What Works In Organic Growth In The Travel Space

This is the Travel Marketing Podcast, brought to you by Propellic, bringing you the news and insights and what's working and not working in today's competitive transportation and tourism landscape. From emerging brands to the most established professionals.

These lessons of intelligent marketing will help your marketing plan travel further. 

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Brennen Bliss

Hello, hello, hello, welcome back to the travel marketing podcast by Propellic. My name is Brennen Bliss, I'm the founder and CEO of Propellic and we are a digital marketing firm that works specifically with travel brands. 

Today I have an exceptional, exceptional opportunity to interview Kevin Indig who's become a friend over the last year or so.

He did a travel industry deep dive and we reached out and asked him to do a podcast episode with us six, eight months ago, maybe. And it was an incredible conversation. And in the time since we've worked together a couple of times, and most recently we've sponsored his second deep dive into the travel industry, specifically on the topic of SEO. 

And I can't say this enough. Kevin is one of the most respected people in the space. He not only understands SEO, but he has one of those really unique things that SEOs sometimes don't have. And that's an understanding of business unit economics and how money is made. So we're going to dive in, talk a little bit about what's happening in the travel industry. This is an interview style format, just basically covering the findings of his research, which you can find a link to in the show notes. So we'll dive right in. 

Well, welcome back, Kevin. Good to see you. 

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Kevin Indig

Glad to be back. Thank you so much for having me. 

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Brennen Bliss

It's so funny for anybody who's not in the room with us, switching from the conversation we have right before to pretending like we haven't spoken at all and then jumping into the podcast. 

All right. So for all those that are listening, just know that we had a very funny moment because we've been talking for 10 minutes and then we had to pretend like we hadn't talked at all. 

But in any case, we'll dive right in. 

So Kevin, why are you here today? 

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Kevin Indig

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I'm here because I have published another deep dive into the travel industry. Thank you for sponsoring it and making it happen. And I have some interesting findings to share. 

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Brennen Bliss

Okay. Got it.

Now I think we've passed the thousand people listening to this mark. So I think it's actually worth your time now. So I'm excited to dive in and for anybody who's not familiar, Kevin is definitely at the forefront of research in the SEO industry. Incredibly, incredibly well thought of. And I think when he speaks, people should listen and you'll hear a little bit about that and get that in a second. And you'll also know that's the only reason he's the only time someone's come on this podcast twice. So there you go. Right? 

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Kevin Indig

It's an honor. Brennen. I'm trying to live up to the honor here

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Brennen Bliss

The joke is on you because I asked a bunch of others and they said, no, one was a... I'm kidding. All right. So talk about this report, why you did the first one. Then we can kind of move into some of the things that you found in the questions. 

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Kevin Indig

Yeah, absolutely. So look, I was missing a map of the SEO landscape. So when you work in finance, you have a map as in the form of maybe a markets dashboard or maybe an S&P 500.

When you're a politician, you have a global map of conflicts, right? Every industry has their map. And I was missing a map for SEO to understand how are the tectonic plates shifting? What's changing from a visibility perspective, from a SERP feature perspective, what is Google changing and how are players adapting to it? And this year I finally built myself a map where I'm tracking a couple of thousand domains, many thousands of keywords every week to understand who's visible and then I can dive deeper into what are they doing? How's it performing? And on top of that comes some industry analysis. 

I learned that one of my strengths is analytical thinking, holistical thinking, critical thinking. So I try to combine all of that into doing these elaborate market research reports with a very strong focus on organic growth. And that of course has a very strong footing in SEO. 

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Brennen Bliss 

Yeah. It's interesting because I've got people around me and some of the, lot of the exposure I've gotten when we're potentially considering an acquisition, looking at data rooms, understanding how a business functions, how a market functions, how macroeconomics function. That's the context you put this in. It's not like H1 headings. Like that's not what we're talking about. We're really talking about the business impact of optimization, which frankly, like one of our philosophies in our performance booking methodology is that you need to have some sort of organic forecasting to judge your decision-making. So you don't want to target a keyword because it has a high search volume. You want to target a keyword because there is not only demand for that, but the average order value is high. The click through rate on that specific term is high and conversion rate on that term is high, or at least substantiates investing some sort of time and money into targeting that term. 

In that research in the second round that you've done. So what are the dates? Do you remember when you did the first round? 

