In this video we explore the top ranked websites in Google for the search term "Dallas Travel Agent". We were surprised by some of the finding, but identified the true top leader and some of the techniques they used to gain their first page rankings.
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Transcript of Dallas Travel Agent SEO Audit
Mike Zittel - SEO Audit Speaker (00:00):
Hey, it's Mike with SERR.biz search engine ranking rules dominate your niche. So I got a call today from a prospective client who is a travel agent in Dallas. We haven't really moved forward yet, but I thought I'd get ahead of the curve and do a quick little SEO audit for travel agent Dallas. See who the top players are. See what I can bring to the table for the first meeting and start to immerse myself in that space a little bit more. And if you're in the travel industry watch this, it'll probably help you learn how to dominate your niche in travel. So let's jump over to the next screen. Okay. So I am over here on Google. I'm using Firefox in private mode, so as not to skew the results based on personal history of search.
Mike Zittel - SEO Audit Speaker (00:57):
I've typed in travel agent Dallas, and let's see, obviously the first thing's paid that we knew that was gonna happen. There's 36 million pages competing for the top spot. So that lets you know, for that exact search phrase, it's gonna be a little tough. But if you're willing to make the commitment, you can do it. So if we scroll down, obviously this is low hanging fruit of getting into Google maps. There's not that many that showed up in my immediate geographical area, but if we scroll out for sort of all of Dallas over to Fort worth we can see that there's quite a bit of search results, but still not all that many, that actually have a physical location. So if you're not in the Google map, you need to get in Google and start getting reviews. So over here we see the top ranked one has 36 reviews on only a 4.5.
Google Maps are low hanging SEO fruit - go get some!
Mike Zittel - SEO Audit Speaker (01:51):
The next one is 4.9 with 102. So Sharon's probably closer to me physically my IP address than Campbell. And then Vincent vacations is right here in the top 10 with 36. Now I mentioned them because we're gonna find out they're actually in the top 10 as well. So once we scroll past the Google graph space here we'll see some search results, but I just wanna touch base on this quickly. So the people that are here, if you look at them ABC 11, that's really tough to compete with. What is interesting is I ran their sites through schema validator and let's see what that looks like. So the ABC has a schema markup for news article, lots of good information there. Obviously that's really hard to compete with ABC but they did utilize schema which Google likes. And you can sometimes get into that space, that open graph space or not open graph that Google graph space, if you use schema or micro formats. So let's just take a look at another one that was in that space. Let's see, the next one was nerdwallet.com. Let's see what their page has. If they have any schema, let's see, bring it over here for you. They use the bread crumb schema as well as the article schema which again, just validates the use of schema and let's see, who else did we have here?
Use Schema To Get Into Google Knowledge Graph
Mike Zittel - SEO Audit Speaker (03:46):
Oh, Frommer well, this was interesting. The Frommer's website here it is by the way, the actual article pretty text heavy, obviously Google likes text, look at all that serious text, but their page, as far as schema validation went, they didn't have any but you know, Frommers is a long time, well respected travel publisher. So I'm sure if we did a back links on them, they would just have like literally millions of back links. So they're a super high authority site. So that's probably in part why Google went ahead and, and included them there in that space. So back to the search results, close that we get all the way down to the very first one which is legacy travel.com. I've never heard of them, but that doesn't mean anything. Right. so let's take a look at their site.
Mike Zittel - SEO Audit Speaker (04:53):
Okay. They're number one. Sure. That's an H two tag or H one tag. We'll look at that all in a second, but just giving it a quick look you know, pretty heavy on the text, right on the homepage. I'm sure it's responsive. They've got a video here, a Vimeo video. They probably also have a YouTube video that's related. They're in Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. Youtube's really awesome for building back links and validating your profile. Mexican beach experts. Yeah. Interesting that they're not corresponding their branding. But let's just take a look at one of their videos. See if they have a back link to their parents' site? No, they don't. There must be something, huh? That's interesting.
