Search "travel SEO keywords" and you'll get lists. Thousands of terms sorted by monthly volume, with "travel" at 1.2 million and "cheap flights" near the top.
Those lists are close to useless for an operator, because volume is not the constraint. Nobody running a trekking company in Nepal is going to outrank Booking.com for "cheap flights", and they would not want the traffic if they did.
The useful question is narrower: which searches, out of the thousands available, are made by people who might actually book with you, and which of those can you realistically win?
That question got sharper in 2026. With 68% of travel searches starting on mobile and roughly 40% of travellers now using AI tools to help plan trips (Perk, 2026), a large share of early-stage informational queries never produce a click at all. Intent is no longer a nice filter to apply. It's the only filter worth applying.
Key Takeaways
- Volume without intent is a vanity metric. A 90-search term you can win beats a 40,000-search term you cannot.
- Adding one qualifier collapses the competition: "Everest Base Camp trek" scores 37 for difficulty, "Everest Base Camp trek cost" scores 8 (Semrush, US database, August 2026).
- Intent lives in the modifier, not the destination: "cost", "permit", and "best time" signal booking; "beautiful" and "top 10" signal browsing.
- Research in the database your buyers search from. Getting this wrong invalidates the whole exercise.
Volume is the wrong first filter
The standard approach sorts by search volume and works downwards. For a travel business it should start with the question of who can win, because ranking is relative and you are not competing against the keyword. You're competing against whoever currently occupies that result.
Here is what that looks like with real numbers. We pulled Nepal trekking terms from Semrush's US database in August 2026:
| Keyword | Volume/mo | Difficulty | Intent |
|---|---|---|---|
| everest base camp trek | 5,400 | 37 | Commercial |
| annapurna base camp trek | 1,900 | 34 | Commercial |
| annapurna circuit trek | 1,900 | 46 | Commercial |
| manaslu circuit trek | 1,600 | 28 | Commercial |
| langtang valley trek | 1,000 | 25 | Commercial |
| everest base camp trek cost | 1,000 | 8 | Commercial |
| nepal trekking | 880 | 27 | Commercial |
| annapurna base camp trek cost | 140 | 3 | Commercial |
| best time to trek in nepal | 90 | 12 | Informational |
| everest base camp trek difficulty | 70 | 2 | Commercial |
Source: Semrush, US database, retrieved 2026-08-10.
Read those two number columns together rather than sorting by the first one.
"Everest Base Camp trek" carries 5,400 searches a month at a difficulty of 37. That means competing with OTAs and operators who have spent a decade accumulating links. Add a single word and "Everest Base Camp trek cost" drops to a difficulty of 8 while still carrying 1,000 monthly searches.
Same trek. Same buyer. Roughly a quarter of the fight.
Drop one more rung and it gets better still. "Annapurna Base Camp trek cost" sits at 140 searches with a difficulty of 3, and "Everest Base Camp trek difficulty" scores 2. Those are pages a new site can genuinely rank within a couple of months, and everyone searching them has already decided to trek.
That is the shape of opportunity you're hunting. Not the biggest number. The biggest gap between what a term is worth to your business and what it costs to win.
Intent lives in the modifier
The destination tells you the topic. The words around it tell you where the person is in their decision, and that is what determines whether the traffic converts.
Timing is part of this. Around 56% of travellers research and book activities ahead of their trip, and 25% plan four or more weeks out (Expedia Group, 2025). Someone four weeks from departure searches differently from someone daydreaming in January, and the modifier is how you tell them apart.
| Modifier pattern | Stage | Books? |
|---|---|---|
| best time to, weather in, is it safe | Early research | Rarely, but builds trust |
| cost, price, how much | Comparing | Often |
| itinerary, day by day, route | Comparing | Often |
| permit, visa, insurance | Committed | Yes |
| difficulty, fitness, altitude | Committed | Yes |
| best, top 10, beautiful, amazing | Browsing | Almost never |
That last row is where most travel content budgets die. "Top 10 treks in Nepal" has real volume, attracts readers, and converts almost nobody, because the person searching it has not decided to travel yet. It's also the most competitive category, since every publisher on earth writes it.