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Kevin Indig

Yeah, first one was earlier this year. I think it was around June and then now the second one was just published in November.

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Brennen Bliss

Okay. So it's like a half a year later. What has changed for travel SEO and travel organic?

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Kevin Indig

A bunch of things. So the first report was more of a 360 degree view. 360 degree view. Let me try that again. 

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Brennen Bliss

You did it. 

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Kevin Indig

360 of what's going on in general, you know, like what are some of the most important keywords, players, certain features that Google shows and a bunch of other stuff. And the basis for the second deep dive were a couple of specific questions based on some of the bigger trends in the travel industry.

For example, how is travel demand, right? How does that compare year over year or compared to before the pandemic? Obviously we're now a couple of years behind the pandemic based on when you define the end of the pandemic. And that obviously has a big impact on the travel industry. But then also things like obviously AI, right? I think it's hard to get around AI. 

So I was very curious how companies are using it? What are they doing? And then there's also something to be said about consumer behavior due to inflation, "discretionary income"  and all these kinds of things.

And then I finished that with a look at who are the newcomers in the industry? What are they doing well? And what are the patterns that they show? 

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Brennen Bliss

Got it, interesting. Okay. 

There were a couple of brands that you looked at and mentioned what brands kind of stuck out as doing something interesting? Do you mean in terms of newcomers or in general? I say newcomers. That's interesting. Cause that's who's “disrupting”, right? I did air quotes for anybody who's not watching. 

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Kevin Indig

Yeah, totally. So when we talk about disrupting players, it doesn't mean that they're, they formed the company this year, right? It could have been on the market for a little while, but I would still file them under the newcomer umbrella. So the way that I approached this is I looked at over 200 startups in the travel space, basically as many travel startups that I could find, not pop lake, not like a market leader. And then I brought that down to maybe the 20 most interesting ones. So we're talking about companies like Get Your Guides, Layla AI, Travel Perk, but also Bio, Hopper, Peak, Tour Scanner. They all do a bunch of different things, but those are the types of companies that we're talking about really. 

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Brennen Bliss

Got it. Okay. So, you know, there were some standouts like Hoppers, not a startup, right? They've been around not quite as long as Booking.com and Expedia have, but they're not a startup. And I would say Get Your Guide having raised somewhere around a billion dollars. I mean, there's a lot of that with secondary transactions, but you know, they got the kiss of death or life from a soft bank, depending on how you look at it. 

I'm curious how you would differentiate Layla. I don't know how deeply you got into it. We've done some work with them. I'm curious if you look at what they're doing and that's AI driven, particularly versus Hopper, which is not. Do you have any thoughts on strategy around AI driven content? 

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Kevin Indig

A lot of thoughts. So a couple of things. One relationship that I looked at is for these newcomer types of companies, right? Smaller type of companies. What is their relationship to how well they do in SEO compared to their funding round to basically how much money they raise?

And what I found is that there's actually a pretty strong relationship. Essentially the more money companies raise, the better they perform in organic search. And that is not because they have more money. It's typically because with more money, they either have the capacity to work on SEO or they hit a funding round where SEO is like one of the logical channels to expand to. But there's an inherent flaw here, which is that SEO is oftentimes especially for probably 90% of travel companies, SEO is actually a very good growth channel. It's very scalable, especially when we talk about AI and Layla. I think you've done great work with them, but their recommendations and their categories might lend themselves to actually a perfect scenario for SEO. 

So I think generally startups invest too late in organic traffic and it means that it's kind of a missed opportunity. 

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Brennen Bliss

Well, and admittedly with Layla, that's a project we've had very small interaction with, there hasn't been much, it's just situational improving things, I give them a lot of credit for the work that they've done on their own in-house. 

I'm curious on the like trends piece, there were these interesting trends that I just didn't expect, like the all-inclusive resort one. You had mentioned in that report that there was a shift towards all-inclusive resorts. Were there more like specific types of search terms or specific focus areas that you see consumers searching for? 

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Kevin Indig

Yeah. So all-inclusive definitely is a big one. And I attribute that back to the discretionary income of people, right? Reality is that discretionary income is relatively tight for a lot of people right now due to inflation for sure, but also a couple of other economic factors that we can dive deeper into. But long story short, people are looking for ways to save money. All inclusive resorts are typically, I don't want to speak from a personal preference here, but I think of the broader perception, they offer a good kind of return for the money, right? They're like a good- 

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Brennen Bliss

Who doesn't want 14 restaurants at their resort? 

