SEO for travel is a specialist discipline. The sector is uniquely competitive — tour operators and travel brands are competing not just against each other but against global OTAs, aggregators, and major travel publishers with substantial domain authority and content investment. Choosing an SEO agency with genuine travel experience makes a meaningful difference to the results you’ll achieve. Here’s what to look for when evaluating your options.
Realistic offers
SEO is a long-term investment, and any agency promising rapid ranking improvements on highly competitive travel terms should be treated with scepticism. Legitimate SEO produces compounding results over time — typically meaningful progress within 6–12 months on medium-difficulty terms, longer on highly competitive destination and trip-type searches where OTAs dominate. What we’ve found is that operators who enter SEO engagements with realistic timeline expectations and a commitment to sustained effort get far better results than those expecting shortcuts that don’t exist.
Discussing your unique goals
A good SEO agency should spend meaningful time understanding your specific business goals before proposing a strategy. For tour operators, that typically means: which destinations or trip types generate your highest-margin bookings, which OTA search terms you most want to compete for, and what role organic search currently plays in your booking mix. A proposal that could apply to any travel brand without modification — generic destination SEO, generic link building — isn’t a strategy, it’s a template. Insist on specificity.
Clear communication
SEO involves technical decisions that have real commercial consequences, and you should be able to understand what your agency is doing and why at every stage. Ask how they communicate: how often you’ll receive reports, what format those reports take, and how quickly they respond when questions or issues arise. For travel businesses where SEO performance directly affects booking pipeline, a responsive agency that communicates proactively — not just when you ask — is essential. Clients often ask us how to evaluate agency responsiveness before engaging — we recommend asking for their response time commitment in writing as part of the contract.
Experience in SEO
Ask specifically for evidence of SEO results achieved for travel clients similar to your business type. Case studies showing ranking improvements and organic traffic growth for tour operators, ferry companies, airlines, or activity providers are more relevant than general marketing case studies. In our experience, the technical and strategic challenges of travel SEO — competing with OTAs on destination queries, managing large volumes of tour pages, handling seasonal content cycles — are specific enough that experience in the sector genuinely matters.
Understanding how to use links
Link building remains a significant part of competitive travel SEO, and the approach the agency takes to it matters. Ask specifically: what types of links do they build, from what kinds of sites, and through what methods? Agencies relying on low-quality directory submissions or private blog networks produce links that carry little value and can actively harm your profile. The most effective link building for travel combines quality guest posting on relevant travel publications, digital PR that earns editorial coverage, and content-led link acquisition through genuinely useful destination resources. What we’ve found is that travel brands with the strongest organic positions have earned links consistently over time through genuinely good content — not through link schemes.
Experience with technical SEO
Travel websites are often technically complex — large numbers of tour and destination pages, structured data requirements for rich results, international SEO challenges for operators serving multiple geographic markets, and the performance demands of image-heavy pages. Your SEO agency should be comfortable with technical audits, Core Web Vitals analysis, schema markup implementation, and crawl budget management for large travel sites. Ask how they approach technical SEO and what their process is for identifying and prioritising technical issues on new client sites.
Discussing your budget
Be transparent about your SEO budget and ask the agency to be equally transparent about what it can realistically achieve. SEO budgets in travel vary enormously — a national tour operator targeting highly competitive destination queries needs a very different level of investment to a small specialist operator building visibility in a specific niche. The right agency will give you an honest assessment of what your budget can achieve and how long it will take, not an optimistic pitch designed to win the business.
Get in touch
If you’d like to discuss SEO for your travel business, get in touch with the Summon team. We work exclusively with tour operators, ferry companies, airlines and activity providers, and we’d be happy to talk through your goals and how we could help.