How to do luxury travel SEO in 2024 (the right way)

Are you looking for a smart way to drive more traffic to your luxury travel brand website?

Luxury travel SEO is part of the larger field of travel and tourism SEO, but luxury requires a different approach to bring solid results.

The target audience for luxury travel typically has high expectations (and a high budget). You need to rank your website in the search engines for keywords that luxury travelers search, or you risk not being found by your target audience.

Your site also needs to resonate with the luxury consumer mindset, while engaging your audience and driving them further into your digital marketing funnel.

In this post, we’re going to explain the most important aspects of SEO for luxury travel, and how you can put them into practice to attract your ideal luxury clientele through search marketing.

Why is SEO important for luxury travel?

Luxury travelers are not dreamers; they are do-ers.

The ‘dreaming’ stage of travel planning is far less important for this target market, so by the time a luxury traveller finds themselves on Google, they are more likely to be ready to make a purchase than the run-of-the-mill travel booker.

This is a key difference, because it results in a shorter sales cycle than you could expect for a standard travel, tourism or hospitality brand.

The trade-off from this shorter sales cycle is that luxury brands have less time to get their brand messaging across. This means that attaining a top position in the SERPs (search engine results page) is all the more important in luxury travel, where the top 3 Google results get more than 50% of clicks.

Luxury travel companies thus have a need to claim their stake at the top of the search engines with best-in-class content, all while persuading their audiences of their value proposition with pages that resonate with a luxury consumer mindset.

The key to luxury travel SEO is to combine an understanding of your target audience with a good working knowledge of SEO best practices, including:

• Keyword research
• On-page optimisation
• Backlinks
• Local SEO
• Technical proficiency

Whether you’re a luxury resort optimizing for SEO or a luxury hotel who wants more traffic from search, SEO is a great investment for travel companies versus other marketing channels, like pay-per-click (PPC).

PPC vs SEO

While PPC is a popular marketing avenue for travel brands, we find it to be less successful in the long-run compared to a more sustainable marketing channel like search engine optimization (SEO).

This is especially the case in luxury travel, where the onus is on you, the luxury travel marketer, to push out a brand identity that resonates with your audience and fosters long-term affiliation and loyalty.

PPC delivers results to the highest bidder, which can be a powerful driver of traffic. Video ads in particular can work well in luxury travel PPC campaigns, due to the visual advantage that many luxury travel brands have.

However, investing in a data-driven SEO campaign is a more sustainable approach, because it can continue to deliver visibility for years to come. A proper luxury travel SEO strategy can help you to reduce your reliance on ads and turn your website into an automatic sales machine that runs day and night, not just while you pay for clicks.

SEO requires consistency, knowledge and expertise. These are also the things that luxury travelers value, so in some ways, luxury travel is a good metaphor for SEO at large!

Doing luxury travel SEO effectively requires a long-term effort to build authority and trust in your area, and this consistency will be rewarded in the loyalty of your clientele.

Our leading Travel Content Pro service helps luxury travel brands with their organic search efforts through carefully-planned, expertly-implemented SEO content. Stop paying for PPC and invest in a long-term, sustainable strategy with the help of our travel marketing experts.

Read on to learn our six main strategies for luxury travel SEO in 2024:

1. Find keywords that luxury travelers search 🔍

Typical keyword research for travel brands might look for ‘best activities’ and ‘best tour’ type keywords. This is what we’d call a shotgun approach, where the keywords chosen target a general audience planning general vacations.

While keyword research for tours and activities may be suitable for these kinds of keywords, luxury travel keyword research, however, requires a much more focused bid for your target demographic.

The best way to approach this kind of keyword research is to consider your ideal customer, including their age range, income and interests, and build your prospective keyword list around their interests and aspirations. Importantly, luxury travel needs to consider the shift from a consumer mindset to an experiential economy.

For example, if I run a luxury resort near Helsinki, Finland, I probably wouldn’t bother creating content around a keyword like ‘what to do in Helsinki’. Even though this keyword has around 1900 searches a month, which is a lot, it doesn’t have a luxury, experiential focus. Additionally, I’d find myself competing with all the different hotels, tour guides and travel agents in Mumbai.

