Travel has come a long way since the post-pandemic rebound. International tourist arrivals reached a record 1.52 billion in 2025, up 4% on 2024, according to UN Tourism.

With the industry booming, it’s unsurprising that travel is one of search’s most competitive verticals. Operators compete with online travel agents, metasearch sites, and Google’s own travel features for the same queries. Without a clear SEO strategy, it’s hard to win traffic.

Travel and tourism SEO involves improving a travel brand’s website so it ranks well in Google and other search engines, and increasingly, gets cited in AI-generated answers.

Let’s look at how tourism and travel brands can create an SEO strategy that brings in more of the right traffic and more bookings.

The travel market in 2026

Travel demand in 2026 is still strong, but it’s no longer growing at the pace it did during the reopening years. UN Tourism expects international arrivals to grow by 3-4% in 2026, but growth slowed to 2% in the first quarter as conflict in the Middle East disrupted travel in March.

Costs are another pressure impacting the industry. UN Tourism highlights high travel costs and economic uncertainty as key risks. Travellers are still weighing up value, which makes them more likely to research, compare and shop around before they book.

How they research is changing too. Alongside Google, travellers can now plan trips and build itineraries with AI tools, which we’ve tested ourselves. That means travel brands need to be visible in AI answers as well as classic search results.

Put together, there’s more competition for every high-intent search, from more places. Grabbing the attention of potential customers – and showing them what you offer – requires more than a good website.

With a thought-out travel SEO strategy that takes the current market into account, you can increase the likelihood of your site ranking highly for your services. Here’s where to start.

Start with your site

Before diving into keyword research, make sure your site is in good technical health. That means checking that there are no barriers to Google, other search engines, and AI tools crawling, indexing, and rendering your site. Start with a technical SEO audit. A few of the many areas to cover are:

  • Core Web Vitals, especially on image-heavy destination and hotel pages
  • Duplicate content, which is common when the same tours, rooms, or destinations appear under several URLs
  • Page structure
  • Hreflang implementation, if your site is available in multiple languages or countries (our international SEO team can help with this)
  • Any directives that tell Google you don’t want a page indexed, such as canonicalised URLs and noindex tags
  • Booking engines and search filters built in JavaScript, which can hide content and links from search engines if they aren’t rendered properly.

A technical audit will bring up issues of varying priority, depending on their impact on users and search engines. Fix the issues that stop pages from being discovered and indexed first, before you scale up keyword research and content.

If you’re also changing platforms or templates, plan the work as a migration.

How to target the right keywords

Start with what you already rank for. Google Search Console and third-party tools show which keywords bring you traffic and which pages rank for them. This quickly highlights any keyword cannibalisation, and pages that need more keyword research.

Above all, keep the user in mind. For every keyword, ask whether someone searching for it would expect to find your page, and whether your page answers what they’re looking for. If it doesn’t, either drop the keyword or, if it’s highly relevant, create content that does answer it.

To expand your keyword footprint, look at your competitors. Check which keywords they rank for and which of their pages rank, and pick out the ones relevant to your business. Then repeat the exercise for AI search: who gets cited for the same trip-planning questions, and which pages earn those mentions?

From there, look for long-tail keywords. They usually have far less competition than short, high-volume terms, which makes them especially useful for smaller travel and tourism companies. Ranking first for a niche query is often worth more than ranking on page two for a popular one.

Plan around seasonality, too. Travel searches peak with booking windows, often months before people travel, so publish and update seasonal pages well ahead of the peak.

Finally, map each keyword to a single page. Targeting the same keyword on several pages splits authority between them and makes it harder for either one to rank.

Optimising your pages and adding new content

Once your keywords are mapped, start optimising the on-page elements of each page, including:

  • Title tags
  • H1s
  • Meta descriptions
  • Images and alt text
  • Internal links

When it comes to adding new content, write with real travellers in mind. The strongest pages are original and experience-led, with first-hand destination guides, real photos and practical detail that a generic listing can’t offer.

On a large site, this adds up to a lot of content work. Set aside the resources to research, write, and publish updates and new pages, and work through them in order of potential impact. A technical content audit can help you decide where to start.

Bringing it together

Travel demand is still strong, but every high-intent search is contested – by online travel agents, metasearch sites, Google’s own travel features and, increasingly, AI answers. However, the brands that win aren’t necessarily the biggest. They’re the ones that do the basics well and keep building on them.

Get the technical foundations right, map keywords to intent and publish genuinely useful content, and your travel and tourism SEO strategy can deliver growth even when travellers are more price-sensitive. It’s the approach behind the 235% organic growth we achieved for a global yacht charter platform.

If you’d like help building yours, get in touch with our travel SEO team.