Local SEO
Helping tour operators dominate local search results in their destination.
Local SEO for Travel & Tourism | Destination Search Visibility
When people are asked to think about SEO, they’ll often associate the term with online businesses – companies whose sole aim is to drive potential customers to their website. In reality, SEO has many more ‘real world’ applications. When specialist SEO marketing tactics are used to increase your local exposure, it’s referred to as ‘local SEO’.
A staggering number of people use search engines to find local businesses.
Local SEO is powerful – and if you do business locally, it should be a marketing priority. While the basics of local SEO are easy to grasp, putting them into action requires answers to some complex questions, including:
- How can you be sure you’re represented in the places local people are searching?
- What kind of site content do search engines look for when ranking local businesses?
- How can you combine local SEO, blogger outreach and link building to maximum effect?
Summon has supported many local companies to drive business with a number of local SEO fundamentals. Whether you’re looking to attract local business – or if you’d like to capture some of that local appeal for your bigger company, our travel SEO team can help.
Why Local SEO matters for travel businesses
If you run a local tour company, travellers are searching for you on Google Maps, in local pack results and with destination-based queries. Local SEO ensures they find you - before your competitors.
Appear in destination ‘near me’ searches
Travellers search ‘tours in Kyoto’. Local SEO gets your business into these results - the Google Map Pack, Google Maps and local organic listings - at exactly the moment a traveller is ready to book or visit.
Build trust through reviews and citations
Review signals and local citations are core local SEO ranking factors. For travel businesses, a strong Google Business Profile with consistent details across TripAdvisor, Booking.com and key directories builds the trust that drives both rankings and booking decisions.
Capture walk-in and same-day bookers
A large proportion of travel bookings - especially for activities, restaurants, tours and transfers - happen on the day or day before. Local search is how these travellers find options. Strong local SEO ensures you’re visible when the buying intent is at its highest.
Outperform OTAs in local results
OTAs dominate generic travel searches - but local SEO is where independent tour operators can win. Google favours the actual business in local results over intermediaries, giving you a genuine competitive advantage in destination-level searches.
Our Local SEO services for travel
Google Business Profile optimisation
We fully optimise your Google Business Profile - categories, description, photos, Q&A, review management and local post strategy - to maximise visibility in the Map Pack and Google Maps for destination-based travel searches.
Local citation building
We build and audit your business listings across travel and local directories - TripAdvisor, Yelp, Booking.com, tourism board directories and local business databases - ensuring name, address and phone consistency that supports local ranking signals.
Destination keyword targeting
We identify and optimise for the destination-specific queries your target travellers are using - ‘family activities Cornwall’, ‘food tours Barcelona’ - creating location pages and content that compete in these high-intent searches.
Review management
Making reviews and review sites work for you doesn’t have to come down to luck. At Summon, we’ll help you to encourage more great reviews – and then make sure those reviews are seen in the right places.
Developing backlinks
Although backlinks are an area of online marketing in their own right, great local link building will help to establish you as an exceptional local business – both to real people and to the all-important search engines that those real people use.
Our Local SEO process
At Summon, we believe there’s no universal ‘right way’ to make digital marketing work for you – and our local SEO services are no different. This is why we’ll start with an understanding of you, your business and your aims.
We will also perform a local SEO audit and some keyword research. This will look at your site, your business listings, social media profiles and much more, as well as making adjustments along the way.
When we’ve established what’s working well for you – and what the competition is doing, we’ll focus on your website – ensuring the important technical basics are in place. Doing so gives you a solid foundation that the rest of our local SEO work can be built upon.
With the essentials in place, we can help you to create content that identifies your site as being an authority in your industry. We’ll identify a number of opportunities that will help bolster your local SEO campaign. For example, link opportunities or citation site placements. We’ll monitor every step of the process, making sure you get the best return for your investment.
Why work with us?
We know what customers are looking for when they search for local businesses – and we’ve used this knowledge to help an enormous range of companies increase their local SEO performance. Whether you’re considering local SEO for the first time, or you’ve got an experienced team who could use a little expertise or support, we can help.
At Summon, you’re never just another client; you’ll always be talking to a member of our team who understands you, your goals – and where your campaign is at right now.
What’s more, we’ll provide you with on-going information that’ll help you assess how your local SEO campaign is performing – making sure you’re always up to speed with how your business is moving forward.
