The Travel Marketing Podcast

Fueling Growth For Global Transportation Services

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Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Propellic Travel Marketing Compass Podcast. Today, I had the pleasure of interviewing Alex Galinas.
I think his title is SEO director. He's the head of SEO for sure at Hoppa. Hoppa is a car transfer and airport transfer service, they serve over 3 million passengers annually and it'll become very, very clear as you listen to this, that he is not in the same category as many of the people that we think as, as SEOs. He sits in the category of someone who truly understands the drivers of business, which you don't see frequently in our space. He's not worried about traffic, he's worried about bottom line performance.
So I'm really excited to dive in this conversation, we talk about everything from testing SEO
with statistical significance all the way to making optimizations based on what's performing well in search versus best practices and digital PR and driving links are really high authority sites and everything in between.
So I'll stop talking. Let's dive right in.

Alex, thanks so much for joining me today. I'm super excited to dive in. This is, I guess, the accidental episode of the Propellic Travel Marketing Podcast on SEO. We just talked to Kevin Indig on the last one and interviewed him on a lot of his travel research. And I also think that we were both featured in a trust most recent article.

Yes. Correct.

All three of us actually. So we'll keep the travel SEO conversation going. You're obviously at Hoppa. I was scraping through your LinkedIn, I'm just going to start diving into some pretty tactical questions. I think that's what a lot of our listeners come for a lot of travel marketers, so varying stages of their careers. So let's talk about something that is less than a month old, It's pretty fresh, pretty painful for a lot of people. It seems like y'all did well, but obviously we had the August core update rollout.
Tell me how Hoppa did and you know, kind of what actions you took. It sounded like things went well. Why do you think that might be?

Yeah, we did have some positive evaluations as a result of the August update. The case was that before the update, we were facing several year-on-year traffic gaps and for some time before the update, we were working on numerous fronts to address those gaps, both on a page level, page by page level, as well as site wide optimizations like PageSpeed so from a top level perspective, some of the things that we did, we did metadata updates on pages that hadn't been updated for quite some time, we did content updates on pages that are lost average rank year on year. We had been investing on digital PR for about a year and a half. So we had gotten hundreds and hundreds of powerful links from authoritative, mostly UK publishers like, you know, the Telegraph, Mirror, and so on and so forth. We did page speed optimizations for all our page templates. We did a tech audit that brought up some nice tickets that we, you know, put in place, we implemented. And we also had some nice gains even on our blog, although traffic levels on our blog right now are not insane because the case was that before I joined Hoppa, the blog was very underperforming. It was mostly used as a vehicle for link acquisition with some of the annual reports that we were doing to attract links.
So after our joint Hoppa, the blog was a mess. We did a redesign, we fixed a million tech things, and that went live on December 2023. And slowly but steadily, it's picking up ever since, but it got a nice bump, especially after the August update. So even on that front, we were positively evaluated.

Okay, got it. So it sounds like a little bit of everything. I mean, you look at SEO and you see these three core pillars and there's one of them I want to dive into in a second, but you've got technical, you've got content strategy, you've got authority building. And I think that third one is the hardest one to grapple with at least systemically or systematically. I don't know if it's systematically is what I was looking for. So let's talk a little bit about digital PR because this is, this is a term that I think best refers to link building in a more organic nature where you're not looking at going in specifically placing links on sites that are never visited and using AI generated guest posts, but you're really going out and doing something that's worth linking to. So tell me a little bit about your digital PR strategy. I mean, I saw you were featured, you got a domain rating 91 link from a, from Yahoo news, which is obviously a good link and that was specifically around your debug tick tock flight booking hat, so tell me about that strategy. Tell me about your overall digital PR strategy and then that specific initiative.

Yeah. Up until I would say a month ago, we were not doing just digital PR. We're doing a combo of digital PR and guest posting. In my eyes, this is, I would say the best combination when it comes to link building. You're approaching link building holistically and I think that each one of those link building approaches serves different functions. So on the one hand, you have the PR links, which you get access to very powerful websites, but it's mostly branded anchor texts and not 100% relevant websites. So it's mostly your generic news publishers. But then on the other hand, the more relevant links you get from guest posting, because obviously it's for the most part a paid activity.

