Travel SEO
SEOforpeople
whorunthetrips.
Most SEO advice for tour operators is written by booking-software vendors and generalist agencies. We build travel websites and rank them, which means the recommendations here have been tested on live operator sites rather than in a deck.
(01) — The problem
Operators lose the booking before price is ever compared.
A traveller searching a specific trek sees OTAs with thousands of pages targeting exact queries, while the company actually running that trip has a single "Our Tours" page. By the time anything is compared, the marketplace has framed the choice and takes a commission on the booking that follows.
The fix is rarely a bigger content budget. It is usually structural, and it is cheaper than most agencies will tell you.
(02) — What's included
Seven workstreams, run in the order that compounds.
Trip page architecture
One indexable page per trip you actually sell, with price, itinerary, permits and difficulty in the HTML — and written from scratch. Duplicated supplier itinerary text is one of the quietest causes of flat rankings in this industry.
Technical foundation
Crawlability first. If a booking widget holds the only copy of your prices, or your itinerary renders only after JavaScript, none of the content work matters yet.
Keyword and intent mapping
Targeting the searches made by people who have already decided to travel, rather than the high-volume inspiration terms every publisher competes for.
Content on a seasonal calendar
Permits, costs, fitness, weather windows — written so AI answer engines can quote them cleanly, and published against your booking window rather than your travel season. A page going live in October ranks in January.
Trust and reviews
Travel is bought on trust, and reviews now carry roughly a fifth of local ranking weight. The highest-converting moment to ask is the 24 to 48 hours after a trip ends, which means a process, not a reminder email whenever someone remembers.
Citations and authority
The OTAs outranking you have a decade of accumulated links. Closing that gap means tourism boards, destination guides, and industry directories — and identical business details across every one of them.
Reporting that means something
Enquiries and bookings by landing page. Sessions are a vanity number when a single trip page can outperform a blog post pulling ten times the traffic.
(03) — How it works
Sequence matters more than effort.
Audit
Two weeks. Crawl, index, speed, and structure. You get the findings whether or not we work together.
Fix the floor
Crawlability, then speed, then schema. Publishing into a site Google struggles to read is wasted effort.
Build the pages
Trip pages first, in order of margin. This is the largest single gain for most operators.
Publish and refresh
Pre-booking content on a seasonal cycle, updated rather than replaced so pages keep the authority they earn.
(04) — Investment
Priced monthly. No lock-in.
Travel SEO
Ongoing optimisation for an existing site: technical fixes, trip page structure, keyword mapping, content, and reporting.
Start a projectWebsite + SEO
When the site itself is the blocker. Built with trip pages, speed, and schema in place from the first day, then optimised monthly.
See full pricingBoth are starting points. Scope varies with how many trips you run, what condition the site is in, and which markets you sell into, so we quote properly after a conversation rather than pretending one number fits everyone. We start every engagement with an audit, and if it shows your site does not need a monthly retainer, we will tell you that instead of selling you one.
(05) — Fit
This works if
- You run the trips yourself rather than reselling
- You sell to travellers in other countries
- You have trips worth building dedicated pages for
- You can publish prices
It does not if
- You need bookings this month — SEO is not a paid channel
- Your trips change constantly with no stable catalogue
- You would rather not show pricing publicly
- You want guaranteed rankings, which nobody can honestly sell
(06) — Questions
Asked before every engagement.
How long before we see results?+
Three to six months on competitive head terms, four to eight weeks on specific route, cost, and permit pages. Trip pages move fastest because the competition on those queries is thinner than most operators assume.
Do you work with operators outside Nepal?+
Yes. We are based in Lalitpur and most of our clients sell to travellers in the US, UK, and Australia. The work is the same wherever the trips run; only the keyword research changes to match the market you sell into.
What if our website needs rebuilding first?+
That is often the honest answer. If your itineraries are locked inside a booking widget or the site takes six seconds on mobile, a monthly SEO retainer will not fix it. We will say so, and quote the build separately.
Do you require a long contract?+
No. SEO is billed monthly and you can stop at any time. Work delivered stays yours, including the audit, the page structure, and any content produced.
Can you help if we already have an SEO agency?+
Sometimes. If the blocker is technical or structural rather than content volume, an audit will tell you which. We would rather tell you your current agency is doing fine than sell you a second retainer.
(07) — Further reading