Embryo - Summer Holidays SEO analysis

After an incredible weekend away with team Embryo in Palma. It has definitely given me the holiday bug. I have previously worked with Love Holidays before and they have always been my go-to website to book holidays. However, I wanted to see who else was performing well online.

As well as Love Holidays, I’ve chosen the following six websites to see which ones are doing well and which ones are performing best, they are: On The Beach, Holiday Gems, Cheeky Trip, Holiday Hypermarket, HolidayPirates and Ice Lolly.

Organic Visibility

Here you can see the visibility of each of the sites checked when people search for terms relating to “Cheap Holidays” and “Holidays Abroad”.

Love Holidays currently has the highest visibility score. However, they did have quite a big drop at the beginning of the year and fell behind On The Beach. They have recovered in recent weeks and have now regained the top spot for organic visibility.

We can see the other sites are all very close so we will look into them individually to see who else is doing well.

Love Holidays

Love Holidays visibility saw quite a considerable drop at the beginning of the year. It remained fairly flat until recent weeks and they have now seen some very good growth.

Love Holidays currently ranks for 191,691 keywords. 36% of these keywords are on page 1. 

On The Beach

On The Beach has seen some very impressive growth in the last 12 months. They have seen a steady rise throughout the year!

On The Beach rank for 218630 but have 36% on page 1

Holiday Gems

Holiday Gems saw some good growth around May 2022. It has remained fairly consistent from September to now. 

Holiday Gems rank for 53924 keywords and have only 14% on page 1.

Cheeky Trip

Cheeky Trip is probably the smallest site on the list. However, they have had a good 12 months where they too have seen some good growth. I would definitely recommend they focus on improving domain authority and content strategy to see that growth continue.

Cheeky Trip  ranks 25453 keywords and has only 4% on page 1 

Holiday Hypermarket

Holiday Hypermarket has had a fairly stable twelve months. They saw some growth in May but similar to other sites they have stayed relatively flat since that period. 

Holiday Hypermarket rank for 71201 and have only 13% on page 1.

HolidayPirates

HolidayPirates again have had a fairly consistent twelve months. They have not seen any significant period of growth until very recently when the visibility grew fairly steeply in recent weeks. It will be interesting to see if this is a one-off or if they can sustain this growth.

HolidayPirates rank for 70221 and have only 14% on page 1

Ice Lolly

Ice Lolly experienced a steady increase up until June 2022 and has since been very inconsistent experiencing peaks and troughs throughout the remainder of the year.

Ice Lolly ranks for 31544 and have only 23% on page 1

Organic keywords

The amount of industry-related keywords that each site can be found for is always an interesting set of data that can tell you a lot about the successes and failures of particular brands.

On The Beach currently ranks for the most keywords the site ranks for an impressive 210,000 keywords. They are followed by Love Holidays which rank for over 190,000 keywords. IceLolly surprisingly only ranks for 31,000 keywords. I would have expected a brand like theirs to rank a lot more

Referring domains

Love Holidays currently has the most referring domains with just short of 7000. On The Beach has just less than 3,000. HolidayPirates has the 3rd highest with just over 2,000 referring domains.

No surprise that these are the three sites performing best. Whilst the other three sites have much fewer domains.

Domain Authority

Following on from referring domains here we can see that Love Holidays has the strongest domain authority with 73. On The Beach has the second highest with 61. HolidayPirates has a domain authority of 58. 

Holiday Gems, Ice Lolly, Holiday Hypermarket and Cheeky Trip all need to focus on increasing their domain authority if they want to see organic visibility growth.

Summary

It’s evident from the above research that the holiday sector is extremely competitive. Even without including all the bigger brands like Jet2, EasyJet, TUI etc. It is very hard to succeed online through SEO. 

If you are going to try and succeed online, you really do need to focus heavily on your content strategy. Messy Middle content is so important. Users don't just search for ‘holidays’ or ‘cheap holidays’ etc. 

Users can spend weeks, months, or even years researching the best locations, the best hotels, the best restaurants, family-friendly holidays, couples holidays etc. Then they will look into reviews, weather, and travel from the airport just to name a few before they finally decide to book their holiday. 

Your website content needs to consider all these factors and usually, the sites that perform best are the ones that do this strategy the best.

I have been using Love Holidays now for years and not just because I find them easily online. The UX is exceptional. The site is very easy to use, they have some great deals and everything I need is in one place from reviews, flights, hotels, and easy navigation. It really is one of my favourite websites online and I would highly recommend it. It is a true example of ticking every box within digital marketing.

Obviously, these are my opinions, given after taking a look at the snapshot data that I have collected. I am sure that if I delved deeper into each piece of information, I would find many more things that would steer my thoughts.