Mike Zittel - SEO Audit Speaker (05:58):
All right, fair. So now let's just take a look at the quick SEO quake. Seo rush search results on this or not search results. The quick analysis they're URL is good. They're not using canonical tags. They've got 81 characters in the, in the title. They've got a meta description. Oddly, they still have keywords, meta keywords, which really nobody uses those anymore. It's not advised but this site's probably been around a long time if they still have keywords listed there. But what they do have listed doesn't look like it was over the top and not spammy. So that's relevant. Interestingly, they don't have an H one tag, but they've got an H two tag. Let's just see H two H two H two H three. All right. Interesting. Now that's the awesome thing about SEO and doing an audit is that, you know, you've got your rules standard things, but then when you do an audit, you see things get broken and then you have to dig in deeper to find out, well, why is this site that doesn't have perfect SEO ranking
Odd - Has Meta Keywords - Must Be Old Site
Mike Zittel - SEO Audit Speaker (07:11):
so high? We'll look into that a little bit more. They've got two images without all tags. That's an easy fix. The 38% text to HTML ratio, not bad. They've got an i-frame, but it's probably related to the video. No flash that's good microdata. No, no microdata, no schema open graph for Facebook, et cetera. No. And no on Twitter. Very interesting. View port it's responsive robot, text, XML, site map, language setting, doc type and coding Google analytics and the FAV icon and good. So those are the top line things. They, I really only get like a 50% on, you know, standard best practices of SEO, but they're number one. So then we took a look over at their backlink profile from HREFS and this is what we've got on legacy travel CNN travels linking to them.
Mike Zittel - SEO Audit Speaker (08:17):
They've got a bunch they've got about 2,358 backlinks. 72% are due follow dressing. And their domain rating is 32. Bunch of the links are all pointing to the homepage, triple play resort. So that's probably it all. They've probably got a lot of these resorts that have linked to them, which is, you know, highly relevant. Right. And validating, I don't know what that life hack thing is that something to look at. They've got some stuff in Spanish CNN that looks that that's interesting. So they've got an actual direct link from cnn.com. That's, that's big, that's a big authority site. That's linking to them. Yellow pages Espanol CNN let's see, Moz community topics. Cool. so as you can see best luggage.com all bunch of insider.com related to travel, et cetera. Glassdoor homestead, Yahoo, interesting the, of the day Dn B.
Strong backlink profile
Mike Zittel - SEO Audit Speaker (09:34):
That's a good authority site. So it looks like they've got some solid yeah, some solid back links from authority sites. So if we went into the account on HF we'd find a lot more information. So that's, who's ranking number one, not the best SEO on page, but a solid amount of back links, which presumably at first pass are all really solid. And in general, Google's pretty good at weeding out the, the spam link backlink profile, people, et cetera. You might get a short bump, but you're probably ultimately gonna get knocked down. So stay the course, be ethical white hat, get good solid links when you can and write good content. So now let's take a look at the number two person well actually number two is Yelp. We're not gonna touch Yelp travel leaders. Okay. Travel leaders is the number two position. That's cool. Let's take a look at their website. I'm gonna open over here, travel leaders. Now this is interesting travel leaders in and of itself is a big authority website. Let's see what their elating is.
Number 2 in a national travel website
Mike Zittel - SEO Audit Speaker (10:58):
They're number 200, 2,843 out of all the websites and the Alexa index. But they've got thousands of pages. This is really just an index page of their individual agents in the area. But this is interesting. The number one person here April Defterios, let's just take a look at her profile quick, which is, you know, supporting this page as well, internal linking but she's got 61 reviews. This page, lots of content images look at all these reviews. I bet if we did some schema check on this, it probably has schema on those reviews and there's just a ton of ton, a ton of travel related content. It is optimized that page little Elm, Texas. So it's very regional. The little, Elm's a, a town, a little north of Dallas here. This page is south Dallas dash Fort worth.
