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Best SEO Agency for Travel & Tourism
Most travel companies hire SEO agencies expecting traffic. They get a blog full of "10 Things to Do in [Destination]" articles that rank nowhere and convert nobody.
Travel SEO isn't content marketing with pretty photos. It's competing against billion-dollar OTAs for transactional keywords, managing seasonal demand spikes that destroy your infrastructure, building multi-market topical authority, and converting browsers into bookers before they click back to Booking.com.
The agencies pitching you haven't looked at your GSC data. They don't know your average booking window. They've never optimized for shoulder season recovery or fought Google's travel panels for SERP real estate. Here's what actually separates competent travel SEO from expensive content mills.
Why Travel SEO Is Actually Different
Travel queries have intent complexity most industries never see. Someone searching "Paris hotels" could be researching a trip 8 months out, comparing options 3 weeks before departure, or panic-booking tonight because their Airbnb cancelled.
Your SEO strategy has to capture all three and route them appropriately. The researcher needs inspiration and authority signals. The comparer needs specific inventory and trust markers. The panic-booker needs availability, price, and a CTA above the fold.
Most agencies treat these as the same keyword with the same content solution. They're not. The "best hotels in Paris" searcher comparing neighborhoods isn't the same human as the "hotels near Eiffel Tower available tonight" searcher, even though both queries mention hotels and Paris.
Then there's the OTA problem. You're competing against domains with 20+ years of link equity, billions in ad spend brand recognition, and algorithmic advantages because they're aggregators. Google trusts them by default. You start 40 positions behind them in every market you both target.
Agencies who don't understand this will build you a content strategy that ignores commercial intent and focuses on blog traffic that never converts. The ones who do understand it know how to win transactional queries through service-specific topical authority and technical optimization that OTAs can't match because their templates are generic.
Seasonality Breaks Most SEO Strategies
Travel demand isn't consistent. You have 6-week windows where you need to capture 60% of annual revenue for specific destinations. Miss the ranking window and you miss the season.
This destroys typical SEO timelines. The agency promising "results in 6 months" doesn't realize your Amalfi Coast bookings happen March-May for June-August travel. If you start SEO in January, you're already too late for this year's season.
Competent travel SEO works backwards from booking windows. If your data shows average 14-week lead time for European summer travel, your content and technical optimization needs to hit page 1 by February. That means the work starts in October.
Agencies without travel experience don't build this into their roadmaps. They launch destination pages in April, watch them climb to position 12 by July, and call it progress. Meanwhile you've lost the season.
The other seasonality challenge is maintaining rankings during off-season when search volume craters and Google decides your content isn't fresh anymore. You need shoulder season optimization strategies that keep pages ranked for 8 months of low volume so they're ready when high season hits again.
Most agencies ignore this entirely. They chase whatever has volume right now and let your winter destination rankings collapse in summer because "nobody's searching for it." Then you start from position 35 when winter season starts and you're buying Google Ads to compensate.
The OTA Traffic Trap
Booking.com, Expedia, TripAdvisor, Airbnb — these aren't just competitors. They're algorithmic incumbents with structural advantages you can't replicate.
They have 10 million internal links. You have 500 pages. They have 200,000 destination pages. You have 12 markets. They have a Domain Rating of 92. You're at 34. Google's algorithm doesn't care that you offer better service and local expertise — their domain signals overwhelm yours for generic commercial queries.
Bad agencies will tell you to "build authority" and "create better content." That's not a strategy. That's a LinkedIn caption.
Good agencies identify the gaps OTAs can't fill: hyper-local inventory ("boutique hotels in Le Marais with rooftop bars"), service-specific authority ("all-inclusive surf retreats"), and experience-focused queries where aggregators have thin content ("multi-generational family villas Italy").
The OTAs own "hotels in Barcelona." You're never ranking for that. But "family-run hotels Barcelona Gothic Quarter" is winnable if you build real topical authority around neighborhood-specific content and user signals that prove you're the better answer.
This requires actual SEO skill — keyword research that finds valuable gaps, content that targets specific intent, and technical optimization that makes your pages faster and more useful than OTA template pages. Most agencies skip this and compete head-to-head on impossible queries while ignoring the longtail where revenue actually hides.
