When it comes to developing an effective SEO strategy for travel companies, one of the biggest challenges facing an SEO marketing agency is the competitiveness of the generic keywords they try to fight for. And for companies with a relatively small online marketing budget, it’s especially difficult. Unfortunately, there is no straightforward solution. Some try to target the less competitive long tail keywords. There is no doubt that it is easier to rank better for these more specific, less competitive keywords, but some fairly obvious problems present themselves to this keyword strategy. For a start, for each long tail keyword you target you would need to create a relevant landing page. This page would then need to be keyword enriched, and a lot of time would need to go into a fairly seldom-searched phrase. The other problem is that, in my experience, some long tail keywords don’t seem to convert well. And if conversion rates are not as high as might be expected, there is little to be gained from targeting them. So what, then, do we do with the long tail? In my opinion, the best SEO strategy is to begin by targeting the mid level keywords (not too generic, but not too specific). You can then create a reasonable number of landing pages for these keywords, which can be optimised without wasting too much energy. A combined PPC and SEO strategy can then be implemented. PPC campaigns can easily target the long tail keywords, without too much energy or money being spent on the campaign. Based on the conversion results of the campaign, any long tail keywords that seem to be converting really well can be targeted with an SEO campaign. Landing pages can be created for these keywords, and it would then be worthwhile to optimise these pages for SEO.