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Kevin Indig

Might depend on like the type of resort that you're going to, but people are seeking these out specifically also saw a heightened search demand for things like adult only all-inclusive resorts. It seems like sometimes it's like a kids free all-inclusive resort. So I think that kind of segment specifically is in a higher demand right now, but long story short, people are trying to save money and you see that reflected in the whole deep dive across different areas. Maybe one interesting stat that I can highlight. If you look at flights, actually Delta and United make over 85% of the profits in the whole US airline industry. 

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Brennen Bliss

Yeah, I saw that headline a couple of weeks ago. 

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Kevin Indig

It was just insane. And of course there's a lot to the story, but a big part of it is their modular pricing, meaning they allow you to spend more money to get more, but you don't have to. And so that is directly tied to the fact that there's a heightened search demand for all-inclusive resorts. And it basically just means that people want to up or downscale their trip experience.

Either they like most of the time because they don't have as much discretionary income. So they want to save money, but in some cases they want to maybe spend a bit more, but to their liking and to their preferences. 

And so I think the long story short here is that that's a critical kind of situation that everybody in travel needs to be aware of and needs to react to and can talk about different strategies to get there. 

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Brennen Bliss

Okay. Bit of a pivot. We just published a report with Phocuswright based on their 2024 trends, consumer travel research trends report, which basically they field couple thousand travelers and do some statistically tested research on how travelers are researching planning and booking travel. And then we took all that and said, okay, here's what it means for marketing. 

And I published this white paper, released it at the Phocuswright Conference. 

One of the interesting parts, the part that, you know, got pulled out by a number of people and was even brought up on stage was advanced web rankings. This is known as advanced web rankings. I'm fairly certain that it's just clickstream data that they're using to make these forecasts and predictions.

You know, there's a test of validity that you have to layer on top of this, but in advanced web rankings, which forecast click through rate, that's one of their tools that they've built. I don't know if they built it themselves or if they're just pulling it from some sort of API, but it said click through rates on the travel industry have fallen from 31% to 15% on position one. 

You spent a lot of time auditing the SERPs for the travel industry. Number one, do you think that's true? Number two, why do you think that could be? 

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Kevin Indig

I think it's true depending on the market. So the first caveat is that in the US I could absolutely see that happening in the EU, for example, I would be surprised if that happens to the same degree. And the reason is simply because Google gives so much of the answer away themselves. So it was a whole bunch of search features like carousels when you look for attractions, for example, or the own travel platform, when you look for flights and hotels. So interestingly in the EU, Google is forced to be much more passive with that. And in some cases…

Yeah, exactly, It’s markets act, basically the sword of the EU to kind of trim players that violate certain market conditions right now I think it's eight companies, by the way, booking is one of them. 

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Brennen Bliss

Yeah. The gatekeepers, the gatekeepers. Anybody wants to see the CEO of booking.com just loses his mind about that. Just go watch skiffs recordings. It's a almost laughable. 

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Kevin Indig

Look, it's a complicated topic. Okay. Part of me likes this a part of me doesn't, but I think a takeaway here for anybody who operates in multiple markets.

Ideally in and outside of the EU is do your best to compare click through rates in and outside of the EU for the same keywords. It's easiest when you look at English speaking markets. It could be a little tricky since the UK is not in the EU obviously, but whenever you have the chance to compare click through rates and the search results layout for the same or similar keywords, I think that's a very fruitful exercise to better project traffic and click through rates down the line. 

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Brennen Bliss

Yeah. I mean, then you get into like smaller countries, like take Lithuania, for instance, like if you go there, clickstream data becomes unreliable. Search volume data becomes unreliable. For anybody listening to this that doesn't know anything about SEO data sourcing, what you read in these tools about the search volume and about click theory, it is a guess of a guess of a guess. That is generally somewhat significant unreliable at large scales and at least comparatively. 

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Kevin Indig

And it's part of a larger disease, which is just simply that all of our marketing data is getting worse and worse. 

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Brennen Bliss

Worse and worse and worse.

