We have been investigating the winners and losers in terms of which Travel Companies are achieving good Search Engine Optimisation results; that is, being found naturally in the Search Engines. We have limited our research to Google, Yahoo and MSN, these are reported to account for over 85% of all UK searches. We have also limited our research to the 63 main key phrases that include the word Holiday or Holidays.

One of the conclusions of this research is that irrespective of how large a business you are, or how large your annual budget is for SEO, you are not guaranteed a page one appearance for a particular keyword or key phrase. In fact we see major brands within the big four (Thomson, First Choice, MyTravel, Thomas Cook) with very few page one appearances, whist individual private villa or apartment owners are able to achieve a top 5 page one ranking.

The research, also reveals which businesses focus on Search Engine Optimisation. As a general rule, we see many of the more specialist dot com travel businesses out-gunning their traditional travel industry counterparts; almost certainly, because they rely 100% on the web for their business. It can also be argued, that they are web professionals targeting the Travel Industry, rather than traditional Tour Operators attempting to get a grip on the web site development and keyword optimisation. An example would be BargainHolidays.com (part of LastMinute.com).

One of the greatest gifts that the internet has bestowed upon us, is the huge volume of statistics regarding customer behavior, the terminology that they use when "searching" the web. Why do 180,000 searchers each month type in "book a holiday", and not specify a destination or a holiday type, come to that why do 5 million of us just key in the word holiday or holidays?. Travel businesses should look at all of the available data even before buying the domain name. As the results show, the Domain name can be important particularly on Yahoo and MSN.

The tables below, show the keyword, the approximate number of searches in a month (these are for May 2007). For each of the three main search engines; we show the top ten placed web sites, that is those that have naturally made page one of the search results. If a Holiday brand appears in a top ten spot in more than one search engine for that specific keyword; we have colour coded the brand, to make spotting good SEO performances. In the first table for the keyword "Holidays"; Saga were 4th on MSN, 4th on Yahoo and 7th on Google. The results below were gathered in a 24 hour period during the week ending 12th October 2007.

The summary of our findings is shown at the bottom of this page.

1) General

1.a) Clearly, there is a need for virtually every travel business to generate bookings sourced from the internet search engines. There are two main routes by which this goal can be achieved; i) by pay per click campaigns (i.e. you pay to be found) and ii) by natural listings, this is achieved by optimising your travel web site, if successful, your website listing will appear in the natural listings section of the search engine results page. The sensible and most realistic approach is to have a mixture of paying and non-paying visitors to your site. Looking forward. it is guaranteed that the cost of ppc campaigns will rise as more competitors join the fray. Therefore, if you have relied solely on PPC campaigns to date - it is time to concentrate on the Search Engine Optimisation of your site; not just the text on the page, but how the site is structured, the sites navigation, it's meta-tags, subsidiary page names, where the server is based, inbound links, search engine submission policies and a whole host of other considerations.

We talk to many travel businesses - the goal of every travel business owner / director is is to appear naturally for the most important keywords and key phrases (for their travel business) achieving a page one position on the three major search engines. What we wanted to know, was "how realistic is this objective"

1.b) The keywords that we have investigated are used by prospective holidaymaker's to explore and ultimately purchase future "holiday" requirements. We have looked at the most important 63 keywords and key phrases across three search engines and have ascertained who, during the 24 hour period that we extracted our results, was occupying the cherished top ten, page one positions - we looked at the 1,890 occupiers of these cherished positions. These 63 keywords and key phrases were typed into the three search engines collectively over 15 million times during May 2007. We would have liked to report that all natural listings were filled by UK based travel businesses, unfortunately, the competition for these cherished positions extends much wider than UK based travel companies. We found: Newspapers, online Encyclopedias, a County Council, Price Comparison Sites, Tourist boards, Foreign Travel Sites (Australian, Canadian, Greek, New Zealand, etc), Trade Associations, Hotels, Libraries and even 10 private villa or apartment owners, occupying these coveted positions.

