One of the genuine pleasures of agency work, now that I’ve been doing it a couple of months, is seeing the same problems turn up across completely different industries wearing different costumes. A travel client and a retail client will describe their situations as if they are unique, and half the time they are the same situation with different vocabulary.
Take the problem of near-identical pages. A retailer selling a shirt in eight colours has eight pages that differ by one word. A travel site selling the same hotel through three different landing pages has the same headache. Both are sitting on a duplication problem that Panda made a lot more dangerous this year, and both usually got there by letting a database generate pages without anyone deciding whether each one earned its place. Retail has been forced to think hard about canonical tags and faceted navigation; travel, in my experience, often hasn’t yet, and could save itself a lot of grief by borrowing retail’s homework.
The traffic goes the other way too. Travel understands seasonality in its bones. A travel marketer knows that the search for a summer holiday happens in January, that demand has a shape across the year, and they plan content and budget around that curve as a matter of course. A lot of retailers, outside of the obvious Christmas scramble, still treat their year as flat. They could learn from how travel reads a calendar; there is almost always a season hiding in the search data if you go looking, even for products that feel year-round.
A few patterns that seem to hold whatever the sector:
- The money keywords are the ones everyone chases and nobody wins cheaply. Both travel and retail waste effort fighting head-on for the biggest, most generic terms. The volume that actually converts usually sits in the longer, more specific phrases underneath.
- Site structure is destiny. How you group products, or destinations, or categories, decides what you can ever rank for. Get the architecture wrong and no amount of content patches it.
- Reviews and user content matter more in some sectors than clients expect. Travel worked this out early. Plenty of retailers still treat customer reviews as a nice-to-have rather than a source of the exact fresh, specific language searchers actually type.
I won’t pretend the sectors are interchangeable, because they aren’t. Buying a holiday and buying a jumper are different acts with different levels of anxiety attached, and that shapes everything downstream. But the underlying search problems rhyme far more than clients believe, and a chunk of my job so far has been carrying a good idea from one industry over to another that hadn’t thought to ask.
That portability is the bit I didn’t expect to enjoy as much as I do.
