5 Elements of a Great Travel Blog

Whether you’re a digital nomad who makes a living as a content creator or some who maintains a travel website simply because you want to share stories of your journeys to other travel enthusiasts, creating a travel blog can be a worthwhile and lucrative endeavor. And while successful travel blogs can look and feel radically different, they all have a few things in common. Here are some of the elements you’ll find in almost every successful travel blog:

1. Solid SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of configuring your site and its content in a way that prioritizes them on search engine results pages (SERPs). Because Google is the world’s most dominant search engine, the practice of SEO is generally understood to mostly revolve around optimizing sites for Google Search.  

It’s worth noting that a large proportion of visitors to travel blogs are travelers doing their research. Most of them will probably come from Google, with the remainder originating from your social media platforms. Traffic from search engines is generally easier to maintain compared to social media traffic, making SEO a great investment if you have limited resources.

By having solid on-page and local SEO on your blog, you can maximize the odds of your website ranking higher on Google Search when someone looks up a location featured on your blog. If you’re blogging about more competitive locations, you can also consider trying other types of SEO in addition to on-page optimization.   

If you’re already creating engaging content, having properly implemented SEO should bring your pages up on the SERPs and to a wider audience for relatively little effort. A higher ranking on Google’s SERPs will mean more visitors, and consequently, more potential revenue.

2. Great Photos

If you plan on making a travel blog your main source of income, it’s probably a good idea to read up on the basics of taking good pictures. While it’s not mandatory for travel blogs to be especially image-heavy, they have always been a place to share unique travel photos. Today, it’s expected that each published blog article comes with at least a number of high-quality photos. Unique, well-shot photos can improve a blog’s credibility and help ramp up visitor engagement.

Before you invest in an expensive camera, practice taking good shots with your phone’s built-in camera. Not only are phone cameras today extremely powerful, but they are also probably going to be more convenient to use in many situations when you’re out traveling. This means that even if you do have access to a great DSLR or mirrorless camera, you’re often going to end up using your phone’s camera when you’re traveling.

If you do decide to make your blog image heavy, make sure to choose designs and layouts that help accentuate your photos. If your blog is hosted on WordPress, there are a lot of free travel-oriented themes out there that are specifically designed to properly display high-quality photos on both desktop and mobile versions of your site.

3. Unique and Useful Information

A lot of your blog’s visitors are probably researching the places you’ve written about because they intend to travel to them eventually. This means that you will want to accurately document the places you’re traveling to. Proper documentation can increase your credibility and authority as a travel blogger, driving more visitor traffic to your site over time.

It’s important to write in detail about things that would-be travelers might want to know. Focus on transportation options, places of interest, underrated sites, local customs, and things that might not be mentioned in other blog articles that also talk about the same place.

While you do want to mention the usual touristy things and popular attractions, you should also try your best to document things that are off the beaten path. These kinds of details can help build your blog’s authority and make it an important resource for your site’s visitors.

4. Engaging Writing

The reason why few travel blogs succeed in the long term is that the writing isn’t as engaging as it should be. When people visit a blog, they expect an experience that is different from what they could get from just browsing social media. Unless you’re a very good photographer or have a particularly compelling angle, you will have a very difficult time maintaining engagement on your blog with so-so writing.

What qualifies as “good” writing is highly subjective. However, applying tight editing and good storytelling to your blog’s articles is usually a good way to keep visitors interested. By telling interesting stories and keeping things focused, you can get visitors emotionally invested. When this happens, they are more likely to stay on your site.  

Another way to drive engagement through writing is to publish serial articles that are related in some way. They could tell a continuing story or be tied to a central theme. In this way, site owners can encourage repeat visits and get visitors to stay on your site.

5. Effective Social Media Promotions

To grow a travel blog these days, you’ll need to promote it on social media. Generally, Instagram is, by far, the more popular social media platform for travel bloggers, as it has a primarily visual format. The one catch though, is that IG users are limited to one link in their bio and links in their IG Stories and none in the main feed. 

Previously, travel bloggers who wanted to share new blog posts often had to either constantly swap out links in the bio with every article they put out or link to the blog’s main page. Thankfully, there's a variety of link in bio tools for IG that can help bloggers get more traffic through their socials.

To further increase your reach, you could also use Facebook to curate and share your content. You could also consider Facebook as a primary promotional tool if you’re planning on targeting an older audience or a geographical area where it remains highly dominant, such as the Philippines.




How’s Your Travel Blog Doing?

Being a travel blogger is no joke. The job can be even harder if your site struggles to get traffic and conversions. By incorporating these five elements in your own travel blog, you can ease a lot of the burden of earning an income from your site. With these elements in place, you can eventually stop focusing on the hustle and, instead, focus on delivering great content to your audience.