Mike Zittel - SEO Audit Speaker (12:00):
So they've optimized the title, et cetera. Let's take a look at this SEO quake analysis, travel leaders travel. They've got a good URL, a hundred characters they're using canonical URLs. Title's 51. It's good meta description, 169 characters. That's good. No meta great. Or rather no meta keywords. That's good. Heading is good. They've got one H two. Let's take, let's just open that up. Yeah, so they've got Dallas Fort worth, Texas travel agents, plural in the H one tag the H two tag refine results by I, you know, Hey, just a tip. You guys wanna try and bump yourself, modify that H two tag and use some keyword density there. You know, like, I don't know, Dallas agent, Dallas travel agent, you know, singular try to get more keyword density that cause that's kind of a waste of a tag. They actually have too many H two tags in my opinion.
Mike Zittel - SEO Audit Speaker (13:04):
Of course it is subjective. The policy I use is one H one, one H two, and then unlimited H three is almost never a four or five. Definitely not in H six. You just don't need it. Anyway, but they've got lots of H tags which is good, although they're not particularly SEO, it's all individuals names. But the most important tag does have the keywords in it. Dallas travel agents. So that's cool. So good job images that got 64 images without all tags. They want to fix that from an 88 point of view. You might get sued. You're a big enough company to be a target travel leaders. Is that who you are. Yeah. Travel leaders. You might wanna fix that. Text to HTML ratio is low according to SEO quake, but you know, it's, it, there is some there and that's good.
Mike Zittel - SEO Audit Speaker (14:01):
I don't really like pages that are all just text. Right. You know there's sort of the perfect geeky SEO way to do things, but remember you got a human on the other end. That's great if they get to their page, but if they can't bear to read it and it's too dense, they can't find the information they want. They're gonna bounce. So keep that in mind. No micro data no schema. Interesting. They might wanna play with that. No open graph, no Twitter card, no amp meta robot tags, XML, no language specification ENCO analytics, they accounts so, Hmm. Interesting again, not perfect SEO yet. They're still at the top. So that leads me to believe they've got strong backlink profile. Let's pull that over it. What's HF say, well, there you go. <Laugh> so even though it's an interior page they've got 161,000 back links pointing to them as far as the parent site goes.
Mike Zittel - SEO Audit Speaker (15:05):
So that explains why a deep interior index page of a bigger national global site is ranking for such a regional term. So that one, if you're a regional company you know, crawl this, go through this, find out where they got links, see if you can get similar links from them. They're also domain rating. According to HFS is a 72, which is obviously very strong. Point is, is they've got some solid back links use HFS to find where they have back links and see if you can get your website listed there. Now let's see who the third person is. And the third website is Vincent vacations, which we saw earlier was also listed in Google maps. So that's interesting. That's not uncommon. Typically the companies that are seen in the Google map listings are also in the top 10. If they showing up in the first page of the Google results, then they're often down there as well, if they've coordinated crosslinked and have good reviews.
Number 3 is old region site with GMB and YouTube
Mike Zittel - SEO Audit Speaker (16:13):
So let's take a look at Vincent Vincent vacations. So this is also an interior page travel agency, Dallas I've already looked at this site a little bit. It seems they've got two offices, one here, and I think the other one's in Oklahoma not a whole bunch of information here. Pretty straightforward, simple one, well, we got a couple reviews here. Are those text? Yeah, those are text. So that's probably helpful. Let me just see what their SEO quake analytics say URL's good. Canonical tag title, meta description. Wow. Again, least another company. I really haven't seen meta keywords in a while, but Hmm, interesting. Doesn't look like they spammed it out, but again, that might also indicate that there's just an older site that had been around for a long time. And haven't changed their keywords in forever because they were using keywords way back when, you know, 5, 6, 7, 10 years ago or longer a deeper dive would reveal some more information, but this is just a quickie review.
