Travel brands’ online visibility driven down by Google updates
Search giant Google’s latest two updates have cut down the visibility of the travel and tourism sector’s biggest UK brands.
Digital PR agency Tank analysed the impact that Google’s most recent updates had on the visibility for the largest businesses’ websites across 15 sectors.
It tracked how many keywords each company appeared in the top ten results (page one of Google’s search results) for before the changes began, then compared this to how they performed after the updates were implemented.
An aggregate of these figures was then taken for each industry, to give an average statistic for the industry’s performance as a whole.
The travel and tourism industry saw its largest businesses appear in the first few search results for an average of 3.27% fewer keywords in January 2023 than at the beginning of December 2022.
Several other sectors gained from the changes, such as homeware and interiors (up 2.7%), food and beverages (up 2.2%), architecture (up 1.6%) and automotive industries (up 1.5%).
The biggest loss was in logistics and warehousing, with a drop of 5.89%.
The two December changes by Google — the Helpful Content Update and Spam Link Update — were both to concentrate its focus on prioritising helpful content.
The updates also further penalise websites the search engine sees as trying to cheat the system by including content that has only been created to try to rank higher in search results.
However, as Tank’s head of digital Martin Harris explains, both gains and losses from them can be temporary.
“It’s down to the natural way the landscape of Google shifts about, as all it wants to do is provide people with useful and accurate answers for questions they’re searching for,” he said.
“For brands that have lost out, it’s important not to panic and do anything rash. Instead, remember that the most important thing is unchanged: your website should give in-depth and informative information that’s of a better quality than your competitors.
“Likewise, businesses that have seen their visibility increase should be mindful that another update soon could return them to their previous position. So they should take the opportunity to capitalise on those terms while they can.
“Every update allows Google to distinguish content created just to increase a site’s rankings more easily. To put a brand in the best position, businesses should ensure that the expertise of their workforce appears on their website, that they explain and discuss issues — and that people can find it.”