1.c) An achievable phenomena is optimising your site to get two of the ten natural listings on a search engine results page - an example is; if you key "holidays" into msn.co.uk, the first two natural listings are: both from Thomson.co.uk,. Sometimes, its two different pages from the same site that appear, other times it may be a .com and a .co.uk version of the same page. Clearly it is much better to have 20% of the natural listing space than just 10%. On Google and MSN, these duo listings will normally be consecutive, whilst on Yahoo, we see both consecutive and non-consecutive examples. For the search term "last minute holiday"; there are three pairs on MSN, one pair on Yahoo and one pair on on Google. It could be argued that by creating or allowing this phenomenon, the search engines are reducing natural listed options. A few brands are achieving this "doubling up" regularly, therefore it is SEO achievable.

So what have we learned, what is realistic and what is being achieved by whom.

2) The big 4 now the big 2

Tui Travel UK (aka Thomson, First Choice) and the Thomas Cook Group (aka Thomas Cook, MyTravel, Airtours). These two groups (the major brands and their numerous subsidiaries) have 257 page one positions, that's 13.6% of the 1,890 positions that we are researching. Collectively in terms of natural listings they are under performing their market share, We would have expected them to occupy 25-30% of these positions.

2a) The Thomas Cook Group dramatically under perform in terms of page one natural listings achieved with only 36 page one positions. 28 of which are achieved by MyTravel brands and only 8 by Thomas Cook brands. Thomas Cook did not feature in the MSN or Yahoo results.

2b) Tui Travel UK accounted for 221 page one positions,(11.7%) with the Thomson brands achieving 62 page one positions and First Choice an impressive 159 page one positions. One would expect to see a significant difference in the online customer acquisition costs between say First Choice brands and Thomas Cook brands. Looking at First Choice in detail, the major brand and its subsidiaries performed extremely well, the gold star would have to be awarded to Holiday Hypermarket who achieved 101 first page listings (of which 75 were top 5), Holiday Hypermarket's performance also included 17 where they achieved simultaneous listings in all three search engines and a further 17 where they managed simultaneous listings in two search engines.

3) Exceptional performances:

3a) Holiday Hypermarket: see 2b above

3b) Virgin Holidays: 56 page one listings - very specific to their market place, experts at the double listing phenomena, experts at achieving a page one presence in all three search engines. "Caribbean holidays" 5 page one listings, "Canada holidays" 4 page one listings, "holidays to Mexico 4 page one listings, "Jamaica holidays" 3 page one listings, "India holidays" 4 page one listings, "California holidays" 5 page one listings, "Hawaii holidays" 5 page one listings, "Bahamas holidays" 5 page one listings, "Orlando holidays" 5 page one listings, "Las Vegas holidays" 5 page one listings. Clinical SEO excellence. "Africa holidays" only 2 page one listings (must be WIP). It is worth just explaining exactly what is being acheived here - for the term "caribbean holidays" Virgin Holidays are achieving 5 page one positions on three search engines, that means in two of the search engines they are taking 2 natural slots and thus occupying 20% of the natural listings - impressive!

3c) Directline holidays: 71 page one listings, including one of only two brands to achieve page one listings for the 5 million search's a month "holidays" keyword on all three search engines - well done Directline. Directline are also the only brand to achieve the treble on the second most important holiday key phrase "cheap holidays". Also achieving at least 10 keyword simultaneous listings in all three search engines. DirectLines strength is the non-destination generic holiday key phrases; bargain holidays, family holiday, package holidays, cheap package holidays, etc.

3d) Saga: Only 6 page one listings - but the second of only two brands to achieve page one listings for the 5 million search's a month "holidays" keyword on all three search engines - well done Saga

3e) BargainHolidays.com: 15 page one listings, including the spectacular achievement of being the only brand to record page one / position one results for the search term "bargain holidays" in all three search engines. BargainHolidays.com is part of the LastMinute.com

3f) Online Travel Agencies - who said that the "travel agent is dead", he's just moving his shop from the high street to the internet. See 3g below for examples.

3g) Others worthy of mention: Lotus Travel Ltd with 21 page one positions (AfricaSky, AmericaSky, CanadaSky and TropicalSky), Barrhead Travel with 21 page one positions (12 for Barrhead and 9 for 3 other online brands), The Internet Business Group plc's CheapHolidayDeals.co.uk with 15 page one positions, Co-op Travel and Co-op Travel Shop manage 26 page one positions between them, Cosmos 16, Dialaflight 23, HolidayHolidayHoliday.co.uk 16. On the holiday lettings side Holiday-Rentals.co.uk have 21 page one positions

4) Brands to watch next year:

4a) The large "new age" travel dot coms: Expedia only achieved 18 page one listings (16 Google, 2 MSN), Opodo only 1 page one listing and Travelocity who do not appear in our results tables at all. Last Minute.com raised the bar with a reasonable 37 page one listings and their sister brand BargainHolidays.com with 15. We had expected a greater performance from this collective group. we predict they will attempt to take a firmer grip of the natural listings during the coming 12 months..

