffic, but also the quality of people your website is able to attract.

Content Marketing, on the other hand, focuses on using quality, relevant content to inspire your target audience to take them on a journey move through the travel research and conversion funnel to the point of booking.

Whilst SEO drives traffic, content drives bookings. Driving traffic to a website without any content is pointless, as is having a website full of content with no traffic. On their own they aren’t powerful, integrated into a holistic SEO & content plan they create a powerful, evergreen digital channel for your business.

The key to great content

Content should take the user on a journey, from inspiration to education and onto booking. To be found in the first place, content needs to be visible and discoverable by a user – this is just the start of the customer journey. As people dig deeper into your website during their research phase, delivering relevant and timely content based on your audience’s travel research process and path to purchase is going to be a key factor in turning them from website users into customers.

Content – or storytelling – drives best bang-for-buck when it’s part of a holistic digital strategy for tourism. When Maverick builds you a content strategy, we take into account your performance in Google organic rankings, the types of stories and points of interest that surround your brand, pain points or booking blockers your customers have when booking and the type of traveller that fits your target market.

A key part to maintaining your great Google rankings is continually creating new fresh content throughout the year – sites that are regularly updated get rapidly crawled and indexed by Google, ranking higher than repetitive, old, or low-value content. Not only does it benefit your Google rankings, but it gives existing customers a reason to come back to your site to stay up to date with your latest blog or article.