3 SEO Tips to Automate Traffic and Free up Your Time

If there’s one thing travel bloggers love to do more than anything in the world…it’s to travel.

Being able to travel freely and frequently is a privilege and often a luxury that many can’t afford – whether it’s not having enough money, or simply not having enough time.

Today, I’d like to solve the latter of those two issues, and not coincidentally, the former may actually be fixed by this as well.

What I’m talking about is search engine optimization (SEO) and using it to automate your traffic.

With traffic automated, you’ll be able to reap the rewards of sustained visitors to your travel blog, without having to always be working.

This means more time to travel and have fun in the world. After all, isn’t that what travel blogging is all about?

Below, I’ve outlined 3 SEO tips just for you. Let’s get into it.

Narrow Down Your Niche

This first tip isn’t actually about SEO at all, but it has massive impact on your SEO results.

By niching down and focusing on a specific area of travel (a specific region, saving money on airfare, etc.) you don’t have to worry about targeting a vast number of keywords.

Yes, this means you won’t rank for a lot of keywords, but for the ones you do, you will simply have the best, most relevant material out there.

It allows you to focus on just a couple of primary keywords and a whole slew of long-tail keywords, which we’ll get into more on below.

This first tip is very important. It sets up the rest of your SEO strategy to be a piece of cake, so make sure to spend some time focusing in on what your niche should be.

Create a Few Pieces of Valuable, Long-Form Content

These days, search engines like Google reward high quality, highly relevant content, and they punish low quality crap that tries to game the system.

You used to just be able to publish a bunch of SEO-focused articles and crush the rankings…not the case anymore.

If you want to automate your traffic, your best bet is by creating very valuable, long-form content. What’s long-form content? Typically, anything over 1,500 words.

If you’re having trouble believing what I’m telling you, look for yourself. Use an online SEO analyzer to check out your biggest competition. I guarantee that you’ll find their best performing content to be longer articles that provide tons of value.

Writing longer material allows you to include a ton of those long-tail keywords that we mentioned earlier.

You don’t need a ton of content on your travel blog to drive large amounts of traffic anymore. What you need is high quality stuff that people will want to view.

Utilize Links to High Authority Sites Only

We’re almost there to freedom. Can you taste it?

The last step to automating your traffic is to include links in all of your content…but only to high authority sites.

People used to be able to link out anywhere and acquire backlinks in return. Nowadays, search engines don’t reward high volume links, they instead look for high authority links.

As a general rule, you should only link out to other content if it has a Domain Authority (DA) of 70 or greater. The Moz toolbar is a great way for you to measure this directly in your web browser.

By doing this, you’ll make sure search engines don’t penalize you for a ton of bogus backlinks, and instead you’ll be rewarded for linking to other relevant, useful content.

In Conclusion

SEO can be a powerful ally in the form of automated traffic. The trick is to always stay up to date, and always play by the rules.

With more free time, you’ll be able to travel more and simply enjoy life the way it was meant to be lived.