Search marketing agency Greenlight has released its analysis of holiday sector searches for October with Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, emerging as the most-searched for destination. The agency identified 5.3m holiday searches in October which came from the top 3,200 keywords. The results were broken down into 2.3m generic searches, 1.2m for short-haul destinations and 1.8m…
Egypt tops holiday search charts at start of winter season
Search marketing agency Greenlight has released its analysis of holiday sector searches for October with Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, emerging as the most-searched for destination.
The agency identified 5.3m holiday searches in October which came from the top 3,200 keywords. The results were broken down into 2.3m generic searches, 1.2m for short-haul destinations and 1.8m for long-haul. The most popular search terms were “cheap holidays and “holidays” which accounted for 8% each of the total.
However, “Sharm el Sheikh holidays” and “Turkey Holidays” each accounted for 5%, with “Egypt holidays” picking up another 2% of the total.
At the start of the winter season, “ski holidays” accounted for 5% of the total number of searches.The study ranks the “visibility” of travel brands by looking at how often they appear on the first page of Google natural search results. Overall, directline-holidays.co.uk is the most visible, with a ranking of 64%. It is followed by holidayhypermarket.co.uk with 57% and Thomson.co.uk with 54%.
Greenlight pointed out that lastminute.com and Virgin Holidays both improved their rankings since the July report, with Thomas Cook and TravelSupermarket losing ground. It also notes that Expedia came 40th on the list with a ranking of only 2% ‘despite considerable offline activity.”
In terms of paid search, Greenlight looks at results for the top 90 of the keywords and uses a different methodology to give a “share of voice ranking”. The brand with the biggest share of voice was firstchoice.co.uk with a 41% share. It bid on 68 of the keywords and achieved an average ad position of five within the Google sponsored links.
It was followed by icelolly.com and holidayhypermarket.com with a 40% and 39% share respectively. Icelolly.com had by far the biggest share of voice for generic terms. Travelrepublic.co.uk topped the short-haul rankings with thomascook.com coming out on top for long-haul keywords.
By combining the natural and paid search analysis, the most visible brand within Google for the holiday sector was holidayhypermarket.com, followed by directline-holidays.co.uk and Thomson.co.uk.
To see the report in full, click here