So yeah, much more control. Right now we've reduced our link building activities to just digital PR, which to be honest, and based on some of the things that I'm seeing, even from the official representatives from Google, this is like the new way and the most, let's say Google-abidant way of building links. So we're doing that just now and it's going to be interesting to see whether that's going to be sufficient to kind of maintain the rankings that we had.
When it comes to PR, essentially we're focusing on two different types of activities. We do one that is called the expert tips pieces, which the piece that got picked up by Yahoo News was that type of piece, how such pieces usually get to sites like the Yahoo News, at least based on my experience, is that they get picked up by a journalist on some other site.
So in the case of that specific piece, they first got picked up by the National World and the Mirror. And then as a result of that exposure, Yahoo News picked it up, provided short of a summary of those two pieces.

And it got published and we got the link. So it's usually how it's like that, how that works.

Is your playbook for that somewhere along the lines of publish and then go the press release route, or are you reaching out to publishers to get those initial free features?

No, usually we do it together with our partner agency, partner PR agency. We do some sort of research around the publications that we want to get featured on and then specific journalists for travel topics and what type of resources they usually are interested in. And then we do a campaign based on that. What I have observed is that expert tips pieces are faster to do, at least based on the year and a half that we've been investing in PR.
They are faster to do, and in my experience, they can also get very popular with the journalists if you hit the right top.
On the other side of that coin, we have what we call the data-driven campaigns. We haven't done a lot of those because they take much more time. And the concept is that you visualize what you want to do on a campaign level based on many different things, based on a SEO objectives, for example.
And then you draw a data set from a source of data. That source of data can be either public or proprietary, and then you create a campaign around it. So for example, before I joined Hoppa, the company had too much reliance on summer destinations. And naturally they suffer big time in the winter, which I think is a common case for quite a few travel companies. So I came up with a strategy to boost winter destinations and ski destinations.
And I also aligned PR around this to get PR links to some of our winter destinations. The result of this, when it comes to the PR side of things, is that we had a campaign that was called the Winter Airport Transfers Index. We published that last winter, I think it was last December, and it did fairly well. It got something like 40 links. And the data set we based that specific campaign on was from our own booking data, which then our partner agency analyzed to find different angles on what the story should be about.
So I think that the beauty of this type of PR initiative is that it's like a weapon that you can turn anywhere you want. If you want to boost a certain page cluster, for example, because we have some reasoning behind boosting it then you just have to find something newsworthy to write about it. And based on my experience, it's even better to accommodate that with an onsite content asset to funnel the PR link power to the pages you want to boost to the internal pages.

What would be an example of such an asset?

We have one on our website, which is called winter airport transfers index. And essentially it covers different patterns based on the specific data set that we use and changes in trends that happened from a year on year perspective.

Got it. And there's a, I haven't taken a look at that. Is that a static data set or is that dynamic?

No, it's a static one and it's on a specific data set that was drawn from one year's worth of booking data. So January, 2023 to like December, 2023 or November, 2023.

Got it. So we're talking about assets on the website, meant to drive links, whether that's on the blog or whether that's wherever that may be, a resources section.
Let's pivot the same area of the site, but more so traffic related. So in travel, we look at the travel research planning and booking journey, right? As a fairly messy process across the board. You obviously sit in this very specific position that likely is booked after the flight and hotel are booked, because obviously you need a source and destination to pick up and drop off.
You wrote something on your LinkedIn, you shared some thoughts on how to bring top of tunnel traffic and convert it from the blog. That can practically and tactically, I mean, that sounds like a difficult thing to do in your space. Tell me a little bit about how you make that happen and what your recommendations are around bringing top of tunnel traffic and converting them through the blog.