Instead, I would look for a more specific keyword like ‘michelin star restaurants in helsinki’. Even though this keyword has around 1000 less searches per month than ‘what to do in Helsinki’, it targets the kind of traveler who might be willing to spend more than the average on their trip.

Here’s the rationale: luxury travelers are often looking for top-tier culinary experiences, so there’s a good chance that people who search this keyword might be interested in luxury accommodation, too.

After identifying my target keyword, the next step would be to write and publish an informative and engaging list of the best Michelin-starred restaurants in Helsinki.

Once the article is published, I would insert well-placed CTAs (call-to-actions) to make searchers aware of my luxury resort. I would also encourage visitors to pass over their email address so that I can put them into my email marketing funnel and, with the help of marketing automation, increase the chance of a booking or consultation later on.

The reason good luxury travel marketers are able to convert a browser into a buyer is because they have targeted a luxury audience with their keyword research, and then created great content that builds trust and provides value to that audience.

In short, it pays to be discriminate about the keywords you choose for luxury travel, and your keyword research and editorial calendar should reflect the interests and values of your ideal client.

2. Make your website easy to use

While user experience was hardly a massive ranking factor in the past, Google has made clear their intention to reward pages with a good page experience in their core ranking systems.

What is good page experience? Well, it essentially comes down to making sure that your website is easy to navigate, easy to make a booking from and allows users to find the information they need.

All this has an extra importance for luxury travel marketers: research from Think with Google has shown that high-value travelers care more about ease-of-use than reviews or loyalty programs when booking travel.

You can improve page experience by:

• Optimizing your site for mobile and tablet devices as well as desktop
• Maintain Core Web Vitals across your most important pages
• Having a valid SSL certificate to serve pages securely
• Distinguishing your most important content with easy-to-use navigation
• Using a simple, accessibility-friendly color scheme

Finally, consider looking at some examples of successful luxury travel website designs. Take a note of how each website’s navigation works, how content is laid out, what color schemes are used, and how the site looks on mobile and tablet devices. This exercise should help give you an idea of how to maintain a strong page experience for your users, which will positively affect your SEO efforts.

3. Be specific about your offer

Luxury travel brands must define themselves against other travel brands by offering an elevated level of comfort, exclusivity and attentiveness to individual preferences, often with a view to elevating the well-being of their clients in some way.

It might go without saying, but success in luxury travel SEO requires that both your offer and your brand messaging are in harmony with the luxury traveler.

Eight out of ten travelers say that they have made a travel purchase based on promotions or ads they feel represent them through messaging or visuals. If you offer luxury travel services, then it’s a good idea to make sure that your website design and landing pages reflect that luxury ethos.

Look at what other players in the space are doing, not only from a keyword perspective, but also a branding point-of-view. Aim to understand the exact information that luxury travelers are looking for when they plan vacations using search engines, and include that information in your landing pages.

Most importantly, you need to build trust with your audience as an expert in luxury travel who potential clients feel like they can entrust their travel plans with.

That means including all the details about your offer, down to the very specifics. Luxury travelers are scrupulous, and they expect an exclusive offering that can cater to their every whim. By making sure that your landing page and offer are perfectly aligned with their values and interests, you will increase your chances of success from search.

Make the visuals pop 💥

One of the main pulls of luxury travel is the visual aspect, whether that’s breathtaking landscapes or plush boutique hotel suites.

Use your brand assets to your advantage by employing striking visuals, stylish design, and stunning video content that will win over your target audience. Strategically inserting these assets on your most important landing pages will send an immediate message about the authenticity of your brand.

If you follow image SEO best practices such as using keyword-friendly alt text and file names, you also stand a better chance of ranking on Google Images, which is the second largest search engine by market share.

Finally, investing in high-quality photography and visuals will not only make your brand look better on the search engines, but they can be repurposed as marketing collateral across other channels like social media and newsletters.

4. Build backlinks within the luxury travel niche

The amount of backlinks (links to your site from around the internet) you have, and the more authoritative the domains that link to you, the more trust Google will place in your site.

However, if you’re trying to rank for keywords in a very specific niche like luxury travel, then the topical relevancy of those backlinks starts to matter more.

For example, having 100 backlinks from random sites around the internet will be far less effective than 30 backlinks from tightly related websites catering to the luxury audience.

