Travel writing can be thrilling. Think about the objectives: to inspire, excite, inform, persuade, build trust, and to help people take the first or final step in booking their next adventure. Get your travel writing right, and it will contribute to someone’s exciting journey to their next destination. Get it wrong and run the risk of tarnishing your brand and losing prospects to competitors. Here are the most common travel-writing mistakes to avoid.
Lacklustre, uninspiring copy
Your travel writing has to inspire wanderlust in the early stages, build trust as your audience researches and prepares to book, and give all the information required for someone to commit to purchasing or booking. Your copy must be first-class in order to achieve this. Working with an experienced travel copywriter can make sure your content works wonders at every stage of the customer journey.
Generic content that doesn’t serve a purpose
Whatever you’re writing about, it should always link back to a main purpose. Your reader needs to finish the piece, get to the point and structure copy in a suitable way. When you write, always keep your content’s objective in mind as an anchor point, and finish the piece with a strong call to action.
Copy that visually misses the mark
Your copy might just be one big block of plain text, or maybe it’s a mishmash of formatting and styles. Both are mistakes in travel writing. 38% of users will stop interacting with a website if the layout is unattractive. Use titles, headings, paragraphs, bullet points and lists to break up your copy and make it a pleasure to read. Use formatting consistently and in a way that makes sense to the reader. You can also bring your key headlines to life with images, video, animations or infographics.
Getting distracted
Distracted writing leads to incoherent, disjointed copy. Your travel writing has to connect with the reader and draw them in, as it meets the objectives mentioned at the start of this article. Distractions will detract from your ability to meet these objectives. Find a quiet spot, switch off your phone and emails for the day, work from home or block out the world with headphones – whatever works best for you.
Forgetting to optimise for search
Your travel writing will only meets its objectives if people can find it easily. Each piece you write needs to be optimised for a keyword and related terms that matter to your business. When a prospect searches for that term in Google, yours are the links that should be ranking highly and attracting the clicks. Businesses that show up on the first page results reportedly get 92% of the search traffic. Make sure your content is mobile-friendly, tagged up with the target keyword in the title, heading and meta tags, and is as useful and relevant to the target keyword as can be.
Writing plays an important role in the customer journey of anyone seeking inspiration, researching or booking travel elements. Well-crafted travel writing can give you a competitive advantage, build credibility and ultimately win you customers, and more importantly, brand advocates. Avoid these common mistakes and you will succeed when it comes to meeting the exciting, challenging objectives of travel writing.
To read more on topics like this, check out the travel category.
