You want more travel clients, and your (prospective) travel clients want more information, trust and excitement. Today, many of them start planning in Google and AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Google AI Mode, asking where to go, when to visit and who to book with. Kern Media® bridges the gap between your agency and the clients you seek with over 20 years of SEO experience, including travel SEO and content marketing since 2013, now including GEO (generative engine optimization) so AI tools recommend your agency too.
Benefits of SEO & GEO for Travel Websites
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- Attract more potential travelers in Google and AI answers by clearly showing that your agency knows its destinations better than anyone else, with on-the-ground expertise AI can’t make up.
- Educate and build trust with potential travelers by providing a higher level of detail than competitors and proving that booking with your travel agency is in their best interest.
- Increase leads and bookings by guiding visitors from Google and AI tools through your marketing funnel and creating a remarkable experience during the planning phase.
What Kern Media Travel Clients Say
Dan continues to exceed our expectations on a daily basis as he works tirelessly to keep up with travel industry and SEO trends, and keep our site optimized. He always provides new ideas and creative solutions to keep our website a step ahead of the competition. Just take a look at our traffic growth over the past few years!
On a free 30-minute call, we’ll look at your trip pages and the questions your travelers ask, and show you where bookings are slipping away.
Helping Your Agency with Travel SEO & GEO
Kern Media takes a “content first” approach to travel SEO. That’s what travelers want, what search engines want (especially Google), and what AI tools look for when deciding which agencies to recommend. It’s more like real marketing than what you may consider to be SEO. Know your audience, help them solve problems, educate them, build their trust, drive more leads, and grow your brand. Here’s how the Kern Media travel SEO process works.
Create “Traveler” Personas to Better Target Your Marketing
Clarifying what type of travelers you are targeting is an integral first step to effective travel SEO. Kern Media can create audience personas (families, honeymooners, adventure travelers, luxury travelers and more) that help personalize your content to the travelers you want to attract. We also use these personas to track how AI tools answer each type of traveler’s questions, and whether your agency gets recommended.
Your staff’s insight on your ideal clientele can be merged with your Google Analytics and Search Console data (and other travel-related resources) to create a complete picture of who you’re trying to target, what their dreams are (and how to create them), and what their concerns are (and how to solve them). If your travel agency has already created audience personas, Kern Media can further refine them (if necessary) and incorporate them into the content strategy.
Keyword Research: Travel “Questions” + Trip Types
The key to attracting early-buying-cycle visitors in travel SEO is to identify the questions they’re asking and align them with your content. AI Overviews now answer many simple questions (like the weather in a given month) right on the results page, so the content that wins goes deeper: expert, opinionated advice, comparisons between destinations and trip styles, and real experience your competitors can’t match. By answering these questions first, you lead potential travelers down a path of trust and excitement! The more they know, the more likely they are to remember you when it comes time to plan their trip.
Your trip types also need to be aligned with your target clientele’s search behavior. Kern Media has years of experience helping travel agencies align their taxonomy and site structure with how travelers search for trip types and details. Itinerary pages with clear trip highlights (who the trip is for, why each stop is included and what makes it different) help both travelers and AI tools understand what you offer. This makes sure UX and SEO are aligned for increased discoverability and lead generation.
Focus on Lead Generation + Qualification
Every page on your travel site should have a call to action (CTA)…a next step for the visitor to take. Whether that’s completing a contact form, subscribing to your email list, or visiting another page on your website, it’s important to keep your visitors digging deeper on your website during their research phase. Strong “plan your trip with us” pages that explain how your service works, what it includes and why travelers book with an agency instead of planning alone are also the pages AI tools draw on when someone asks who to book with.
Not everyone will be ready to become a “lead” for your agency when they first visit your website, so providing the education they need (before they’re ready to contact you) is very important. Informing them of what’s required to work with your agency (minimum budget, deposits, etc.) is also important to qualifying leads, so your sales reps spend their time wisely and maximize bookings. We can also help score and track leads by source, including the leads that come from AI tools.
Links, Mentions + Brand Visibility
As with any online marketing efforts, links and mentions play an important role in SEO, and an even bigger role in GEO. AI tools lean heavily on what travel publications, blogs, forums and review sites say about your agency. When potential travelers are researching their options on social media, travel sites or AI tools, your agency needs to be discoverable.
Attractive imagery and compelling trip details help draw the attention of travelers, travel bloggers and influencers to your brand, which increases your potential for natural links and mentions. Contributing to travel publications, partnering with travel creators and launching user-generated content campaigns can also help build your brand and earn the links and mentions needed to improve search rankings and AI visibility.
Building Reviews + Promoting Testimonials
Once a trip is over, the online travel marketing efforts do not end. Building positive reviews on sites like Google and TripAdvisor shows future travelers how amazing your trips are, and AI tools pull heavily from these review sites when recommending agencies. Promoting these reviews throughout your website also helps increase lead conversions. Strategic placement of reviews on key pages of your website (in text that search engines and AI crawlers can read) can have a big impact.
Request a Travel SEO Consultation
Start realizing the traffic, AI visibility and lead generation growth that your travel agency deserves. Take action and request a free consultation.
You’ll talk directly with founder Dan Kern, not a salesperson, and get a custom proposal after the call.
