Updated November 29, 2023
If you already have a travel agency website, you may think your work is done.
After all, you either did the hard work of building it yourself, or you invested time and money into having someone create it for you.
Now you expect that people are finding your website and clicking through, exploring your services, the destinations you sell, and getting excited about having you plan their next vacation.
But what if that isn’t happening?
If you aren’t getting consultation requests from your website, or you aren’t even sure if people are finding your website, it’s time for a travel agency website audit.
What is a travel agency website audit?
A travel agency website audit is a technical deep dive into what’s working (and what’s not working!) with your travel agency website. While you can do some auditing on your own, a deep dive requires specialized software that mimics the way Google and other search engines crawl your website.
You can purchase a subscription to a software service that provides audit capability. Popular subscription services include Semrush, Moz, and Ubersuggest.
But if all you want to do is know if your site is actually getting visitors, it doesn’t make sense to pay for a subscription to a service.
That’s where we come in! At The Savvy Travel Advisor, we’ve already subscribed to software that allows us to audit your website, so we can offer you a one-time website audit at a set price.
You get a 1-2 page (depending on the size of your website) report that tells you exactly what’s working and what isn’t, plus next steps to address the most critical issues so you can get more eyes on your travel agency website and turn visitors into leads and new clients.
Here’s what I look at as part of a website audit.
Monthly visitors
If no one is visiting your website, it’s just out there collecting digital dust. No one wants that!
Unfortunately, too many of the travel agency websites I’ve looked at get a grand total of… drum roll please… zero visitors per month.
Zilch. Zero. Nada.
Which is disappointing to hear if it’s your website, but also vital to know! And the good news is that a website with zero visitors now can be getting dozens, if not hundreds of visitors in a few months by taking a few simple steps.
Those steps vary based on what else your travel agency website audit reveals, so let’s take a look at the other important parts of your audit report.
Organic keywords
Keywords are vital to getting organic traffic through Google, Bing, or any other search engine. You need your website to rank for keywords organically, meaning they are naturally included in the copy on your website so Google recognizes and ranks you.
If you wrote your own website copy, odds are that you rank for very few keywords, if any at all.
Even if you’ve paid a professional copywriter to write the copy for your site, it’s possible you don’t rank organically for any keywords.
That’s because many copywriters, while they write excellent copy, aren’t trained in copywriting for SEO, or Search Engine Optimization.
They create beautiful word pictures, are able to generate that “know, like, trust” factor for people who do find your website, but their copy simply isn’t effective for helping people find your website.
The organic keywords section of your travel agency website audit report will tell you how many keywords you rank for, what those keywords are, and where you rank. It doesn’t help your website traffic much if you’re on the 5th page of Google results, our goal is page 1 for relevant, highly searched keywords!
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) errors
There are a lot of factors that go into whether or not Google or other search engines will pull up your website in search results. Errors on your website, most of which you wouldn’t be aware of, can cause your website not to show up.
SEO (search engine optimization) errors on your travel website can range from low word count, long load times, and missing title tags all the way to Google not indexing your website or pages.
Did you know that Google doesn’t automatically include your website in search results?
This was a huge issue for one travel advisor I worked with recently. She has a beautiful website, a great travel blog, and based on her copy she should rank for plenty of organic keywords. But she wasn’t ranking and was hardly getting any visitors!
The visitors she was getting were, strangely, going to two specific blog posts.
What on earth was going on?
I did a website audit, and her site passed the first couple tests with flying colors.
Then I started digging into which pages on her website were being crawled and indexed (technical terms for Google knowing the content of an individual webpage).
Out of all the pages on her website, only two had been crawled and indexed by Google! And those two were the pages that were getting all the traffic.
No wonder no one was finding her site, Google was basically ignoring it!
I was able to help her submit her sitemap and all those missing pages to Google, and now she’s getting dozens of monthly visitors and ranking for over 1,300 organic keywords. Success!
Page warnings
Warnings for your website pages are things that individually don’t have a large impact on overall SEO, but put together they can start tanking your ranking. (That rhymes, I think I need to use those words more.)
A lot of these issues will be invisible to you. Things like broken links, missing title tags, headers not formatted properly for Google to understand the flow of the page, and missing meta descriptions are all small by themselves, but these problems snowball if you have a lot of them and can really hurt your rankings.
If you’re not sure what a meta description or title tag is and you created your own website, it’s quite likely they’re missing. Google doesn’t like that.
Open Google and type your business name into the search bar. Ideally your website should come up first when you search specifically for your business. If it doesn’t there’s some work to be done there.
Regardless of what comes up, take a look at that first listing.
The first thing you’ll see is a link in blue. Those words are the title tag.
The next section is the meta description. If you didn’t include a meta description on your page, Google automatically pulls the first section of text from your page and displays it. That’s great in one way, because it means it’s not left as a blank section.
On the other hand, the first words on the page may not entice a potential visitor to click through to your site. A heading, which could be effective once they’re on your page, may not provide enough information to tell a potential visitor why they should click through.
That’s why you want to have a well-crafted meta description. It needs to provide enough information to pique their curiosity, and at the same time tell them what information they can expect to find when they click through.
If your meta description and the contents of your page don’t match up, a visitor won’t immediately find what they expected and will bounce, which Google sees as bad.
Here's the breakdown of a Google search result, with all the vital parts to help your travel website rank well.
Recommendations and next steps
Ok, so you’re probably thinking “that’s all fine and good, but I’m not a tech wiz. What do I do now? Even if I have you audit my site and you find problems, how do I fix them?”
I have great news for you! As part of a website audit I don’t just tell you what the issues are. I tell you how hard they are to fix, and if your website is created on a website builder like Wix or Squarespace, I'll give you step-by-step instructions to fix them.
If you don’t have the time, tech know-how, or simply the desire to tackle the issues yourself, we can discuss pricing options to have me resolve the issues on your behalf.
Are you ready to see what your website audit results are? Click here to learn more about the process and purchase your audit.
The bottom line
Having a website isn’t enough. The website you have needs to be working for you and bringing visitors and potential customers to your website.
If your travel agency website isn’t helping you grow your business, it’s time to find out why.
Click here to learn more about our travel agency website services and get started today.
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