Stuck in an SEO Spiral …Holidays

When someone goes into a travel agent do they ever say, “please can I book a Barbados holiday?”. I’d conjecture that the answer is no and yet if searching for a holiday to Barbados online the majority of us would start by typing in “Barbados holidays”. The SEOs in travel are well aware of this and thus we’re all encouraged to stuff our pages with ‘holidays’ everywhere you look.

It may not quite be chicken and egg but the idea about how we ended up in this situation doesn’t look easy to solve. Do SEOs add holidays to every page title as a reaction to how people search? Or do people add holidays to every search because they have been trained that it is the best way to get a useful result?

This spiral of SEOs chasing key terms and in turn people learning to search for them  must happen in many different industries, but as a Content Manager working in travel it is the …Holidays scourge that really irks me.

I believe that people want to read intelligent content that entertains and educates them about possible holiday destinations. They don’t want to wade through keywords to find something useful.

Ask yourself this – if people searched for “Holidays to Barbados” wouldn’t the world be just a little bit better? I’d say yes.