How Cruise Travel Agents Can Turn Itineraries into SEO Optimised Content
The early stages of SEO were a Wild West, rewarding sites for manipulating immature algorithms to trick users into clicking with tactics such as keyword stuffing. Through a series of updates, search engines strived to make these nefarious methods obsolete, meaning that valued content had to be delivered to rank highly on search results.
While businesses within the cruise industry must keep their site fresh and engaging to move users from interest to action, they must also be search engine optimised to ensure a consistent flow of traffic through organic search.
Our latest Cruise Industry Marketing & Trends Report showed that there is increasing demand from 25 – 44-year-olds – a market that is famously technologically aware, making SEO increasingly important. So, how can your business guarantee a website that delivers compelling content while still remaining SEO optimised? It’s not magic; it just requires the skills and know-how.
The Importance of Organic Search Visibility in the Cruise Industry
The travel industry, and the cruise industry in particular, is incredibly competitive. For consumers, this can mean better value if they shop around, but for businesses, it can lead to a race to the bottom, securing customers purely through bargain prices.
To maintain healthy profit margins, prospective customers must be aware of the value that your business offers, but with ever-increasing paid search costs, the most viable alternative is through organic search traffic.
Research that BANC conducted showed that up to 70% of cruise brand traffic is a direct result of organic search, showing just how powerful a tool it can be if used correctly. And, unlike paid search, organic search content can be treated like an apple tree; regular pruning of the tree (website) will provide you with delicious apples (customers) for years to come.
Understanding Organic Search Optimisation
SEO in the 2020s is no longer just about keyword optimisation; Google’s algorithms are complex, assessing various factors to address the overall health and value of the site to a user.
Primarily, your business’ site should be fast, easy to navigate, and built around satisfying search intent. Search engines use these datasets because they identify what users want to experience. In the modern internet age, if a site ranks highly, it’s there for a reason.
The benefits of SEO are two-fold. Firstly, your site will rank higher on search engines, but users are more likely to stay on your website longer – no one wants to sit on a page for 30 seconds while the images load. In turn, you’ll see an increase in traffic and conversions as a direct result of higher search rankings.
The Hidden SEO Opportunities in Cruise Itineraries
Now that we’ve identified why SEO is so crucial to the cruise industry, it’s about time that we delivered some actionable insights into optimising your website for search engines.
Best-Practice URL Structures
URLs are an incredibly important aspect of the journey towards SEO. The slugs that come after your domain name can be the difference between a great ranking and a poor one, so it’s crucial to get it right.
On a basic level, slugs should include at least one keyword for the search engine to pick up on, URLs should run on HTTPS, and avoid using stop words (and, the, of) , dates or tracking parameters (UTMs) to keep URLs readable and SEO-friendly over time.
Thorough Content
In the Wild West days of SEO, it was a case of throwing as much content as possible onto the website and seeing what stuck, but today, that could actually be damaging your SEO performance.
The content on your website should serve a clear purpose, allowing the opportunity for users to engage and take in the content on your site. For a cruise company, this should all be content that supports the user’s purchase decisions, for example, itineraries, information and pictures about the activities and amenities on board, etc.
Duplicated Content
When algorithm changes came into effect in the 2000s, businesses that had thrown as much content as possible onto their site discovered that their SEO performance was tanking. The trouble with throwing as much content as possible is that some content gets thrown twice – a big no-no for SEO performance.
With busy schedules and a plethora of content being provided by suppliers, it’s easy to make use of supplier content by simply featuring it on your site. However, as this content has been used elsewhere, search engines could notice this and penalise your site for using duplicated content. In this case, it’s best practice to have a copywriter go through the supplied content to give it a fresh feel, while still maintaining the key information in the content.
Showcase Experience
Google’s algorithm is complex, but it can be summarised using the E-E-A-T initialism: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Cruise retailers can lean on their years of experience to offer first-hand insights that cannot be found elsewhere. This could include bespoke articles about specific events or festivals which your team has attended, or “Insider tips for port X”. These examples prove to Google, and to users, that your business knows its stuff, so your site will perform more favourably in search rankings.
This can be backed up with other content that cannot be found elsewhere, such as photos and videos, rather than stock images or visuals provided by cruise lines.
How to Optimise Cruise Itineraries
Itineraries are a crucial part of the purchasing journey, but they’re also complex and, if formatted incorrectly, can cause SEO issues. Thankfully, tools like Widgety and Pontoon exist to make itinerary integration easy, seamless and, crucially, SEO-friendly.
Widgety works as a centralised data platform for the cruise and tour industries. It aggregates real-time pricing, itineraries, and media from over 70 cruise lines, standardising the information for travel agents. Through embeddable search tools, digital brochures, and a REST API, it helps agencies provide accurate, up-to-date information to customers.
For operators, it ensures brand consistency across third-party sites and tracks engagement. Essentially, Widgety simplifies travel sales by connecting operators and agents through a single, reliable source of truth for complex travel data.
The Pontoon plug-in, alongside Widgety, allows WordPress sites to integrate live cruise data seamlessly. It allows raw API data to be turned into SEO-friendly content, enabling travel agents to display real-time itineraries and ship details while maintaining brand consistency, improving search rankings, and automating updates without manual data entry.
Though SEO is a journey and not a destination, with the right guidance and tools like Widgety alongside Pontoon, your cruise business can begin to see the immense impact that a correctly implemented SEO strategy can take. For more information on how Pontoon can elevate your business’ SEO performance, get in touch with the team at Pontoon.
