Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is an often unpredictable marketing tool, as proven by the recent volatile March 2024 update. This makes it more so important than ever to add new tools and improved techniques to your travel SEO strategy to remain at the top of the search rankings.
Introducing digital public relations (digital PR). Departing from the untrackable nature and limited reach of traditional PR and arriving with high-quality backlinks and increased website traffic, digital PR uses online media channels to boost your site’s authority through backlinks.
With many different tactics for travel digital PR to choose from, we’ve selected our favourites and provided a case study so you can navigate your way to success. Ready to take your travel SEO strategy to the moon (or at least rank number 1)?
Data-Driven Research Articles
The first and most popular form of digital PR is data-driven research studies. This involves writing a research article around interesting data related to your brand and sending it to journalists to publish with a link to your website.
Unless you have your own, collecting data from third party sources such as government agencies, industry associations, social media analytics, and so on can be time consuming.
Nonetheless, journalists and audiences love a hook that contains data. If you’re able to get your research blog into a high domain authority publication, your site will benefit both in terms of trustworthiness and website traffic. Both of which are looked favourably upon by Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines.
My top tip to stand out in a cluttered email inbox – well presented data visualisation. Anything from infographics to animations will help improve your journalist response rate for more precious backlinks!
Recently, Signify Digital Marketing Executive, Georgia Layzell, got her digital PR piece for Marvellous Escapes into RailTech.com (domain authority: 33). How did Georgia do this? Using data collected from Rail Europe and Go Climate, she compared which European city is the most environmentally friendly to travel to from the UK.
Georgia sent her press release to hundreds of journalists who write about rail travel, alongside eye-catching graphs and tables. And voilà, the press release got picked up by RailTech.com. Read the press release on RailTech.com.
Newsjacking
Newsjacking, or reactive PR, involves promoting your products, services, or messages through breaking news stories and putting expert thoughts and opinions into breaking news. These publications are then sent to journalists who write about topics relevant to your brand to release with, you guessed it, more backlinks.
With constant opportunities to capitalise on trends and news, speed, agility, and reactions is the name of the game. You must write about news stories as they break or as trends begin to rise.
Some useful tools to analyse trends include Instagram and Twitter for hashtag analytics, Google Trends, Exploding Topics, and Hootsuite’s social listening tool. Alternatively, you can follow journalists and bloggers within your sector and scan the news.
Getting your publication into reputable online sources will boost your site’s SEO performance. Each backlink gained will improve your domain authority, while piggybacking off what audiences are searching for on
Google will increase your website’s traffic. More traffic means a chance to grow your audience and convert website visitors into paying customers.
I’ll finish off by saying that while digital PR takes time and resources, you may not always get the expected results on the campaign you have worked hard on. It’s vital to try new angles, use different platforms, and think outside the box!
To learn more about our travel SEO or digital PR services at Signify Digital visit our dedicated travel SEO web page.
Alternatively, get in touch with our team of travel marketing specialists by calling 02072 886 206 or via email at online@signifydigital.com and we will be sure to help.