4b) The new specialist groups like TravelZest and Western & Oriental. We expect that one of the skill-sets that these very switched on head office teams will inject into their growing band of specialist subsidiaries will be a greatly improved SEO performance. definitely one to watch when we revisit next year. We expect an extremely robust performance from holiday.co.uk, (owned by Travelzest), it managed just 7 page one listings (2 on Google, 5 on MSN and none on Yahoo), but can surely do better..

4c) Traditional Specialist Tour Operators - Concentrate on SEO or ultimately fail.

5) Domain Names - Are they important?

Our take on this subject is - yes they are important for page one listings on Yahoo and MSN, less important for Google. Take the example "Activity holidays"; MSN - 5 of the top ten page one listings contain the word activity or activities, Yahoo - 9 of the top ten page one listings contain the word active, activity or activities, Google - 4 of the top ten page one listings contain the word active, activity or activities, Consider the apparent success in the results above of web sites where the domain name contains the whole or part of the key phrase.

In reality - if we were advising a new travel business today regarding branding and domain names - the advice would be include your brand and your activity in your primary domain name. Therefore, if it were Thomson, instead of thomson.co.uk, we would recommend thomsonholidays.co.uk as the primary domain. Instead of 46 page one listings, we suggest the result would be significantly enhanced.

Other examples in the results above, include: cheap holidays, golf holiday, bargain holidays, villa holidays, Canada holidays, holiday rentals, adventure holidays, summer holidays, cruise holiday, cheap cruise holiday, cycling holidays, sailing holidays, Mauritius holidays, Jersey holidays, holidays in France, coach holidays, single holidays, Spanish holidays, Crete holidays.

Interestingly, First Choice own Holidays.co.uk - if asked, we would recommend that domain becomes the Tui Travel UK primary site.

6) Search Engines

6a) Google: Appears to favour longer established travel businesses, appears to have more focus on sites able to sell a travel product to you, appears to give the domain name less credence, appears to have fewer duo entries. 307 different brands appear in Google's 630 page one natural positions - 2.05 appearances per brand.

6b) Yahoo: Appears to favour sites featuring part or whole of the key phrase in the domain name. Appears to have most non-travel content (Wikipedia, online News services). 399 different brands appear in Yahoos 630 page one natural positions - 1.58 appearances per brand.

6c) MSN: Appears to favour sites featuring part or whole of the key phrase in the domain name, but to a slightly lesser extent than Yahoo. Appears to generate more duo entries than the other search engines. 351 different brands appear in MSN's 630 page one natural positions - 1,79 appearances per brand.

7) Conclusion

7a) The first conclusion of this research is that for most small and medium sized travel brands, it is unrealistic to expect to achieve a first page position in the natural search listings on all three of the major search engines for a major keyword. It is not impossible and we applaud the 54 travel brands that are achieving this goal. 730 different brands filled the 1,890 page one natural positions that we have scrutinised (that's an average 2.5 appearances per brand).

7b) With the exception of the pre Tui merger First Choice brands, the research reveals that the major Holiday Companies, both traditional and dot.com are under performing in the natural listings for the holiday key phrases researched.

7c) The search engines appear to give greater credence to web site domain names that also include part or the whole of the keyword or key phrase being searched for.

7d) Exceptional search engine optimisers are achieving two top ten result listings per search engine, per key phrase.

7e) Traditional small and medium sized travel businesses need to up their game in respect of search engine optimisation.

8) Footnote

Oldland Consulting has been working with one specialist travel business for the past year advising on Search Engine Optimisation, when we were called in, our client was 72nd naturally in Google for his favoured holiday key phrase and not in the top 100 in either MSN or Yahoo. Today, the client is one of those 54 travel brands that enjoys the benefits of being in the top ten nattural listing positions on Yahoo, Google and MSN for his favoured keyphrase, Infact, his lowest position is seven.