The economics got worse recently, too. Inspirational queries are exactly the kind that now trigger an AI Overview, and Seer Interactive's study of 2.43 billion impressions found organic CTR on those queries sitting at 2.4% by February 2026 against 3.8% where no Overview appears (Seer Interactive, via SeoProfy, 2026). You lose about a third of the clicks on precisely the terms that were already converting worst.
Decision-stage queries are less exposed, because someone comparing permit costs wants the source, not a summary.
Meanwhile "Manaslu Circuit permit cost 2026" has trivial volume, near-zero competition, and is searched almost exclusively by people who have already decided to go. Those are the searches that pay for a website.
The practical rule: if the modifier implies a decision has been made, it's worth a page. If it implies inspiration, it's worth a paragraph inside a page you already have.
Research in the right database, or discard the results
This is the mistake that silently invalidates everything downstream, and it's specific to businesses selling across borders.
A trekking company in Kathmandu selling to Americans and Europeans should research in the US or UK database, not Nepal's. The volumes differ by an order of magnitude, and so does the vocabulary. Our own pull used the US database for exactly this reason.
Vocabulary matters more than most operators expect. Americans say "hiking", the British say "walking", and "trekking" carries different weight in each market. Optimising for the wrong one means writing pages nobody searches for in language your buyers don't use.
Check your analytics before choosing. Whichever countries already send you traffic and enquiries is where you should be doing keyword research, regardless of where the business is registered.
Where to find keywords no tool reports
Tools only report searches with enough volume to measure. The long tail underneath is invisible to them and is where a small site wins first.
Your inbox. Every question a customer has emailed you is a query someone typed into Google first. That's free, first-party research nobody else has, and it's phrased in your buyers' actual words.
Search Console. Once you have any traffic at all, the Queries report shows terms you already appear for, including ones with impressions but no clicks. Those are pages ranking on page two that a small improvement could lift.
People Also Ask. Search your main destination term and read the expanding questions. Each one is a real query with real demand, and they nest infinitely as you click.
Reddit and forums. r/Nepal, r/trekking, and route-specific communities show how travellers phrase concerns before they know the industry vocabulary. That phrasing is what they type into Google.
Our finding: The highest-converting page on a small operator site is frequently one nobody planned. It answers a question a customer asked by email, gets written in an hour, and quietly ranks for a query no keyword tool ever reported.
Turning a keyword list into a site structure
A list is not a plan. The step most people skip is grouping keywords by the page that should serve them.
Take every keyword you've gathered and ask which single page would satisfy someone searching it. Terms that would be answered by the same page belong to that page, not to pages of their own. "Everest Base Camp cost", "how much does EBC trek cost", and "EBC trek price 2026" are one page, not three.
Splitting them across three pages causes those pages to compete with each other, which is a self-inflicted problem that's tedious to unwind later. If you're unsure whether two terms are one topic, search both and compare the results. Substantial overlap in ranking URLs means Google treats them as the same question; largely different results mean they're separate pages.
We used exactly that test when planning this cluster. Two terms that looked nearly identical returned only one shared URL across the top ten, which told us they were different topics and justified separate articles.
Once grouped, order by that difficulty-versus-value gap from earlier. Write the winnable, high-intent pages first. Save the head terms for when the site has enough authority to compete for them, which will be sooner than you expect if the early pages earn links.
The shortest version of this
Ignore keyword lists sorted by volume. Find the searches made by people who have already decided to travel, filter to the ones your site can realistically win, group them by the page that would answer them, and write those pages in order of intent.
For the structural side of turning that plan into pages that rank, see our guide to SEO for tour operators. For the technical floor those pages need underneath them, see SEO for a travel website.
We build and rank websites for travel, tour, and trekking companies from Kathmandu. Keyword and intent mapping is one of the five workstreams in our travel SEO service. If you want a look at which keywords your site could realistically win, get in touch.
