Tripadvisor: How Rank Monitor can help even the biggest websites

Collecting data on a travel giant

Who doesn’t know Tripadvisor? They are one of the biggest travel agglomerate websites, and it is used by millions around the world every month. Today, we zoom in on the search data for Tripavisor.co.uk, as collected by Rank Monitor.

Tripadvisor.co.uk is the British variant of the website. No surprise that they do very well in search results in the UK itself. We added 609 keywords to Rank Monitor to track, mostly general terms such as ‘Asian restaurants near me’, or ‘best hotels in London’. Rank Monitor will then track the entire top-100 of these keywords daily, allowing us to gather information on the target website’s position progresses. It also allows for trends to become visible. Let’s therefore take a look at the data collected by Rank Monitor, both on a large scale, and a small scale.

General keyword analysis

Of de 609 relevant search terms we have added to Rank Monitor, TripAdvisor ranks number 1 for 157 of them! Very few websites could say the same. That doesn’t, however, mean that it can ignore SEO. Let’s look at what we can see in Rank Monitor’s data.

What we can immediately tell, is the amount of URLs that Tripadvisor ranks in the top-100 with for these keywords. In Rank Monitor, you can easy filter and sort the keyword list to find this.

For the search term ‘takeaway near me open now’, Tripadvisor has had 14 different URLs in the top-100 in three weeks! Look below at the day-to-day differences. This indicates to us that Google doesn’t quite know what page to show best, other than the obvious one that continuously ranks.

You may have noticed already, but the URL-structure looks odd for Tripadvisor. There are a lot of numbers, dashes, and overall a messy structure. This is illustrated best by the Page performance function of Rank Monitor, as well as Page Overview.

Delving deeper

Let’s take one keyword, ‘michelin star restaurants london’, and look deeper in Rank Monitor’s features to find out all about it. Monthly, this keyword is searched over 27.000 times in the UK. How does TripAdvisor rank for these keywords? Let’s take a look at Rank Monitor’s keyword position tracker.

We can see that TripAdvisor does not have one clear page that fits this search query, which is why Google places them near the bottom of the top-100. We can also see that the top-10 of this keyword is very stable over time:

It might therefore be a harder task to try to break through. Through Rank Monitor alone, therefore, we have concluded that this may be a challenging keyword for TripAdvisor.

Can we then identify a search query with more potential for Tripadvisor? How about ‘hotels near Euston’. TripAdvisor’s position progress looks like this:

The top-10 has not been stable for the past few days. What this tells us, is that Google is not certain of the best websites to show. This means opportunity for TripAdvisor: it is not far off from rank 1, and can therefore potentially grow towards it in not too much time, for example through on-page optimalisations or linkbuilding. Both these can be tracked through Rank Monitor’s Annotations feature, which will show up as a vertical line in the position progress graph above, illustrating perfectly whether your SEO changes have had an effect on the search rankings.

Advertising

So far we have only talked about organic search results. What about paid search results?

In Rank Monitor, we can see that for the search query ‘michelin star restaurants london’, an average of four paid results appears when it is Googled. Below, we can see who these advertisers are.

But what words do these advertisers use to convince users to click? This, too, can be found in Rank Monitor.

Unsurprisingly, the most used words in the top ads are ‘restaurant’ and ‘Michelin’, but there are some other, less obvious ones to see, too. If TripAdvisor were to use this information, they could pinpoint the exact phrasings that work, and reproduce this in their own ads, should they wish to advertise on this query.

What now?

What TripAdvisor could do with this information? Well, a SEO-specialist could explain to TripAdvisor that ranking as an organic number 1 for ‘michelin star restaurants london’ is going to take a while. If they have an interest in ranking at the top anyway, creating a suitable landing page should be the first step. Then, if results need to come even faster, running an Ads campaign using the right keywords might be a better alternative.

In this case study, we have seen that even a website as huge as TripAdvisor is by no means perfect, and even they could benefit from the SEO insights that Rank Monitor provides. It can show exactly which keywords are worth the effort, and which aren’t. Want to try the tool for yourself? You can discover all it has to offer with a 14-day free trial.