Skyscanner dominates the SEO Flights industry
According to our own SEO travel report, digital travel sales are seeing sustained like-for-like growth, as people search and convert organically online.
With this in mind, we decided to do a bit of digging into the top performing sites for key travel terms, and we found a clear winner.
Skyscanner dominates “Flights” related SEO travel terms
Pi Datametrics Competitor Discovery shows the most commercially valuable “Flights” related terms, by volume, for Google UK.
Skyscanner is dominating the industry. The below chart shows their organic dominance for terms in positions 1-3, when compared to other top performing sites.
Skyscanner is consistently top for SEO travel terms
The chart below illustrates Skyscanner’s consistent performance across the highest volume search terms – with little to no movement or fluctuation from positions 1-3.
Find out how your site is performing:
Skyscanner performs best for most commercially valuable SEO travel search term
Using Pi Datametrics Organic Value Calculation, (Volume x CPC bid x Competition Value), we identified “Flights to New York” as being the most commercially valuable search term.
Again, Skyscanner dominates this space. They have obviously focussed their strategy around this key term, as is demonstrated in the number of backlinks they have accrued (see below)
Skyscanner performs the best in SEO travel
“When you’re looking at individual markets (rather than just ambiguous total visibility scores, which is almost pointless), Skyscanner is possibly the best performer we have seen across any market in organic search. They own the flight sector and have near omnipresence. They’re obviously doing a fantastic job, and it’s up to the competitors to replicate their best practice and the elects behind success.” Sam Silverwood-Cope, Pi Datametrics.
Skyscanner is the Best at SEO, but is this enough to dominate the SERPs? The travel industry is hugely competitive in the PPC market, due to continuous high demands and strong ROI on a high price product. Flight providers, along with most other players in the travel industry, are prepared to pay the price for ad space in the SERPs. This is somewhat demonstrated by Skyscanner bidding on their own brand name (see below), despite dominating most of the first page organically.