Backlinks from topically relevant sites will help Google to consider you an authority in luxury travel, with each backlink acting as a ‘vote of confidence’ towards your legitimacy in the industry. This will give you a better chance of ranking for luxury travel keywords.

One way of gaining relevant backlinks is to utilize your existing contact book. Try to gain online mentions from partners like travel agents, brokers and DMOs, because these can be valuable links, especially if they come from government-affiliated institutions, which will help in establishing you as an authority in the space.

Gain links through data-focused content

People want to link to authoritative sources. By staying on of the latest trends in luxury travel and publish engaging content or landing pages about them, you can establish yourself as a leader in luxury travel, which can drive backlinks from a variety of sources.

There are lots of journalists looking for information to write about the latest trends in travel, and if they come across valuable information on your site while researching an article, there’s a good chance they’ll link back to you.

For example, wellness travel trends such as luxury sleep tourism are fertile grounds for new content, and if you’re able to provide insights on that, then journalists are likely to link to your site.

To do this, you could use a tool like Google Trends to identify the latest trends in your niche, then carry out surveys related to those topics on social media platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn.

Once you have your own data sets from your survey, the next step is to create and publish data-driven content with well-researched statistics in the form of infographics. Infographics are highly linkable assets, because they provide valuable insights in an easy-to-digest format, which will increase the chances of others in the space linking to your site.

Publishing relevant and engaging blog content builds links automatically, because you are providing value to your audience, which results in shares. Keep up a regular editorial schedule and publish as much great SEO-focused content as you can, ideally with insightful data and statistics, and backlinks will start to roll in.

5. Publish ‘best of’ lists 🏆

One of the most popular (and obvious) keyword sets for luxury travel is:

• ‘luxury hotels [city]’, or
• ‘luxury resorts in [city]’,

There are other variations, but the search intent is the same between them all: searchers are looking for a list of luxury hotels, resorts or retreats in a given location.

In our experience, the types of content that ranks here (after the local map pack) are almost always ‘best of’ or ‘listicle’ type articles, such as the following:

As a luxury resort doing your own in-house marketing, you might be apprehensive about publishing an article like that on your website. This is understandable: why would I give free promotion to a list of my competitors, on my own website?

Here’s why.

By publishing a list like this, you have a rare opportunity to frame your luxury brand as the best hotel/resort/retreat in your location.

Yes, the list would have to mention some of your competitors. Ultimately though, it’s you who is in charge of the narrative here. By writing a ‘best of’ list, you have the power to make the case that your retreat or resort is the best one in the area, and direct searchers towards a direct booking or consultation on your own website.

And here’s another thing.

If you don’t, then your competitors will.

In a nutshell:

1. Find the ‘best of’ luxury keyword for your business category
2. Publish the best list that exists on the internet about that subject, directly on your own blog website
3. Watch qualified traffic roll in and guide them towards a direct booking or consultation

6. Use social media to speak to the luxury traveler

While Google has never explicitly confirmed this, independent studies have found a correlation between high social signals and SEO rankings.

Social signals arise from people talking about your brand and sharing your content on social media platforms. Effective use of social media for luxury travel brands can thus not only help you to build a greater connection with your ideal customer, the luxury traveler, but influence Google in deciding how useful and relevant a piece of content is to a keyword.

To engage your audience on social media, you need to publish content that resonates with your audience’s values and aspirations.

For example, a post about a luxury travel trend such as sustainable tourism might increase engagement on your site, especially if your target audience cares about this subject. The more engaged readers are, the longer they spend on your site, and the less likely they are to click away (this is called bounce rate) which sends great social signals to Google.

Another important spoke of your social media strategy should be influencer partnerships. Social media influencers have massive followings, and luxury travellers will often look to them for inspiration as individuals with similar tastes and expectations from travel. Content shared by influencers is also more likely to gain relevant backlinks from sites in the luxury travel space.

All in all, we think that a good social media strategy that stays laser-focused on luxury travel can impact your SEO visibility for the important keywords in your space, even if that effect is indirect and difficult to track.

Luxury travel SEO is a powerful marketing channel

Approaching travel marketing for high-value individuals can be a balancing act between gunning for visibility and maintaining a refined outward image.

However, by employing the tips in this article, you stand a great chance of getting your luxury travel website in front of the right people, at the right time, without having to pay for ads to stay at the top of Google.