Tools You Need for a Successful Travel Blog
Many travel content creators choose to use a blog to create and share their content. It's a great place to be able to organize your thoughts about a specific destination or travel topic, and share it with your travel community (wherever you've built that).
But creating your travel blog isn't enough. It's not a "if you create it, they will come" kinda deal.
You need a great strategy, quality content, and a way to continue to optimize and drive more traffic to your site. With that in mind...
Here are 2 tools you need for a successful travel blog:
And before we get started, you NEED to sign up for these as soon as you start your travel blog. The sooner you create them, the better - and the more informed your content will be later on.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the ultimate source of your website (and blog) data. It will give you a better understanding of how people found you from any source, what they did while they were on your site, what converted them, where they exited your site, and so much more.
The sooner you have Google Analytics set up, the better data you have to understand your site and the actions people take, so that you can optimize and improve performance.
It is certainly a beast of a platform, but figure out the metrics that matter to you, your travel content, and your travel blog. Focus on those. Focus on improving those. The rest is good to have, but you don't need to overwhelm yourself with the plethora of data and reports.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console tells you how people found your website or blog on search engines. When you sign up and add this to your website, you get a better understanding of what pages are seen more in organic searches, what pages receive more clicks, what search terms people used to find your content, and so much more.
You can take this a step further...
Using the data you get from Google Search Console, you can continue to optimize the pages that are getting more traffic or more clicks. I did this for my blog, and in just a few days after making optimizations, I doubled the amount of traffic to a single blog that was already out-performing all my other blogs.
It can also help you see where there are opportunities to refresh content that isn't performing how you thought it would, to help it become more optimized for search engines.
Indexing
A step you CANNOT skip. Indexing your site pages.
To get your blogs and content showing up on search engines, you must request site indexing, which is done through Google Search Console. If you want them to show up there, you have to force it to happen. As you create new pages and new blogs, you will want to continue to manually index the pages.
Note from my SEO-expert friend: at first, you will need to manually request indexing, but after a while, it will naturally happen on its own.
Thinking of creating a travel blog? Read this first!
Want more resources for travel content creators? Check out my travel content creator hub.