Yeah. I believe that the blog doesn't necessarily have the target top of funnel traffic. Usually it does. I mean, if we look at things to do content, for example, which is one of the biggest things in travel and covers top to, I would say middle of the funnel searches, those could be very easily terms one would convert from, hence the intent is kind of mixed on the SERPs. So you have both, for example, the tour operators ranking with our landing pages, as well as your timeouts and so on with more of an information, with more of an informational content, which obviously they monetize through affiliate links to the tour operator, but yeah, to get back to your question, my way of thinking about this is that top of the funnel traffic, I mean, it's no news, it captures the biggest share of the search by. I mean, I remember a study from Semrush, it was in 2023 and informational search intent was something like 60% of the search by. So just because of its sheer volume, if you have a blog that's designed to convert, you can even get some sales from double the funnel traffic. I'm also the SEO product manager at Hoppa and I was also the owner of the blog we designed that we did and was live last December. So when we redesigned it, aside from solving a million tech things that were wrong with the previous blog, we also included certain conversion mechanisms such as for example, sticky conversion widgets, both on desktop and mobile. We included CTAs, we included banners to promote whatever makes sense to promote.

This is very consistent with one of our philosophies is make sure the booking action is clearly visible everywhere on the site. That's a very baseline, whether you're an OTA, a single location tour operator, a hotel chain, we see so much volume of brands that don't have the booking action easily accessible. So you're already basically getting this traffic, it sounds like, and then developing additional competencies to drive more of that, but even just making it visible is what drove an outcome for y'all.

Yeah, exactly. And I mean, you're not expecting all of those people to convert and even more so not every conversion is the same, like you have your software conversions and then you have your hard. I don't expect somebody to kind of directly book through a blog article but you can get something out of them, you can have them install the app, you can have them sign up to your newsletter, you can push them further down the funnel through a CTA to some of your commercial pages. So it's a shame that many people just post blog articles and then they do not have all those mechanisms in place to take something out of them because after that, it's a dead end for those people if there's nothing like that.

This is the driving traffic piece. I want to scale out a little bit and get a little bit more tactical, a little bit more technical. So let's talk a little bit about just tooling. I consistently like in our industry I think companies very heavily index on hiring headcount for marketing that is generally going to be often not as experienced and supply them with tools. So I'll have companies saying we hired an SEO manager someone that has two years of experience and we got them a HRF and expect that to be their strategy. It's hiring someone that has limited experience and then adding tooling on top of it. And as you and I know, that's not a strategy. That's a person, a tool, but let's talk a little bit about the tools. So there's varying levels of complexity, varying levels of tools. Obviously there's keyword research, there's everything from there to server-side crawl, support tools. What is your SEO tool set look like?

I don't use too many tools to be honest. Very limited tool stack. I mostly use Ahrefs as my main suite. Obviously I do many different things with it from the brand tracker, from keyword research, from competition research and all those things that the tool offers. Then I use Screaming Frog as the main crawler that was in conjunction with the site audit that Ahrefs offers by default, the automated one. And then I also use Surfer SEO and Surfer AI for the writing needs, for the content briefs, and for a bit of on-page, probably one of the few people that use Surfer SEO for its features other than the content editor and the writing tool. I think that it's a great tool and when you really want to hone down into competitive queries that require, SERP analysis and analysis of the different elements of the competition for a given keyword.
Surfer SEO has a specific feature for that that is great, which is called SERP Analyzer and you can kind of plot many different SEO elements for the tool to kind of examine and plot into the graph when it comes to the top ranking results. I think it's great and it's not talked about enough.
And then, uh, another tool that I use is called SEO testing. And I use that for SEO tests, so yeah, I mean, that's pretty much it. I have nothing else, I just use port tools and obviously Google's tools, GSC, G4, and then the Looker studio reports that I have.

Got it. Well, I want to come back to SEO testing because that feeds into my next question, but I kind of want to highlight for the audience what you're talking about with Surfer. So we don't use Surfer internally. We use something else that's licensed and a little bit less user friendly, I guess is the best way to say it. But for those listening, I would like to point out that there's really two ways you can do SEO. Alex, earlier you said we're doing things that are more compliant with what Google suggests on the digital PR side and we'll see if that actually works, right? When you're talking about discontinuing some of the place's guest posts. So I can very much tell from that, that not everything that you hear from Google is necessarily the Bible, right?

That's not, it doesn't sound like that's your philosophy.

I think we all know that.

