SEO for travel blogs — here’s how to get traffic from Google
My travel blog sees consistent growth in search results. These are my key tactics.
If you want to get a lot of traffic to your travel blog, you’ll need to understand search engine optimisation — SEO. Sure, you can get some traffic from Pinterest or Facebook, but Google search is by far still the easiest way for travel blogs to be discovered by readers (and when we talk about search engines, we’re really referring to Google).
That’s even after the Google updates that have frightened bloggers so much.
Google as a search engine plays a pretty powerful role in travellers’ customer journeys. Social media is powerful for inspiration and the ‘dream’ stage of travel planning, but getting down to the nitty gritty of assembling an itinerary, or deciding how much time to spend in a destination (the plan/book stages), still sees people turn to long-form written content (blogs or editorial) for help.
Before I dive deeper into what SEO strategies are working on my travel blog right now, a little about me; before becoming a full time travel writer, I was content manager for Tourism New Zealand (and before that JUCY campervan rentals).
So, my background is solidly in SEO and organic content. I’ve done this on big and small scales for years now.
I used all of my knowledge to grow my own website from less than 1000 views to nearly 100,000 in less than 9 months. I definitely had a leg up in that sense, but starting and growing my own travel site was definitely a different kettle of fish to working on SEO for huge travel websites like newzealand.com.
Is growing that quickly replicable for everyone? That depends on too many factors to say.
I can’t tell you for sure that these tips for travel blog SEO will work perfectly, because search can be so unpredictable. What I can do is tell you exactly what works for me.
I hope these insights help you a little with planning your own travel content.
CONTENTS
SEO tools for travel bloggers
Setting up your site
Developing a keyword strategy for your travel blog
On page SEO
Image optimisation
Content clusters and ‘silos’
Getting backlinks
Showing authority (E.E.A.T)
What’s working for my travel blog SEO at a glance
Rule #1: Write for your readers. Always. Don’t write for Google, don’t structure your posts to feed Google, don’t keyword stuff.
Rule #2: Don’t get sucked in by high volume keywords. Develop a keyword strategy that targets topics that get traffic, but will also hold interest (itineraries are a great example of this, as opposed to ‘can I drink the tap water in X destination’).
Rule #3: Have an original point of view. If you’re just regurgitation information that can already be found online, how are you adding any value? An AI tool could do that. Lean into your unique experiences and point of view to build trust with your readers.
What you need to know about SEO in 2025
Travel blogging today is a sometimes weird mix of sharing personal experiences but writing in such a way that your content will be found in search. It’s hard to get the balance right, because overly optimised SEO content is neither fun to read nor fun to write, but go too far in the direction of beautiful travel writing, and you run the risk of no one ever finding your work.
There is a lot of panic around the state of search in 2025, but to be honest it seems like there is a lot of panic all the time, regardless of the year or what is actually going on. Things are always going to change, and part of being in the content game is keeping up with the changes.
Like the fact that AI overviews might reduce clickthroughs, search results are being shuffled so fewer blogs are showing up, and SEO tactics that have shot blogs to huge traffic numbers in the past no longer work (or work against you)
But — none of these things mean there’s no chance for travel blogs to win in search. The opposite might be true, in the sense that now more than ever there is a demand from people to read good content from real people (and not machines).
I do think that if you are putting out good content consistently over time, you are going to build an audience. People want to follow people, so travel blogs will always have a place.
You should absolutely future proof your growing business against Google updates, by building an email list in particular.
Ultra long articles used to work — now you need to get to the point
In 2023, when I first got serious about my travel blog, Google was still rewarding long articles. A lot of SEO advice involved writing more, more more — if the top article in search results had 3,000 words and listed 51 things to do in a destination, then you should write 61 things and more than 4,000 words.
A lot of SEO tools even reinforced this approach, with some scanning your content and the top search results, and recommending how much more you needed to write, and which words/topics you should include to beat the competition.
It really was nonsensical. Who wants to sift through a listicle that long? And how many destinations have that many things to do? It was the travel equivalent of having to read through screeds of background on a dish before you could get to the recipe.
AI might have helped signal the death of that trend, as writing long, fluffy articles became as easy as typing a few prompts into ChatGPT.
