Digital travel and SEO: how Skyscanner dominates the SERPs
The digital journey market has grown quickly during the last decade. Sales in Western Europe totalled $152 billion in 2015, with the worldwide determine greater than $533 billion.
Taken from PI Datametric Digital Travel Report, listed here are some stats on digital journey and search engine optimization, as nicely a take a look at the natural search dominance of Skyscanner on this market.
What do individuals seek for and when?
Here are the main search phrases by quantity. As we will see ‘holidays to..’ and ‘flights to..’ dominate.
There are key seasonal developments right here too. Searches are likely to peak in January and July, the occasions when individuals are more than likely to be planning forward for the summer time, or trying to decide up final minute offers.
SkyScanner’s dominance
One factor which comes out of the analysis is that Skyscanner is choosing up a lot of the natural visibility round search phrases on this sector, particularly for flight-associated phrases.
The chart under makes use of probably the most helpful search phrases within the on-line journey sector and appears at which websites are most seen throughout the vary.
As we will see, Skyscanner is by far probably the most seen model. TripAdvisor comes second, whereas British Airways is the one flight operator to make the highest 10, the remaining being aggregators.
The chart under exhibits a variety of key phrases the place Skyscanner (primarily) tops the natural rankings, on Bing and Google.
It additionally has numerous backlinks to its pages:
Here are the hyperlinks to the Skyscanner New York flights web page, for which it ranks at primary. Plenty of tangible anchor textual content hyperlinks there:
For comparability, listed here are the hyperlinks to a few of the rival websites for this time period:
The caveat right here is that natural dominance doesn’t essentially imply that you simply turn out to be probably the most seen website. This is a sector the place paid search performs an enormous position.
Indeed, although Skyscanner tops the natural rankings for a lot of phrases, it’s typically pushed under the fold.
The current removing of proper hand aspect advertisements from desktop outcomes and the addition of an additional paid outcome has made natural outcomes much less seen in aggressive SERPs like these.
For the time period under (flights to New York) Skyscanner has the highest natural outcome, however has been pushed down by 4 paid advertisements and Google’s personal comparability service.
According to Sam Silverwood-Cope from PI Datametrics:
“When you’re taking a look at particular person markets (fairly than simply ambiguous complete visibility scores, which is nearly pointless), Skyscanner is probably one of the best performer we now have seen throughout any market in natural search. They personal the flight sector and have close to omnipresence. They’re clearly doing a implausible job, and it’s as much as the rivals to duplicate their greatest follow and the elects behind success.”
