Seasonal Trends
Visibility Vs Authority
Link Acquisition
Social Influence
Content Performance
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Brands Ranked
Updated September 2023
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"Really impressed with the work done behind the research, really well done to the team and Salience"
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Every year, we release the Salience Index, a report full of marketing data and SEO knowledge about a sector. This online travel bookings report is full of the best data and brands to help you see where your site fits against it’s competition in terms of SEO metrics such as visibility, keyword potential, brand reach, Pagespeed and more.
This is a great benchmarking exercise, giving you all the best insights and SEO marketing tips, and the best thing yet is that it’s all for free! You can download our travel bookings market report and have it in your inbox in seconds, but for a quick snippet, we’ve got some key insights below.
Brands Leading The Travel Booking Market
The market, as a whole, has seen drops in the last couple of years because of the recent COVID-19 pandemic, but it’s safe to say travel is now back on. Within the last year, the market has grown a good 10% in visibility, and we’re seeing some brands that are leading the space.
The top ten online travel market sites are:
1. booking.com
2. skyscanner.net
3. expedia.co.uk
4. lastminute.com
5. kayak.co.uk
6. hotels.com
7. travelsupermarket.com
8. loveholidays.com
9. thomascook.com
10. trivago.co.uk
Congratulations to the brands leading the market in our travel booking report; look to these for some inspiration on your SEO.
Visibility Wins In The Travel Bookings Report
Within the market, we’ve also seen some brands that have gained the most visibility this year; we can learn a lot from these brands in terms of what is working to rank high.
The top 5 winners in terms of visibility are:
1. skyscanner.net (+45%)
2. expedia.co.uk (+17%)
3. kayak.co.uk (+14%)
4. hotels.com (+16%)
5. loveholidays.com (+19%)
We can see all of our winners have made their way into leading the travel bookings market, being in the top ten as well, so congratulations to all of you for your SEO wins!
Visibility Losses In The Travel Booking Report
Unfortunately, where there are wins, there must also be losses. In our free travel bookings report, we also look into the brands that have lost the most visibility over the past year. But don’t worry if you have, as this is usually a learning point and can be reversed.
The top 5 brands that have lost visibility are:
1. firstchoice.co.uk (-25%)
2. holidayhypermarket.co.uk (-16%)
3. agoda.com (-21%)
4. dealchecker.co.uk (-29%)
5. kuoni.co.uk (-56%)
Keywords & Trends In The Travel Booking Market
If you’ve lost visibility or want to grow further, one way to do this is through keywords and trends. In our travel booking engines report, we cover the best keywords to target as well as emerging and receding trends. First, let’s start with keywords, which can be split into high-competition and opportunity.
High-competition keywords are those that are high in monthly search volume (SV), but everyone is after them, making it harder to rank high in the SERPs, especially for smaller brands. Some of our high-competition keywords in our travel booking report are: ‘flights’ with 673,000 SV but a competitiveness rating of 100, followed by ‘cheap flights’, and ‘all inclusive holiday’. Very top level but worth optimising if you’ve got the authority.
Opportunity keywords are also high in monthly search volume but low competition, making it easier to rank high. A few opportunity keywords in our online travel booking report are: ‘greek all inclusive holidays’ with 22,200 SV and competitiveness rating of 44, followed by ‘reward flight finder’ and ‘jordan flights’. Here we get more specific, if you’ve got them, SEO them up and flaunt them.
Trends are covered in our travel booking market report as emerging and receding products and brands. These are good to know, as they tell you what you should and shouldn’t be focusing on in your SEO strategies. For now, we will just cover a few of the emerging product trends, which are: ‘air ticket’, ‘all inclusive family holidays’ and ‘affordable holiday packages’.
For more keywords and trends to target and focus on, download our free travel booking market report today.
Travel Booking Engines On Social Media
Social media marketing should be part of your strategies, this is because it can influence and strengthen your SEO, rankings and your brand reach. This is why, within our travel booking engine report, we include social data as well as give a brand reach score.
Within social media, you can be really smart with fulfilling your customer’s wants and needs in a valuable way with remarketing Facebook ads and promoted Instagram posts. Making sure your name and your deals or holiday packages are in front of users' faces is key to getting them to go to your brand when it comes time to make a purchase.
Booking.com is at the top of our social media data, with over 18,000,000 followers across various social media platforms and a owned social score of 33,103. They are smashing their social media marketing strategies, posting both video and image content and utilising reels, highlights, and even guides. Posting content around travelling to areas, sightseeing such as ‘top things to do in X’, which is very helpful. And their Instagram capitalises on user generated content with branded hashtags, which is a great way of broadening your audience and increasing trust.
They also have paid partnerships with tourist boards from different countries, such as Visit Greece and Western Australia. Having paid partnerships like this helps to build trust with customers as they can see your company is endorsed by a reputable source. It also opens your company up to a whole new audience.
Doing all of the above, as well as varying your content across platforms, having a strong brand aesthetic and tone of voice, plus providing selfless content, should see your social scores flying high.
Importance Of Reviews In The Travel Booking Market
When booking a holiday package, one thing that’s important is the reviews. I know myself when booking to go away on holiday, I will always read the reviews, whether it’s the review of the hotel I am booking, the area I am going to, or even the provider I am booking with. When someone is spending potentially a lot of money to go away on holiday, they want to make sure it’s worth it, especially if they are booking a package with your company.
Reviews are massive in this sector, and also impact trust for both users and Google. Google is more likely to rank sites high that are trustworthy. Signposting your brand reviews on the site, package reviews, or even hotel reviews from users are great ways to build trust and help users find the best holiday for them.
Our top 5 most trustworthy sites within the travel booking report are:
1. jet2holidays.com
2. haystravel.co.uk
3. travelrepublic.co.uk
4. flightcentre.co.uk
5. opodo.co.uk
Travel Booking Sites & Fast Page Speed
Booking holidays or travel can be fun, but it can also be stressful. Don’t make life harder for travellers by giving them a slow loading site to contend with, or they’ll just exit the page.
Google favours sites with fast page speeds as it makes them easier to crawl.
We identified the fastest travel booking engines using Google PageSpeed Insights:
1. loveholidays.com
2. skyscanner.net
3. holidaydiscountcentre.co.uk
4. holidaygems.co.uk
5. mybudgetbreak.com
Download Our Travel Bookings Market Report
Our travel bookings market report is completely free and has all the above information in far more detail for you to polish up your SEO, with all the best tips and tricks and see where you stack up against your competitors. Creating these reports helps us to understand your market better while giving you the insight you might otherwise find difficult to curate.
If you can’t see your company in the online travel bookings report data, don’t worry, we’ve got it. When sourcing data, we look at the entire market but only include the top brands in our report as it would be too long otherwise. But feel free to get in touch, and we can provide you with a personalised version of the results, including your site.
If you have any questions about our data or report, want to chat SEO, or want a free SEO audit of your site, contact us today we’d love to hear from you.