It makes sense to me that Google now seems to signal that shorter articles are better. Users want to get information quickly, and having to scroll past miles of unnecessary content isn’t the best experience.
On top of that, I think people are now more hungry for curation, rather than comprehensiveness. They don’t want to know about every single possible activity in a place. They want to know what you did — what was worth it and what wasn’t.
Your job as a writer is to go through all of the noise online and present a list of vetted activities that you would genuinely recommend. That’s your strength.
SEO tools for travel bloggers
Don’t worry about paying for expensive tools. I have done all of my blog growth with free tools, so you can too if you don’t have the budget for an expensive one. Try all the free trials to get started, and once you ramp up growth you can decide whether or not to invest.
Ultimately, tools are a starting point for research, and there are free tools available that can do the same job as the paid ones.
Free SEO tools I use almost everyday:
The Ahrefs SEO toolbar — I love using this to scan pages for their header structure, word count, publication date, and other details.
Ahrefs Keyword Generator — this is pretty much the only keyword tool I use, and I use it mostly to validate my ideas and make sure people are actually searching for a topic.
SEMRush (you can do a few free searches a day, and look at competitor domains).
Google Analytics and Google Search Console
Google Search Console is by far my favourite SEO tool, and it’s free. You can use it to track your performance in search, including average positions, keywords that are leading people to your website, and click through rates.
These tools are indispensable for your website — there is a saying in marketing that ‘what gets measured gets managed’, and while I tend to hate marketing speak, there is some truth to this. The more you can see and understand what’s going on, the better you’ll be able to progress.
What about SEO plugins?
My personal opinion is that you don’t need plugins to be successful at SEO. I think plugins can take away from good writing and distract from the main purpose of content, which is to provide real value to readers.
If you focus too much on keyword density, or other things the plugins tell you to focus on, you can lose sight of writing a good piece of content.
More SEO advice that I completely ignore
While I’m at it, I’ll just let you know a few other things I disregard.
There’s a lot of people out there who say that the only way to grow a travel blog is by being on Wordpress, which is just untrue. The main reasoning for that is that Wordpress sites are faster than website builders like Squarespace, which is what I use for my travel blog.
That might have been true at one point in time, but my blog is proof that Google doesn’t care what platform your website is on. Squarespace might show up as marginally slower than a speedy Wordpress site in some instances, but as long as you understand how to optimise images (see below) your page speed will be fine.
I also pay no attention to more technical SEO — it’s just not my thing. Schema? No idea what that is.
There is so much you need to learn about growing a successful travel blog that you have to pick your battles. For me, that means focusing on excellent content and on-page SEO (which again, is where my core experience is).
This is another reason why I choose Squarespace for my travel blog. It lets me leapfrog ahead by not having to worry about hosting, or having to learn a clunky CMS.
Understand SEO, but don’t lose your mind over it
Here’s a few things I’ve never done for SEO:
Used a CDN (I don’t really even know what that is)
Used a caching plugin
Squarespace definitely helps to keep things simple in terms of SEO. The platform takes care of security elements, I don’t need to worry about plugins, and it’s always mobile optimised.
Setting up your travel blog for success
Have a home page that clearly articulates the value you offer, and an about page that tells your story
Create a simple navigation structure
Good navigation is important for travel blog SEO for a few reasons:
Easy navigation keeps visitors engaged and helps them find their way around your site to all of your great content, reducing bounce rates and increasing time spent on your site.
Clear navigation helps search engines efficiently crawl and index your content, improving visibility in search results.
It makes internal linking easier, distributing page authority and boosting the ranking potential of key pages.
I really love Petite Passport’s website — her design is impeccable. You’ll see in the main navigation along the top that there are only five menu items. None of them are drop down. Once you navigate to one of those main menu pages, you then have the option to go deeper into journal categories, or individual countries.
Aim for this kind of simplicity. I see a lot of travel blogs with complex navigation structures, with dropdowns trying to cover every country in every continent. It’s confusing, poor UX, and can result in poor SEO.
This is just one example of when what’s good for your user is ultimately what’s good for showing up in search.
