SEO Auditing – an example from the Travel sector

A review of technical SEO in the Cruise industry

ClickThrough Marketing conducted mini technical SEO audits on the top five cruise travel agent sites in Europe, and found that all five could boost their search performance with SEO tweaks.

This isn't an industry-specific problem – it's an all-round epidemic. We have carried out countless SEO audits for companies of all sizes. And if we’ve learnt one thing, it’s that the size or position of a firm has little bearing on its technical SEO performance. We've seen huge, popular sites with critical SEO problems, superbly optimised sites from struggling brands, and vice versa. To demonstrate this, we conducted mini audits on Europe's top-five cruise travel agents (by reach according to Alexa), looking at 12 key factors that can affect search performance and usability.*

We hope this research shows the type of checks that are relevant and worthwhile for businesses across sector.

Background to the Cruise Industry

The cruise industry is massive, and its growing. According to Cruise Market Watch, nearly 21 million passengers embarked on cruise holidays in 2013 – that's about 11 million more than 2003. And recent figures from CLIA, quoted by Breaking Travel News, value the cruise industry at around £2.5 billion in the UK alone.

Source: Thomas Quine at Flickr.

The fact that this phenomenal rise correlates with the global ecommerce boom is unlikely to be coincidental. After all, it's now easier than ever for customers to book their holidays online, whenever the fancy takes them – another report from CLIA seems to support this suggestion, stating that last-minute cruise bookings are at a ten-year high.

But despite our five companies presumably relying heavily on the web for their revenues, all of them failed to pass our technical SEO mini audits – by a long shot. In fact, even the best-performing brand, Iglu Cruise, fell down on four of our 11 audit factors. The worst performer, Cruising Holidays, scored just 3.5 out of 11 (see table below).

We should point out that this is not intended as an overriding criticism of these companies' marketing efforts – as the top-five cruise travel agents they are all, obviously, doing rather well for themselves.

Nor are we intending to make an example of these companies for unusual technical errors.

The point is that the technical SEO failures we have discovered in these big sites are not industry specific, and are in fact not unusual at all. But this doesn't mean these travel agents should rest on their laurels.

From our own experiences managing technical optimisation projects, we know that every one of these sites could potentially see search engine performance improvements by rectifying these errors.

But at the moment, they're in a position that many companies unwittingly find themselves in – because of the perceived lack of importance of technical SEO, they're missing out on a chance to steal a lead on their competitors.

Please note: The mini audits we conducted in this study only provide the most basic insights into technical issues – comprehensive audits would likely bring more issues to light.

The companies reviewed - the top-five Cruise travel agents in Europe

1. Iglu Cruise: The UK's largest independent cruise travel agent. Has been trading for 15 years.

Performed best in our study with seven points out of 11.

2. Cruise.co.uk: Established 1984. Won 'World's Leading Cruise Travel Agent' award five years straight.

Performed third best in our study with five points out of 11.

3. Virgin Holidays Cruises: Part of the multi-billion pound Virgin Group.

Performed fourth best in our study with four points out of 11.

4. Bolsover Cruise Club: Independent agent established in the 1960s.

Performed second best in our study with six points out of 11.

5. Cruising Holidays (Blue Water Holidays: Specialist in luxury, river and small ship cruises since 2002.

Came last in our study with 3.5 points out of 11.

SEO Audit Results

These are the factors we have reviewed - you can see that broken links, redirects and use of directions can be improved for many of the companies.

Top five sites by Alexa ranking in the category /Recreation/Travel/Speciality Travel/Cruises/Travel Agents/Europe, as of September 8, 2014. All information correct at time of writing.

Want to know more about how we tested? The methodology, top performer and worst performer plus tips are available in the post Sector report: Do the Top 5 Cruise Travel Agents Get Technical SEO Right? on the ClickThrough site.

Image/Copyright: Flickr.com

Thanks to Phil Robinson for sharing their advice and opinions in this post. Phil is the founder and CEO of ClickThrough Marketing You can follow ClickThrough Marketing on Twitter or connect with Phil on LinkedIn.