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Kevin Indig

Exactly. As tracking is getting harder, as more as being solved by AI and black boxes. So my theories that were kind of in a Renaissance or just before Renaissance of leading a lot more in qualitative data, again, talking more to customers to make marketing decisions and taking a step back from performance marketing. And I want to be, you know, like put that in quotes. 

Brennen Bliss

Yeah. I mean, you look at advertising, I mean, like a Google click ID that gets attached to a click on each click through on a Google ad, you're getting like 20 to 30 % of those stripped off by browsers. There's no attribution at all.

How do you know which campaigns are working? It's just, it's messy. And that's always been the case with SEO ever since the SSL certificate took over the internet. 

No visibility into what people are clicking on. So getting a little derailed, coming back to the conversation at hand, you shared a friend of mine, Viola Eva from Flow SEO. You shared some of the work that she did. She built a large language model tracking document that she started using at her agency. I didn't read the full post closely, but I did see it in my LinkedIn feed. And I remember her sharing it in a WhatsApp group that we're in with like two or three other people that were in together. 

What's your thought on that trend of LLM click through growth and traffic growth was pretty substantial, even at a small scale at an early stage. Where do you see that going? 

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Kevin Indig

It's so interesting. viola and I just today published a joint post on LinkedIn and like deepening that research. And so together we looked at over 25 companies and what we saw is the exact same trend for every company, which is that generally when comparing to all organic traffic, the referral traffic from LLMs like ChatGPT is still very small. We're talking about 0.2 to maybe 1%. However, the growth is exceptional. It's growing at over 20% month over month, which for anybody who's familiar with compounding growth, that means it's going to reach critical mass very, very quickly. So where today, referral traffic might make up a percent of your organic traffic, in the next three years it could grow to at least a third of your organic traffic, maybe more. 

And what's also interesting is that at least anecdotally, we need a lot more data to validate this at scale, but anecdotally, the referral traffic from LLMs converts at a much higher rate than regular organic traffic. And it makes sense because users probably go through their journey on an LLM chatbots and then when they're ready for a decision, they click through to the website. 

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Brennen Bliss

This is our guidance. It’s top of the funnel is dying for organic search. It's just...Just stop focusing on it, you can just let it die. Leave the LLMs with all the crap content that's already out there to index and spit out and you go create yourself some good purchase pages. 

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Kevin Indig

I love that, but I totally agree. 

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Brennen Bliss

Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty interesting. What do you want to talk about? What else do you think was interesting in there that you think you'd call out? 

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Kevin Indig

Yeah. So one highlight that a lot of people who shared the deep dive called out is that we're seeing the first direct impact of using AI for SEO.

And that is TripAdvisor's AI summaries. So what they have done is they have used AI. I'm going to talk a bit about how exactly they did that in a second, but they're using AI to generate a summary of reviews. Like think about a hotel review. And that obviously makes it much easier to parse reviews, but they also provide sub summaries of different aspects. So it's very interesting. 

They started this whole project in a way that I love, which is by talking to customers. They talked to over 6,000 users and they asked them, are some of the attributes that you most care about when it comes to hotels, restaurants, et cetera. And then from there, they use that data to train a chat GPT-4 model use racks or retrieval, augmented generation to ground the model to essentially set boundaries for the model to only reply or to only create content about the review specifically. And then they put that on the website, so now you can not only find an AI review summary about the property, but you also find summaries for specific attributes like cleanliness, price, availability, all that kind of stuff. And I have looked at the organic traffic to TripAdvisor's review pages and it has doubled in the last couple of months. So this is now a first actual case where a company has gotten a benefit and I would say competitive advantage in Google search results by using AI. 

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Brennen Bliss

I'm pulling this up. I'm so curious.

I remember looking at it when that report came out look at TripAdvisor, company that has been struggling a bit. At least if you look at their stock price, I would say that they're doing pretty well with Viator, but beyond that, they've struggled. And it's very interesting to hear growth because you said it just the way it was when we were talking about top of funnel content and large language models. Like people are going to have to make a transaction somewhere. Historically, it's not really been TripAdvisor. TripAdvisor is a review site. They're not a booking engine. Like you would look at booking.com or Expedia, but you look at it and say, okay, there's a site that is not at the bottom of the funnel that's growing. That's not the very bottom of funnel that's growing, which is interesting. And I didn't expect to see that today. 

