This blog post will provide you with some of the best SEO tips for your travel blog.

To run a travel blog successfully and passively, you must need to know the basics of SEO. Without SEO, your website may not get the results that you hope from it. 

To begin, let’s learn what SEO is and how it will work for you.

WHAT IS SEO? And how does it work?

When you type a keyword or a phrase into the Google search bar and click the search button, you get a list of resulting websites matched to your searched words. Being a travel blogger, you would desire your blog to appear at the first Search Engine Research Page (SERP). Thus SEO is the key to do so.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization that supports getting more traffic to your blog via Google search engine.  

To rank your travel blog up in the list, you need to learn on-page and off-page SEO strategies.

Many other traffic boosting strategies work only for a short period, while SEO is important for long-term traffic generation. Basically, it helps you find your content by your target audience, which will make you money through your blog.

So, here are the essential SEO tips to boost your travel blog’s traffic which, I assure you, will help.

• Have a secured blog (HTTPS/SSL)

First of all, be sure that you have a secured website because unsecured sites can never rank higher. 

To ensure, check “https://” or a lock icon on the left of your web address. If you can’t find these or only see “http://”, it means your blog is not secured. Immediately contact and ask your host to move your site to a secured version. Usually, this feature is unpaid and needs a few minutes to be done.

• Install Google Analytics 

If you are running your blog and already have installed Google Analytics, you can move to tip # 3.

But if you don’t have any idea about it, let me tell you a bit about Google Analytics which is one of the most amazing tools by Google for analyzing the performance of your site and the good thing is, it is free. So, please take a few minutes to install it directly on your website and get ready to track its metrics. 

Under different tabs in the GA, you will find the information about the number of visitors to your site, the traffic source, how they use your website, the time they spend on each page and a stack of other information. Understanding these patterns of traffic and users behavior makes you the master of your website metrics.

Another tool, “Google Search Console”, is also helpful to know by which keywords people searched and found your site. By using these tools, you will be able to track your performance and get to know the topics ranking up.

• Get the Yoast SEO plugin

Following, you have to do is installing the Yoast SEO plugin on WordPress, which is also free of cost like Google Analytical. It helps in optimizing your posts and ensures their ranking. 

• How it works

When you write any post, Yoast SEO is at the bottom of the page with “SEO” and “Readability” tabs. In the SEO tab, you will write the keyword and a brief outline in specified places. It will analyze the post and will provide a list of problems with solutions. Also, it has a list describing the good points in your content.

On the other hand, the Readability tab gives you suggestions regarding how to write better content inflow.

• Special note that should be considered

Use Yoast guidelines as a helper, not as mandatory rules. 

Although by modifying your content entirely, you will get all the green lights in the Yoast SEO section, which is satisfying. But most SEO experts agree that undoubtedly, the Yoast plugin is helpful and provides you with informative guidelines; however, as a blogger, you should not worry about always getting the greens.

Let’s explain this; Yoast provides maximum suggestions for optimizing your posts, but it is neither necessary nor recommended to follow it strictly. For example, putting your keyword in a post too many times may be suggested by Yoast nonetheless is not required.

• Choose the right keywords and LSI keywords for your travel blog

A keyword is the main feature of any travel blog and SEO. It is fundamentally the main topic consisting of one word or a phrase about which you will write.

Let’s learn how you can search for the right keyword and use it.

• Searching keywords

There are many tools to find keywords. Some of the best and free tools are Google Keyword Planner, WordStream’s Keyword tool and Soolve. While Keysearch and KWFinder are affordable options. 

If we talk about Google Keyword Planner, it is a free tool as described earlier and easy to use. The beginner should prefer this without thinking about anything as it is a reliable tool

In Keysearch, searching for a topic will give you related keywords with their search volume and competitiveness score. The keyword with lower competition has more chance to go up on SERP.

• Putting them in appropriate places

When you get the right keyword, you need to insert the exact keyword in your blog post’s

• Title 
• URL/slug
• Heading
• First paragraph
• Meta description
• Image Alt Tags/ Alt title

• LSI keyword

LSI keyword stands for latent semantic indexing keywords, phrases and expressions relevant to your hunted keyword. These words are helpful in enhanced understanding of the transcribed data and creating connections between the content and the main keyword. Using LSI keywords also increases the ranking of travel blogs. http://lsigraph.com is a free website to find related keywords to make your blog post worth ranking.

• Provide quality content

When you have done your work with the keywords, you have to write a high-quality blog post that will work and will take your blog upwards in ranking. For this purpose, follow some simple yet advantageous tips

• Use some tools to proofread your post before you publish it (such as Grammarly)
• Be specific and write content longer than usual (more than 1500 word blog post)
• Divide post into smaller portions/ paragraphs.
• Try to write short and easy-to-read sentences.
• Include some related images to your post
• Use links in your post, at least one to another site and a few to your other blog posts on the same site.
• Must add meta description on every page

• Publish more content and keep updating it

Publishing more content on your blog keeps you alive. For better running, you should publish at least one post every week.

Other than posting new stuff on your website, you need to update too many old posts because there are chances that old posts may not comply with the latest or changed situation regarding a particular topic. 

• Write more related posts and especially about topics that are ranking higher

Another valuable tip to move your blog upwards is to write more posts relevant to a topic. The topics with a considerable number of related posts will go up in SERP because it is perceived that Google ranks those websites higher that write more relevant content to a particular topic. 

It can be understood by one simple example of an individual post on your site. Suppose you have only one post on the topic “holiday in Germany”. In that case, Google will not consider your blog as crucial as another website containing 5 or 6 blog posts related to the topic.

So, turn your attention to the topics/ posts you want to rank high, create more related posts, and link them to each other. Linking also helps users find all connected posts on your site and makes it worth and relevant for Google ranking.

Also, keep an eye on the top-ranking posts in your blog, which can be found through Google Search Console (mentioned above in tip # 2). Write more pertinent posts and do not forget to link new posts to your already successful posts. 

• Guest posts and collaboration

It is a handy tip for off-page SEO. Having your links on other websites makes your website more influential. For this, you have to struggle in finding and talk to other bloggers working in the same niche. You can ask them if they would agree to take guest posts on their blog.

An alternative idea to promote your site is sharing your posts along with your website link on Facebook groups.

• Be patient 

SEO is a challenging and time taking task. You have to work for your success to the maximum of your efforts and surely you will get better results with time. The time can be from a few weeks to a few months to get the desired outcomes. After your SEO homework, all you have to do is wait and stay motivated to grow. What you do today will pay you off in the future and for a long time.

• Aim for featured snippets

At the time of succession, when your blog gains heavy traffic and ranks among the top 10 results of SERP, now you should aim for the featured snippet for your posts. It is generally a list of main points of your content that answers the question asked by the searcher. It is shown on SERP above all organic results. Now, this is your achievement!

In the end, I hope that you are now ready to transcribe much better content to start your blog and make it growing and ranking up.