Multi-Market SEO Isn't Just Translation
If you operate in multiple countries, you need hreflang, market-specific content strategies, local link building, and the technical infrastructure to tell Google which version serves which audience. Get this wrong and you'll have your UK pages ranking in Australia and your US content cannibalizing your Canadian rankings.
Most agencies implement hreflang tags and call it international SEO. They don't audit whether Google's actually respecting the tags, whether your content is differentiated enough to avoid duplicate content penalties, or whether your internal linking creates regional silos that confuse the algorithm.
You'll also get agencies who think translating your English content into Spanish makes it "localized." It doesn't. Search behavior differs by market. "Luxury villa Spain" is a UK search pattern. Spanish searchers use different phrases, have different intent signals, and convert on different page elements.
Competent international travel SEO means market-specific keyword research, content that matches local search behavior, technical implementation that prevents cross-market cannibalization, and the discipline to launch markets sequentially instead of spinning up 12 half-finished sites simultaneously.
If an agency pitches international expansion without asking about your booking data by market, your translation workflow, or your fulfillment capacity in each region, they're selling a template. You need someone who's actually scaled multi-market travel sites and knows where the edge cases break things.
What to Actually Look for in a Travel SEO Agency
First: do they ask about your booking data before they pitch a strategy? Average lead time, seasonality patterns, conversion rate by traffic source, top-performing destinations, booking window by market — if they're not asking, they're guessing.
Second: do they understand your commercial model? Tour operators, DMCs, villa rental agencies, boutique hotel groups, and adventure travel companies all have different SEO challenges. An agency that treats them identically doesn't understand the industry.
Third: technical competency. Can they audit your Core Web Vitals, diagnose JavaScript rendering issues, implement proper schema markup for travel entities, fix crawl budget waste from infinite filter pages, and optimize for Google's travel-specific SERP features? Or are they just content strategists who outsource the technical work?
Fourth: content strategy beyond "destination guides." Everyone publishes destination guides. They're table stakes and they rarely rank unless you have domain authority you probably don't have. What's their plan for building topical authority through service-specific content, experience-focused comparisons, and actually useful planning resources?
Fifth: do they have a perspective on competing against OTAs, or do they ignore the problem entirely? If their pitch doesn't acknowledge that Booking.com outranks you on 90% of your target keywords, they haven't thought about your actual competitive landscape.
We cover this in more depth in our travel SEO approach, but the summary is: hire someone who's done this before, not someone learning on your budget.
Red Flags That Mean Walk Away
Guarantees. Anyone guaranteeing page 1 rankings for "hotels [destination]" is lying or ignorant. Either way, you don't want them.
Package pricing without audit. SEO pricing should reflect scope of work, which you can't define without seeing the current state of the site. If they're quoting you before they've reviewed your GSC, your backlink profile, or your technical infrastructure, they're selling you a pre-built package that won't fit.
"We'll create content." Creating content isn't a strategy. What content? Targeting what keywords? Solving what user intent? Supporting what conversion funnel? Agencies who lead with content volume instead of content strategy are selling you blog filler.
No questions about conversion. Traffic without bookings is vanity metrics. If an agency isn't asking about your conversion rate, your average booking value, or which traffic sources actually convert, they're optimizing for the wrong thing.
Agency-owned links. Some agencies build "private blog networks" or "partner sites" and sell you links from domains they control. This is a shortcut that works until Google figures it out, at which point your site gets penalized and the agency moves on to the next client. Build real links or don't build links.
Reporting without context. "Your traffic increased 40%" means nothing without knowing which pages, which keywords, which markets, and whether it converted. Good agencies report on business outcomes, not just traffic trends.
If you're evaluating agencies and need a second opinion, request a free teardown — we'll review your current SEO state and tell you what's actually broken.
The Verdict
Most travel companies waste 6-12 months with agencies who don't understand the industry, then restart with someone competent after a season of missed revenue.
You can skip that cycle by hiring someone who's actually done travel SEO, understands your commercial model, and has the technical chops to compete against OTAs in winnable markets. That means asking better questions during the pitch, ignoring guarantees and package pricing, and evaluating based on their understanding of your business instead of their portfolio of logo slides.
Underdog Digital works with travel companies who are tired of content mills and want an SEO partner who understands booking windows, seasonality, and the OTA competitive landscape. We don't do retainers or meetings — just audits, strategy, and implementation that actually moves commercial keywords. If that sounds like what you need, check out our case studies or get a free teardown of your current SEO.
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