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Kevin Indig

Totally, I think the way that it plays out is it's just a much better user experience. Skimming and looking through reviews, unless you have a very specific question and there's a very specific kind of factor that you need to make a decision. It's a waste of time and it's tedious. I think Amazon was actually one the first companies that started summarizing their reviews with AI.

TripAdvisor has done a really good job and it's just a better user experience and that reflects in rankings, right? So taking a step back, right? When I think at what moves the needle the most in anything in terms of SEO, it's oftentimes these quality of life improvements. Make it easier for me to make a choice, help me make the choice. Like sure, there's some technical things that still matter. Sure, backlinks, authority, all that stuff, it still matters. But some of the best gains come from just making the product the front end, the free experience much, better. 

And TripAdvisor does a good job in doing that with AI. Now I will also say they're not the only ones doing that, but they're the only ones benefiting from that. And that's because of technical SEO, right? So that stuff still matters. For example, Expedia and some other companies, think booking as well, they also have AI summaries, but they hide them behind a pop-up that Google cannot see. I think there's a technical issue actually holding them back.

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Brennen Bliss

I like that just comes back to a boost, give someone a better experience. They're going to dwell longer and that's going to result in better performance across the entire portfolio. It makes a lot of sense, right? 

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Kevin Indig

Yeah, it does make a sense, a lot of sense. And not only do they dwell longer, but they also are more likely to make an actual decision in that moment. Instead of seeing, there's a thousand reviews. Like how do I even know which one to look at and which one to help me? They might get overwhelmed and then actually leave. 

Brennen Bliss

Yeah, I certainly do.

As someone who runs a travel marketing agency that specializes in that specific portion of the research planning and booking journey, I'm a pretty bad example of someone who just gets fatigued and gives up and might not even go on the trip as a result. 

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Kevin Indig

I'm totally with you. And so are billions of people around the world. I think we're all the same in that regard. It's an old school marketing principle, which is that too much choice is simply overwhelming so narrow down the choice that makes it easier for people to make a decision and they're more likely to actually make one. 

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Brennen Bliss

Yeah, for sure. Interesting. Uh, this is not something that we talked about prior, but it just popped into my head as a potentially good talking point. When you look at a small business doing sub a million in revenue and it's a tour company, a local tour company, maybe a rafting company, is there a path for them to win with organic anymore? 

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Kevin Indig

I think there is…

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Brennen Bliss

And further, like there's no reason to say yes, if it's no, which you obviously wouldn't do, but then what is the path? 

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Kevin Indig

Sure. I think it's in kind of hyper-specialization, right? So as a rafting company, you're bound by location, right? So there's something inherent about obviously like you're bound to geography, but I think there's a selling aspect. So can you make sure that you're included, for example, in listicles about the best things to do in a certain location, like your location. So there's an aspect about reaching out or managing relationships with other websites. And then I think you on your website can also create content about way more than just your offering. 

So the first thing I would say is make sure that you have a good understanding of all the questions that your customers and potential customers might have and address them. That is so often forgotten, not just by small local businesses, also by billion dollar public companies, but just know what questions are top of mind for customers. Create content around that on your website. And then two, think about what all the other ways are that people might search for stuff in your location. So again, best things to do maybe attractions, maybe you're close to an attraction, right? 

Something like along that line, itineraries, all that kind of stuff. And then put something together for people that's interesting and insert your own offering into it. And that is not just a way to be present in classic organic search, but also increasingly in AI search. 

So these types of listicles like best X things to do and blah, those work really well in AI search and people do search also for local stuff on ChatGPT and co.

That might be a great way for you to be present there as well. 

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Brennen Bliss

Got it. And that's another so influencing via, I'm going to come back to the large business on that question, the same question I asked, but as a transition point, just for a second, because you mentioned it, influencing AI overviews. First and foremost, we tried to make a tool for destinations to figure out if they were getting recommended as the target destination as an interesting destination to visit. If you're looking for a trip to the Southwest, what we found was that the volatility in AI overviews for outweighs the benefit of trying to guess if you're mentioned or where you're ranked in the suggested articles to the right. 

Are you seeing levels of volatility in AI overviews number one, and number two, are you seeing opportunities to influence your visibility in those beyond what you just shared? 

