Big brands continue to dominate travel industry’s search traffic

Big brands winning keyword battle from world"s most searched travel keywords

Tatiana Rokou 

“Restaurants near me” becomes most expensive keyword in industry at $3.78 followed by "cheap hotels" at $3.35 per click.

Digital market intelligence firm, SimilarWeb has identifiedthe most popular desktop keywords driving traffic to online sites in travel, revealing the individual travel sites wining the battle for these super searches between May and July 2016.

In online travel, search generates 42% of all traffic to the industry, making it the most important source of traffic.

The study found that the biggest online search in travel is "flight tracker" followed by "flights", "hotel", "car rental", "airline tickets", "restaurants near me", "cheap hotels", "plane tickets" "cheap tickets" and "train tickets".

Top searched "Flight tracker" was a keyword battle won by flightview.com which picked up  37% of all desktop traffic from the keyword in the past three months. In second place,  was  “flights” for which Kayak.com  lands the biggest market share (16.94%), followed by expedia.com (9.51%) and SkyScanner (6.29%).

For “plane tickets” Expedia.com picks up 46.4% followed by TripAdvisor 16.19% and Kayak (6.67%).

Another big brand dominates the top traffic for “hotels” (of which 45% is paid search) where more than 40% market share goes to Hotels.com.

For “car rental” (the fifth placed search term) Enterprise.com picks up 18.7% of market share compared to carrentals.com (16.1%) and rentalcars.com (9.68%).

The most expensive travel keyword - if paid for as part of a PPC campaign - at $3.78 is “restaurants near me” - won by a landslide by three TripAdvisor domains, collectively taking nearly 40% market share of this traffic. Also in the running for traffic from this keyword is Yelp (5.21%), Locu (3.21%) and Zomato (3.12%).

Though big brands dominate, newer players can use a deeper analysis to examine less competitive, and therefore less costly, keywords for their SEO strategies and PPC campaigns. Pursuing a number of longer-tail and/or less popular terms can generate a significant amount of increased traffic. Even for the top keywords a number of skilled smaller players still take traffic from the leaders including hotel.de (in hotels) which is ahead of Trivago and Expedia - despite overall getting around 30 times less traffic than these players.