Building pages while building community. How Travelocity, Tourism Media, and Local Tourism Organisations collaborated to create fully optimised, highly informative, multi-contributor travel content.

The Challenge

The SEO team at Travelocity approached Tourism Media to create customised content pages related specifically to a destination’s key offerings. The project was aptly named the ‘Theme Page Project’ and the team at TM strategized and assembled some of the best content experts to take it on.

The challenge was to develop customised, high ranking content which achieved both great user experience and provided opportunities for strong future relationships between Travelocity and their partner destinations. The pages needed to have cross-linking opportunities, high SEO value and the ability to integrate media assets such as photos (both from TM’s existing library and provided by the local tourism organisations).

Our Approach

Strategy. Travelocity provided a list of the company’s most important destination markets. The aim was to assign ‘themes’ (determined by travel-related keyword/SEO research) to each destination. If a certain term had a high search volume, it would be corralled into a list of potential ‘themes’. High search volume suggested that the ‘theme’ was:

  1. an actual important and viable experience pertinent to the area, and
  2. an experience a large pool of people were already interested in.

Once we developed a list of viable themes from the keyword research, we took the top 10 and reached out to the local destination marketing offices (DMOs) to elaborate on the identified themes and provide input for the copy creation and accompanying images. The DMOs used Accelerator forms to submit the data making it easy to organise and use by the writing team. In exchange, we reciprocated hyperlinks to their website. 

Writing. Our SEO specialists provided our writers with comprehensive briefs, including SEO requirements (including keyword density). The content was published to one-off pages using the Explore platform and cross-linked to multiple related pages.

This project aimed to:

  • Build optimised, relevant content to compete in a space with high search volume.
  • Fit within Travelocity’s existing ‘Discover’ ecosystem.
  • Provide a good user experience.
  • Create strong, long-term and reciprocal relationships between DMOs, Travelocity and more broadly, Expedia.

The Results

Over the course of several months, we developed 250+ pages of custom, visitor-centric pages for Travelocity, while fostering on-going, reciprocal relationships with numerous DMOs around the world.