Yeah, well, here's the thing is it's like why there's algorithm updates and then you figure out why did I drop from position 2 to position 10 and after the algorithm update, the best practices are still the same. That kind of leaves you actionless, right? Whereas if you're using something like Surfer and Surfer again is basically, I'm not fully familiar with their algorithm, but I do know how ours work and I'll just give that as a kind of reference point. So we're going to crawl and render and download the content for the top 100 ranking pages for a target keyword and then run a regression analysis across about a thousand different ranking factors and see which one surfaced to the top as having statistical significance and optimize for those things, right? That's something you can do with a tool like surf or at least to an extent or what we use internally and it's not relying on just the best practices. It's auditing the current performance of pages in the SERP and optimizing for that, which is a much more powerful way to optimize. So let's talk about SEO testing. Some people are like deploy and see, and I think a lot of agencies are that way. And then there's some people that run controlled structured tests across specific subsets of pages and run a statistical significance assessment against the results. Sounds like if you use SEO testing, the latter side, but tell us a little bit about your testing philosophy and how you approach testing.

Yeah, I usually test things that in my head, it makes sense to test. So when I first discovered that tool, I got really obsessed with testing everything. So at some point I realized that maybe I was wasting too much time and testing things that were not as important because after a while you kind of get to understand some of the things that are worth testing because there are obviously many different things that you can test. Some of the things I usually, for example, test are metadata updates or content updates or content enrichments. So pages that used to have minimal content and that we put more extensive content, cover the topic more holistically. Usually I set up a test to check the impact.
I also used to do like link building tests. So when I started building links to a page, I might set up a test to check the impact it has on a specific query or queries I want to rank for, or the page traffic in general, but I think that you can really draw any conclusions from that. And industries like travel because there are too many moving pieces and you also have the seasonality factor and that happens also on a destination level. And it becomes too convoluted and you can't really assess the impact of link building, also because of not 100% sure when the impact of the link will kick in. So I kind of ditched that.
Right now I don't have too many tests running. I think I only have a couple of content enrichment tests that we did to some of our homepages on different languages. Like I said, I'm using a tool that is called SEO testing and what I like about this tool is the fact that it also, when you set up an SEO test, you can also tell it to track any GA4 event you wish to track as part of that test. So you can map SEO changes to their impact on GA4 goals like purchases and because I'm a very business metrics focused person when it comes to SEO, I don't believe in traffic and selling that as a success if it's not high intent traffic and if it doesn't lead to sales or at least if it doesn't contribute to sales in some way.

Yeah. I can get them building audiences and retargeting them, right?
It's like a, as a function of value. Well, you can really test out the intent of keywords, for example, or even you can test out the impact on the organic channel of things like CRO activities.
You know, I'm a great fan of the tool. I've been posting and posting about it on LinkedIn on some of the things that I do with it. And I know that there are other SEO testing tools out there. It's just the one I'm using, I'm not saying that it's the best, but yeah, I mean, you know, I like the tool.

Yeah, there's that and then there's things like other options that might be a couple thousand bucks a month versus SEO testing, which is much more accessible for brands. And I think you kind of have to balance that if you're an OTA with 36 million pages, like some of our clients, then you really need something that works scaled at the server side to deploy tests in large scale. But SEO testing a hundred percent. I'm a huge fan as well.
So getting even a little bit more technical for people who aren't familiar. Next question is a little bit about understanding how search engine crawlers and AI chatbot crawlers, whatever it may be, how they interact with your website. Do you index or give any value to understanding log file? And how search engines are exploring your site. I know that your website's what about five, 10,000 pages somewhere in there.

We have thousands of pages. Obviously we don't index all of them. We have something like 6,000 pages index. We run a tight index and it's 6,000 pages, but imagine that that's on nine different languages. So we try to keep a tight index and kind of just give water to the branches that are worth having water.
Yeah, to get back to your question, no, I don't, we don't do any sort of log file monitoring. I know that we probably should. The case is that up until this month, specifically internally was just me and a content executive and the SEO team plus our partner SEO agency. Now we have another person in the SEO team, which is a breath of fresh air to me. But yeah, you can imagine that there's tons and tons of things to do if you're just essentially a one man show and a multilingual site that's active in nine languages. So yeah, we haven't been doing that, but intend to do it in the near future.

Okay. I've got one more question noticing that we're almost at 30 minutes and that's where I promised you this would take. So I've not seen this before and I think it's kind of brilliant. And I think I'm going to let you tell the story rather than me point it out and call it out, but tell me about the "Has Hoppa Gone Bust" thing.