Developing a keyword strategy for your travel blogs
Don’t keyword stuff (it’s not worth writing in bad English for the sake of a keyword. Google is smart enough to pick up keywords that aren’t exact matches, so no need to write “Are you searching for the best things to do in Auckland, New Zealand?” Just write Auckland.
Things to do in X destination
In my experience, the most valuable keywords to target have been lower volume, long tail keywords that relate to a complex topic — for example, itineraries.
High volume keywords, like those relating to weather, get a lot of impressions, but not a lot of clickthroughs.
Understand the user journey, and where they are in that journey, for each keyword
What the keyword research tools don’t show
One post can capture many different keywords, so even if you’re targeting one keyword, say “two week Tasmania itinerary,” it’s pretty likely you’ll capture traffic from a lot of related keywords as well. This means the traffic you can to that post can be a lot higher than the volume for that one keyword.
On page SEO — simple tips for optimising each blog post
Optimising your images for SEO
Travel blogs often need strong imagery — visual inspiration plays a huge part in the travel planning process.
I resize and rename all images in Lightroom, and edit my own photos (I shoot in RAW).
Make sure your images are maximum 300kbs.
Dimensions should be large-ish — I set mine to 1020 x 800.
Vertical images work better for mobile devices, so I recommend having most of your images portrait rather than landscape.
Give the image file a descriptive name, like woman-on-a-beach-in-new-zealand.jpg
I save all my images in JPG
I use ImagOptim 2 to ‘clean’ my image files, which makes them smaller without losing any image quality.
Build up relevant landing pages
You should be building your content out around specific topics, or content clusters, that ladder up to your overarching niche.
For example, if solo hiking for women is your niche, you might have a content cluster on the topic of gear. You could have a landing page on ‘hiking gear for women’ and on that page link to all of the relevant blog posts on that topic. For example, a hiking list for overnight hikes, hiking clothes to wear in summer, what to wear hiking in cold weather.
Getting backlinks
Most of the backlinks to my travel site have come from publications I have written for as a freelance writer. This has been a boon for me, as I have backlinks from the likes of Lonely Planet and National Geographic.
Being an expert on one location or topic can help you accrue more backlinks over time. For example, journalists have come to me for quotes about van life in New Zealand, which is one of my key areas of expertise.
Showing authority (E.E.A.T)
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness. It is essentially a way of signalling to both Google and readers that you know your stuff.
It’s simple, really — anyone who lands on your site should be able to quickly tell what your area of expertise is.
You can do this by:
Including an author bio at the bottom of each post.
Having a strong About Me page.
Freelance writing for other publications — there are many mentions of me across the internet, which helps build my authority.
Original photography.
Briefly summarising relevant experience in your blog intros, then referencing your experiences throughout via anecdotes and first person language.
As with most things SEO, there are no hard and fast rules for EEAT, but the clearer it is to readers why they should pay attention to you, the clearer it will be to Google.
Travel blog SEO, post Helpful Content Update
If you’re looking to start or grow a blog, you have probably picked up on a lot of the negative chatter online about the Google updates that have upended search results starting in September 2023. (In brief, there have been updates in September 2023, March 2024, and August 2024).
My view on the updates is that they were course correcting content that had honestly become too spammy and affiliate focused. Some good blogs were shot down in the process, but some were so obviously over optimised that it’s hardly any surprise Google tried to reshuffle the search results.
This might sound a little heartless considering how many blogs lost nearly all of their traffic, but there were just so many bad ones out there.
I kind of get it that Reddit started to get so much more traffic — I trust Reddit threads too when I travel, because at least I know it wasn’t written by AI. I’m truly so surprised to see how many travel bloggers (and travel blogging coaches) advocate for using AI writers for their blogs.
If writing isn’t something you love to do, travel blogging might not be for you.
It’s tough to hear, but there aren’t any good shortcuts to building a good travel site. Great content takes time. A good blog post should take you hours, not just 30 seconds with ChatGPT. And readers aren’t stupid — they can tell when something comes from you, or when it’s generic regurgitated AI slop.
I could rant about this at length but I’ll stop here.
If you found this useful, you might like to check out some of my other posts:
