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.