The travel industry fascinates me; not just because like everyone else I love a good holiday and some time in the sun, but it’s also one of the most competitive industries when it comes to the SERPs.
Perhaps the reason it intrigues me so much is the huge opportunity to grab traffic from the typical head terms, right through to capturing the long tail search queries at the awareness stage in the buying journey. Alongside this is the challenge smaller brands face competing with the giants in the market and having to get smart with leveraging search.
During this post, I want to take you through an example overview of part of the travel market and give an understanding on how smaller brands are capturing search traffic against the bigger brands in the industry.
The Goliath Challenge
So, Google has a patent in place in regard to brand weighting and how it is calculated. However, it’s pretty difficult to understand.
‘The system determines a site quality score for the particular site, and might be determined by computing a ratio of a numerator and a denominator, where the numerator is based on the count of unique queries that are categorized as ones that refer to the particular site, and where the denominator is based on the count of unique queries that are just associated with the particular site, just don’t refer to it in the same kind of way.’
Perhaps something easier to digest is this piece by Tom Capper over on Moz, around a ranking correlations study which compares domain authority against branded search volume. Basically, bigger brands seem to rank better and have an uplift due to their authority in the market which is certainly a challenge in the travel industry with giants such as Virgin, Thomas Cook and Thomson.
Now I could list at least 20 brands here, but for the purpose of this example I have selected a few that have appeared in a particular SERP that I’m going to be talking about later, with a mixture of big brands, specialists and aggregators.
The scale of this can be seen from a simple bit of keyword research along with monthly volumes:
- Thomas Cook: 1,400,000
- Thomson: 992,000
- Virgin Holidays: 224,000
- Travel Supermarket: 139,000
- Lastminute: 75,000
- Kuoni: 43,000
Market Landscape
I’m sure you all know how to see where you are in comparison to your competitors, with tools such as Sistrix, SEMrush and Searchmetrics allowing you to see your visibility vs. competitors. We prefer to export all of the keywords that each of the brand ranks for, and then categorise, strip out branded terms and then drop it into a graph to give you a visual.
