How To Establish Your Travel Brand As An Author

How To Establish Your Travel Brand As An Author

Discover how to develop your travel brand and get recognized as an industry author. Learn how to make your content compliant with Google's E-E-A-T standards.

SEO experts often advise creating content that complies with Google's E-E-A-T standards, but there isn't much information available on how to do this.

Numerous travel-related websites were affected by the September 2023 Helpful Content Update.

In a quick analysis of over 100 travel-related websites, I discovered that although more websites gained than lost from the change, those who did see declines in traffic had significant dips.

According to my analysis, many of the travel websites in my sample that experienced declines were producing a lot of content and, on paper, checking off a lot of the items on most content checklists; however, there was no proof that the authors were legitimately qualified to discuss the subjects being published.

The Value Of Original Writing In Travel-Related Content

If customers think your brand is legitimate and that professionals are behind the guidance and services you provide, they are more likely to make a purchase or consider making a purchase after discovering your travel brand online via your website or other material.

This gives your company a more credible and reliable appearance, which is crucial for guiding prospective customers through the phases of research and purchase.

Having credibility and disclosing the identity of your content creators enhances the perception of your brand and boosts the likelihood that customers will make a purchase. It has a significant impact on your search engine rating as well.

Google uses factors like trustworthiness and expertise to determine the quality of material on your website. Although E-E-A-T is only a set of guidelines outlined in the Quality Rater Guidelines, exhibiting these aspects contributes to a useful and pleasant user experience.

How Your Knowledge May Affect the Traveler's Experience

Travelers don't follow a simple, straight road; instead, they embark on a complicated and diverse journey from research to holiday booking.

It progresses through many phases, impacted by a range of elements including individual tastes, suggestions, commercials, and financial concerns.

Prospective tourists may begin by daydreaming about places they have seen on social media, then read reviews and check pricing across many websites.

Before they make reservations, they may reevaluate their plans after gathering more information in light of new facts or insights.

Creating informative material and demonstrating your expertise in the field can increase people's confidence in you.

Trust is a major factor in consumer purchasing decisions, and in order to earn consumers' trust, you must ensure that the information and services you provide live up to their expectations.

These benchmarks are not only established by your content and brand, but also by the words of your rivals.

Building confidence for your brand may be greatly aided by having an author associated with it who is acknowledged and verified as an authority in the field in which they write.

How Is Authorship Judged by Google?

To ascertain if several pieces of material on the Internet are produced by and related to a single author, Google employs a process known as reconciliation.

Many writers may have the same name (particularly if you have a popular name like mine), and these signals may be misleading if there aren't any obvious distinguishing markers or consistent links to a single place. These are just a few of the issues Google confronts when attempting to discern authors and authorship.

Author bylines, dedicated author pages, structured data, and other signals and data points are all analyzed throughout the reconciliation process.

Websites should attempt to verify writers by include links to their personal websites and social media accounts in their article-level author biographies and author pages, since this will help Google with the reconciliation process. This uniformity helps Google in minimizing reconciliation process errors.

This can increase the amount of process complexity for certain firms, as connecting to a person's personal or professional social media accounts puts the company at risk of disagreement should the person publish something that the company finds offensive.

Read this article from 2021 to understand more about how Google manages author identification and how John Mueller has addressed the issue.

Authorship Display Using Structured Data

Google used to identify writers using rel="author," but these days it uses structured data/schema markup and on-page indications (such a clearly identified content origin) to determine who the primary author of a piece of content is.

To identify and designate authors, you might utilize different Schema types and attributions.

Although there are just a few formats that Google officially supports for SERP design and features, using all structured data (where appropriate) has been linked to increases in search engine performance and ranking.

When utilizing the Knowledge Graph API to graphically map things, we may also see correlation benefits.

Schema Person (Schema.org/Person)

An individual is described by means of this schema. Some qualities you might use are:

name: The individual's name.

jobTitle: The employee's official title, such as executive director, writer, or journalist.

worksFor: The company the individual works for (may be used to link the writer to a website or brand).

URL: The address of the person's social media profile or official website.

image: The URL of the person's picture.

sameAs: A list of URLs that you may use to connect the individual to their Wikipedia page, social media accounts, and other online presences.

Schema for CreativeWork (Schema.org/CreativeWork)

This schema encompasses a wide range of content, such as blog entries, videos, and essays. It may be used to clarify the connection between a writer and their creations. Qualities consist of:

author: The content's creator, who is associated with the Person schema.

publisher: The entity that may be connected to the Organization schema and is in charge of publishing the work.

datePublished: The content's date of publication.

headline: The content's title or headline.

Schema for Articles (schema.org/Article)

a more specialized kind of creative work with an emphasis on articles. Here, CreativeWork-like qualities might be used, with special attention to:

articleSection: The name(s) of the high-level section(s) to which the article belongs (e.g., Lifestyle, Technology).

For writers for your travel website, the following sample schema would be somewhat standard:

{ "@context": "http://schema.org", "@type": "Person", "name": "Bob Bobbins", "jobTitle": "Travel Writer", "worksFor": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Curacao.com", "url": "https://www.curacao.com" }, "url": "https://www.curacao.com/authors/bob-bobbins", "image": "https://www.curacao.com/authors/bobbobbins.jpg", "sameAs": [ "https://www.grenada.com/authors/bob-bobbins", "https://www.turkscaicos.com/authors/bob-bobbins", "https://www.travelamericas.com/authors/bob-bobbins" ] }

Establishing Travel Credibility

In addition to the SEO advantages, producing informative material with a verified author biography may influence the user's purchasing decision and make your business seem crucial in the user's vacation planning and inquiry process.

Authorship and expertise are more crucial than ever, as shown by the useful content updates.

Additionally, challenger travel firms have a lot of chance to compete for search queries that have previously been dominated by the big travel brands at different points of the consumer booking experience because to Google's Hidden Gems effort and other factors.