Yeah. You know what happens when you're an aggregator, just because you don't own the product and you don't have full control of the product, you're just aggregating other people's services sometimes customers are unhappy. And obviously we have many, many systems in place to kind of control the product and the product quality that the partners deliver. But obviously we're not perfect, we're not there yet. I noticed at some point that there were reputational searches, negative reputational searches, branded searches around Hoppa. And one of those searches was the one that you found out. It was the question, ¨Has Hoppa gone bust?¨, which is kind of embarrassing to see really. There was also another one. It's called, ¨is Hoppa legit?¨ So the second one, I think it's kind of a common one. I remember seeing this when it comes to pretty much every brand that was in the gambling industry, because before I got into travel, I was in gambling for five years.

Ah, that's why you're so smart. Okay.

Yeah. The things you get to see in gambling, you can add them. So my approach is that I try to manage the organic channel from the standpoint of whatever happens, happens on search engines. It's my responsibility to fix it. This is more of a reputation type of case. So like I said, I have noticed that query along with the other one, but is Hoppa legit one? I decided to answer those FAQs on our testimonials page. We have a testimonials page, I also use that specific page to try to rank for the term Hoppa reviews, because that page has customer reviews and ratings on it.
And the reasoning behind this is that, like I said, we don't have the best ratings in some of the third party platform like TripAdvisor so I wanted to kind of protect the reputation of the brand on search engines. So I tried to rank the testimonials page for all those reputational queries because we kind of there, we only show the TrustPilot ratings, so on TrustPilot, we have a fairly decent rating, we're trending at something between 3.9 to 4 so we managed to show up on the feature snippet for that specific query. And I think the interesting side to this is the fact that, which was also a deliberate decision, is that the page title reads, read what 70,000 happy customers said. That's what the page title reads to that specific page.
So I think that it was a nice case of on the one hand, you have a negative reputation branded query ¨has hop a gun bust?¨, and then you show up on the feature snippet and you show up with a page title that indicates 77,000 happy customers.

So I see this right. And so when he said when that was in customers, and I'm just going to get a bit nerdy for a second—you'd have to imagine there's some sort of Twiddlers in place that reorganizes results so you don't end up in the top position for the review keywords, right?
And I think that's what's happening. Do you think that it's possible you're right now in position 3, at least on my browser where I'm looking at from it here in Austin, Texas, do you think it's possible that you'll ever rank position 1 for Hoppa reviews?

For Hoppa reviews? No, because I think the intent is that people are expecting somebody else outside Hoppa to get the reviews from there, It wouldn't be impartial if we rank number one, but it was a long shot. I knew it, but I went for it anyway.
I think that before that page was optimized for Hoppa reviews, we ranked even lower. So maybe that's an improvement. I can't remember. But at least for the really negative reputation questions we got at the top. I don't know, maybe it would be interesting to see whether some link building would help us rank for help our reviews as well.

How would, you know, I would think, honestly, my thought is that like that is one of the juice, not worth the squeeze situations where I would imagine like Google, I don't know where we learned about Twiddlers, but I know that I've done some reading, like the adjustments that happen after the core search algorithm delivers its rankings that say, Hey, don't let the primary domain for this term rank in this position. So I totally agree with you.
Are there any other, I mean, we're over time, but are there any, anything else you want to share or anything that you think is important for all of the travel marketers listening to this?

No, not really. I mean, the way I'm approaching not travel marketing, but any type of marketing and any type of SEO is the fact that specifically for SEO, at least this thing is a black box. So just relying on other people's opinions and not testing things on your own. Then you might be missing out on vital pieces of information, no market is the same, no website is the same, no industry is the same. So we have several different sub niches in travel.
So you have to go through this war yourself really to learn.

Yeah. Get a cocktail and a couple of friends, at least to catch up with it at the end of the day, every day. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate it. My one question for you is where are you traveling next? What's your next destination?

I have no idea. Surprisingly, I don't have anything planned right now. You know, I got back from Krakow last week and right now I'm just trying to put an order in the organized chaos that is the first week back from leave.

Well, thank you for fitting us into your busy schedule and I appreciate it. And I'm looking forward to staying in touch and following your progress.

Thank you so much guys. Thank you for having me.

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