Competitive Intelligence and Backlink Audits—What Marketers Need to Know from the Latest SEMrush Study

September 27 Was World Tourism Day. The Theme Of World Tourism Day 2017 Was “Sustainable Tourism— A Tool For Development.”

To show how top businesses see tourism as a potent driver of economic growth, leading online marketing intelligence and analytics company SEMrush, released the “SEMrush Website Airline and Keyword Study.” The study highlights the top destinations, top travels and the main channels that generate the highest traffic streams for the travel industry.

On key words for destinations and website traffic (SEMrush) highlights include—

– Cyprus Malta, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Bulgaria, Greece are the top destinations

– Tripadvisor, Airbnb, skyskanner, the trainline.com, easyjet.com, expedia.com – top travel websites

–  Facebook (83.7%), Youtube (8.63%) and Twitter (5.69%) – main channels from which travel websites get traffic

At the time of the release of this Tourism Day 2017 study, we spoke to Olga Andrienko, Head of Global Marketing, SEMrush, to understand how top brands leverage competitive intelligence and backlink audits to align their marketing and advertising for seamless customer conversations.

Olga said, “Word-of-mouth advertising has transformed into referral traffic on the web. Backlink analysis and backlink audit play essential role in online marketing today. Firstly, having a lot of quality websites that link to your content increases your traffic and builds your authority. And, links are one of the ranking signals for Google – in our latest Ranking Factors Study we have identified that the number of referring domains has huge importance to your page’s position in SERPs. The TOP-1 had almost twice as many referring domains as pages on 10th position. So, the more backlinks and more domains link to you, the more likely the conversation with the customer will happen – you’ll get more visitors to your website.”

So how do marketers ensure that their social interactions positively influence the website traffic?

Olga informed, “Key to engaging the audience on social is to support the readers with not selling, but educational content. You should explain why this article is important for reading and what conclusions the user can make by reading it and what advantages he or she can have if he/she uses your site or your product. That will lead the potential customer to the website and existing users will really love you because you are not only the product, you are the service from where they learn. Show users an interesting infographic, make sure that they share your findings and your posts, this will help not only bring traffic to the site, but also draw new loyal customers.”

Olga said that though the traffic from social media platforms generally is not really high compared to direct or organic, yet it should not be neglected. She said, “Social media is where the conversation about your brand is happening. Dissatisfied customers link to your site to ensure their friends never buy from you, satisfied clients give referrals and prospects in doubt ask their audience if they should consider buying from you.”