Mike Zittel - SEO Audit Speaker (17:39):
Their headings let's see what their headings are. H one H two lots H twos. Again, a lot of H threes. Anyway, they have a lot of header tags. They've gone all the way down to H six S actually. Interesting. and what else do we wanna look at here? Perfect on no missing all tags text HTML ratio is very strong. 52% explains their positioning a little bit. No frames. That's good, no flash no micro data, but they did find schema. So back to the point earlier. So the site that has good H KL ratio proper use of header tags good schema the ranked in the top 10, they've got a Google map and they also have, let's see what their back links are. So now it's interesting. They, according to HFS, they have 35 domain rating, which is a little higher than the first one we looked at their back links are about double again.
Mike Zittel - SEO Audit Speaker (18:51):
They've got some, let's see, inclusive weddings, premium craft, Huffington post that's good. That's a really authority site, a blogger.com. So they've probably been at this a while yellow pages, draft blogger, Reddit ah, they have a hit from Wikipedia. That's a good, if you can get it, a couple of 'em looks like so wi Wikipedia, if you can get a legitimate back link in there that can be very powerful. That'd be something to explore how they did that. You know, they probably contributed some information somewhere and got the link in. Not sure it's always better. If somebody else links to you, that's not associated with your business in Wikipedia, if you can get it. That's great. So they basically got strong back links good design, good content and their top ranked. Let's just take a look at Vincent A. Little bit more because they've got two hits.
Number 3 site is winner as it is also in GM - Deep dive that one
Mike Zittel - SEO Audit Speaker (20:00):
So to me, they're the winners, even though they're, they're down a bit, they've got the Google map and they've got the you know, the organic search result hit, which to me in my approach would be to really kind of deep dive on them, find out more about them, find out more about their architecture, their content, where they have links and what certifications they have, et cetera. And one last thing I wanna check on them is they have a YouTube page. Okay, look at this. They do have a YouTube channel. They only have 144 subscribers. They do write from their channel, have a direct back link. Let me turn this volume down. How many videos do they have overall? Cause even though they don't have a lot of subscribers, you know, you can utilize YouTube not to be a YouTuber per se, but to get back links to you that Google does tend to like a lot let's see how many videos they've got a decent amount here. You know, they could probably, let's just take a look at one of these you know, they could probably use some optimization. Oh, Nope. Cool. That's good. They, at least they could optimize it a little bit more. It's only a minute 40. So it's kind of hard to put in too much information on a minute 40 video, but anyways, they've got back links to themselves here. Let's see if some other random one, did they back link to themselves?
Mike Zittel - SEO Audit Speaker (21:47):
Hmm. Now they didn't on this one, but their channel does have a back link and some other of the videos had backlinks pointing to themselves. So that's how you can use Google maps and YouTube to help boost up your own web website. So that's cool. Okay. So that is interesting. Like I said earlier, if I was really focusing on trying to get a local Dallas travel site ranked in the search engines I would definitely try to follow Vincent's what was their name again? Vincent vacations.com. I don't know who the webmaster is or who did the SEO, but good job. You guys are right there on the top of the homepage of Google, as well as in this Google maps. So that's who I would follow because they've got a responsive site. They're in Google maps, they have YouTube.
Mike Zittel - SEO Audit Speaker (22:42):
They've also got a big social profile on Facebook. They've got a ton of back links that would be the one to, to lead the way. And then the other two that I followed, I'd do a deeper dive on those as well and, and dig in a little bit more. But again, back links, schema responsive code, Google map, YouTube, those five things I believe are what's helping them be in the top 10. And who knows how many other pages that they're or how many other search terms they're ranking for anyway if you need help with your search engine optimization specifically in the local niche then check out Serr.biz. There's a whole free tutorial on the website and I've also now started teaching classes every third, Wednesday private individual training classes and private group classes are also available. Thanks for watching my name's Mike with search engine ranking rules. Serr.biz Dominate your niche.