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Kevin Indig

Yeah, yes to both. And part of that is that the models are being upgraded. just now had Gemini 2 came out, so Google's flagship LLM Gemini, the second version just came out. And that obviously also powers air overviews. And so I'm not surprised that they all see a shakeup as they get better. And then two, Google is constantly tweaking air overviews as they better learn what people actually want, what people click on, etcetera. So they're kind of trying to self-improve. And I would argue that they have improved over time, but that creates a point of volatility that can be hard to deal with. It's a cat and mouse game. So the question is, what's your appetite and what's your agility to chase that mouse?

I think there can be real benefits, but I will also say that it very much depends on industry in industries where, know, for example, in the publishing industry, when you have large publishers that mostly make a revenue through affiliate marketing and they focus mostly on high intent keywords, they see very little impact from AI overviews. Whereas other industries and travel could be one of those they see much higher impact from their overviews. As we talked about before, right click rates are falling in half.

Now the question about impacting outside of creating content on your own website is that there are two platforms in the top three of the most cited domains or sites in AI overviews that are actually where you can actually create content. One is YouTube and the other one is LinkedIn. Travel content on LinkedIn could be a harder sell. Like LinkedIn articles might be a chance, maybe with business travel, but you have to maybe find an angle. The other thing with YouTube is that there's a much higher chance to be cited as a source. But there's two problems with it. One is the high production costs so not everybody can just simply publish on YouTube. Or if you have a certain tolerance for lower fidelity productions, then it might be more accessible to you. But two is that even when you're cited on YouTube as a source, people might watch the video, but that doesn't mean they go to your site. So it's a very indirect passive play. But those are two ways to impact our views outside of your own website.

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Brennen Bliss

Got it. Yeah. I was looking at YouTube and I was looking at hiring an agency to get some videos on there around our concepts and it's going to be like three or four grand to produce a 20 minute video, minimum of 20 videos. And it's like, that's a lot. 

It has up to 60 to 80 grand right there, okay, cool, cool, very nice. 

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Kevin Indig

That's no pocket change. Maybe webinars could be one. Like that would be my hack. Upload webinars, make sure that the talking track refers to some of the AI overviews that are shown for the keywords you care most about, that could be something to test. 

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Brennen Bliss

So for you multi-destination travel OTAs, make sure that you have a high production value video for each one of your 10,000 locations, okay? That's the takeaway, right? 

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Kevin Indig

Or user-generated content, right? Like I think at that scale, there might be a chance that, I don't know, maybe you have video reviews and maybe there's a play to leverage that for AI overviews. 

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Brennen Bliss

Yeah, I think we really are at a moment in time though where the SEO craft has substantially changed.

Like is very, you know, SEO is one piece of organic, but diving into the SEO channel. I mean, we still have very statistically relevant and valid data that endorses link building like manual link building, which is again, it's not preference to search engines. They don't like that because obviously it's an intentional attempt to manipulate search results, but authority does at least for a period of time, carry weight. And then further, you make it easier for Google to read index and understand your website technical is going to be important. It's that content piece that just is kind of a very different ballgame now than even it was two or three years ago. 

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Kevin Indig

Oh, a hundred percent. So first of all, I very much agree with you, I think link building is still a great thing. And especially when you build links that clicked, right? They provide a benefit from many perspectives. And then second, we just talked about technical SEO and how important it is for things like AI generated review summaries. And then third, the content game has completely shifted as of so far that anything that an LLM chatbot could create is not worthless, right? If you have like a very generic listicle, like, hey, here are 10 tips for traveling with a toddler, right? That you can find on any corner of the web that is not worth the $0, and so you have to find ways to create content that only you can create that is unique and that is defendable over time. 

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Brennen Bliss

That's funny. Today we were literally just talking to a brand that does the books trips for families traveling with kids. And yeah, I think that experience that you've shared of that being very diluted and having a niche opinion. I mean, you just ask. I mean, yeah, it's a different world. It is a different world on big businesses using SEOs. I've talked to some very large travel businesses, like very large, very much household names for multiple verticals. And what I'm hearing is things that we're not forecasting SEO to grow or we're forecasting deterioration of our SEO channel. Those are the two things I've heard from some very large travel brands. What's your response to that? 

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Kevin Indig

Yeah. Funny enough, the same thing.

