In July, AirSorted ads popped up all across London – from Gare du Nord videos to the Eurostar magazine and billboards on the city’s iconic double-deckers. Even the Airbnb I stayed at was managed by the company, whose straight talking and sleek service instantly caught my attention.

As France is the No.2 market for Airbnb after the US and AirSorted is poised to set up shop, I thought I’d take a look at the SEO for all short-term rental “sitter” services in France and the opportunities available to AirSorted.

(more…)

Norwegian often pops up in conversations, especially in relation to Los Angeles, a destination previously with very few direct flights from France and sky-high prices as a result of the mono/duopole of Air France and Delta (Skyteam alliance).

By offering direct single fares from €199.90, Norwegian will without doubt boost the number of passengers using this route!

Norwegian offers direct flights from Paris to Boston, Denver, Miami, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco (as well as medium-haul Scandinavian destinations) to become an airline to watch in France! (more…)

We often accuse online reservation sites of bullying independent hotels by invading Google search results (AdWords and SEO) and taking ever higher commissions on hotel reservations.

When we look at the results for “hotel”on Google.fr, we see that OTA (Online Travel Agent) dominate the SERP, in particular, Hotels.com, Booking.com, Trivago and TripAdvisor.

(more…)

The flight industry was one of the first to be revolutionized by the

internet. EasyJet pioneered selling 100% of its flights online from 2000 to avoid a costly distribution system dominated by travel agents, whose commission represented up to 20% (agency and GDS fees). Now that online reservations have become the norm, which airlines and flight comparison sites are faring well when it comes to SEO?

The top keywords for air travel in France:

• Cheap flights (246K) – “vols pas cher”
• Airline Tickets (200k) – “billets d’avion”
• Flight comparison site (200k) -“comparateurs de vols”
• Paris Barcelona (15k) – “Paris Barcelone”

(more…)

The market for long-distance bus travel was opened to competition during the promulgation of the “Macron” law of 6 August 2015. Since then, many French and foreign companies have begun to open routes in France, thereby creating competition with the French train company SNCF as well as the carpooling service Blablacar. Let’s review how liberalization has impacted competition, market share, and the evolving digital strategies of bus companies in France. (more…)

According to SEMrush, Liligo is the flight comparison website that gets the most amount of organic traffic, as compared to his competitors in France, such as Kayak, Opodo, Easyvoyage and Skyscanner. Looking into further detail, we can see a comprehensive SEO strategy has been driving this in France.

Liligo: number 1 in France in terms of organic traffic and 1-3 queries volume

Liligo gets twice as much organic traffic as Opodo (dark grey). When reviewing the highest ranking keywords (pale grey), the volume of queries also doubles. How was this accomplished?

Could this success be linked to Liligo’s awareness in France?

After all, Liligo is a French company that has operated in France since 2006, and was previously owned by the French railway company SNCF. Maybe the awareness can explain such a head start?

Liligo.fr SEO Strategy

If the superiority of Liligo isn’t reliant upon its own brand, then what is driving it?

Looking closer at the SEO, one can see that it has been worked on carefully for both competitive keywords as well as long tail ones.

Competitive Keywords

The keywords with the largest volume of queries for air transportation are plane tickets, cheap flight, and flight comparator, or airlines like Easyjet (or in French : billet d’avion, vol pas cher, comparateur de vol). Liligo manages to rank at the very top for those major queries, providing big chunks of qualified traffic to its flight comparator. Using the full potential of travel related services, Liligo manages to rank well with certain car rental keywords but could do much better with Hotel related terms.

Long tail keywords

When looking at the long tail, it becomes interesting to see the actual results made in terms of content.

• The category flight is split in individual pages for each pair of cities: this allows Liligo to ranks on queries like “Vols Paris- Barcelone” ( Paris Barcelona Flight), 9900 queries.
• A whole part of the site is dedicated to providing information on which destination to chose according to the month in the year , which allows Liligo to rank for the expression “où partir en Janvier” (where to travel in January), 3600 queries a month, as well as rank for “que faire à Barcelone” (what to do in Barcelona), 170 queries.
• Liligo also issues the “Magazine du Voyageur” (Travellers Magazine), to help rank for multiple expressions around travelling, such as “luggage allowance”

In short: Liligo provides a good example of a successful SEO strategy!

Do you have other examples of good SEO strategies in other industries? Let us know!