All the travel companies that I have spoken to, all of them exclusively at best predict flat. So no growth. It's funny because there's a big travel company out of Germany and I recently spoke to their SEO. I'm not going to say who it is, but they saw a decline in organic traffic and there was a win for them because it wasn't as bad as it maybe was for other companies. so the funny thing though is that there is a disconnect between the ranks and the organic traffic, right? So ranks might've actually been relatively stable in the terms of how many keywords do the rank and top positions for, but the organic traffic decline, it goes directly back to where we're talking about the beginning, where click rates are just, they're just eroding. 

So the question of course is what do you make out of that? And where does all of that attention go? Because as I've also shown in my deep dive, the year of year travel demand is growing. It's going slower than the previous years, but it's still growing. So the market is growing, but organic traffic is not. And again, that's because Google is taking a larger piece of the pie and so the question is, what do you make out of that? And it's the same thing that I've been preaching for years is that first of all, you need to find ways to bring organic traffic into channels that you can control better. Email, apps, those kinds of things make it worthwhile for people to create accounts so they can gather first party data and then leverage as much data as you have to create the most personalized and high quality experience possible. And look, I don't think anybody who works at large OTA is surprised by what I'm saying. I think that is now, like everybody tries to achieve that. The big question is, is your organization set up for success in those regards? And part of that is holding yourself to a high performance marketing standards. It's what we talked about before, right? Like, do you expect a, like juice out of every squeeze? Can you make some long-term bets? Do you have buy-in to maybe invest in certain things that might not move the needle right away?

Those are the things that marketing leaders are confronted with right now. These are hard decisions to make and a lot of them take a leap and a leap is scary because you don't have certainty. A leap is scary because it might not work out and you might lose your job or at least not get promoted or get a big slap on the wrist. And it takes a little bit of judgment and it tastes a little bit of, might not be able to fight your way through with just numbers and projections. So that is a challenge that a lot of marketing leaders are confronted by at the same time though if one of these bets plays out, that's also where modes and competitive advantages are coming from. 

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Brennen Bliss

Yeah. And then also just AI reviews, summaries. 

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Kevin Indig

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Those kinds of things. Look, there's also other cool things in the space, right? I think it's called Romie from, was it Expedia? 

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Brennen Bliss

That's Booking. Oh, is that Booking or Expedia? That's one of them. 

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Kevin Indig

One of them. Um, I'll get it right in a second, but Romie is a cool idea, cool concepts, and also an AI trip planner. But instead of going to a landing page and then walking through like a flow, you can just tag this bot in your text, like in a text group with friends, for example, it's by Expedia. And then Romie will scan the conversation and give you travel suggestions or put an itinerary together for you. So I think there is a lot of ground also to innovate and that actually makes the whole game fun and exciting. 

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Brennen Bliss

Yeah. It's an interesting world that we're in right now. I'm gonna do another one of these in six months.

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Kevin Indig

Yeah. Yeah. You bet. I'm on. 

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Brennen Bliss

I'm in. Let's do it. No, I appreciate again, as always, the insight. You're at that rare point that is honestly so incredibly rare in SEO. It's more common and paid, but in SEO, it's like you don't typically find someone that understands business and that art and you're at the front of that. And I'm so happy that we were able to get you here and work with you on this and support you in it. And thank you for doing this. What's your sub-stat called? It's sub-stack, right? 

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Kevin Indig

Yeah, I'm on sub-stack. It's called a Growth Memo. So the domain is growth-memo.com. There's an imposter. It's called “the growth memo”, that's not my newsletter. Mine is just called Growth Memo. 

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Brennen Bliss

Is it an attempt to do something very similar to yours? 

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Kevin Indig

Yeah, I think so. And they were just bought by another company. So I do need to trademark my name and then sue them but… 

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Brennen Bliss

It’s growth-memo.com. I highly recommend reading it.

And then we shared this in our NavLog newsletter as well, as well as across all the Propellic, Propellic stuff. Thank you, Kevin. I appreciate it as always. 

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Kevin Indig

I appreciate you too, Brennen. Thanks for having me on again. Whenever I talk to you, my energy goes up. So it's a pleasure and I'm looking forward to the next one. 

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Brennen Bliss

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Have a wonderful holiday.

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For more empowering ideas, visit Propellic.com. We're on a mission to create more diversity and thought for the planet, and dedicated to helping brands both large and small increase their reach through intelligent travel, transportation, and tourism marketing. P-R-O-P-E-L-L-I-C.com.

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