Modern Wasn’t the Problem With Her Travel Site
Travel scores 67 out of 100 across the trades I audit, 46 of 47. A client asked me to make her page look current, so I changed almost nothing you can see and four things you can’t.
“Hi Patrick. We’re happy with the content, honestly. We just want it to look more modern. Nothing fancy. Can you quote on a refresh?”
That one landed in March. Near copies of it have arrived every month since, and travel businesses send more of them than anyone else I work with.
Have you sent that email? Be honest with yourself for a second, because the version in your drafts folder probably reads almost word for word the same.
So I quoted. Then I asked whether I could sit with the page for an hour before either of us agreed to anything, because I once built something beautiful for a man whose real problem was that no stranger could find him, and he paid me properly to solve the wrong thing.
I audit 47 trades, and one evening I ranked every one of them by score to find out where travel comes to rest, which is 67 out of 100, 46 of 47.
That number is ten checks with different weights on them, so it’s got no opinion whatsoever about whether a page is handsome. Hers was handsome. Hers still is.
What the page looked like in March
A photograph of a beach at the end of the day, running edge to edge, with the company name laid across it in a thin white script.
Under the name, four words. Where will you go?
Below that a row of six menu items, then three more photographs in a neat line, then a paragraph opening with “Founded in 2011, we are passionate about travel and about the people we travel with.”
At the bottom of it all, a phone number, an address, and two small social icons.
It’s a good-looking page, it loaded quickly, it behaved itself on my phone, and every photograph on it was one she’d taken herself on a departure she led.
Then I opened the code underneath, and the hour I’d asked for turned into three.
The four things I found
Both social icons pointed at the platform’s own front door instead of at her page, and they’d been sitting there like that for four years without a single person mentioning it to her. Four years is what happens when nobody owns the small upkeep on a site and everyone assumes the last person checked. 62.6% of travel sites link a social profile at all, and I’d bet a decent sum that plenty of those links go exactly where hers went.
Go and tap your own two. Right now, on your phone. Did you land on your own business or on a login screen belonging to nobody in particular?
Schema markup was the second one. Schema markup is the same facts you already have on the page, written out a second time in a set format built for software to read. A visitor sees no difference whatsoever.
Invisible work is most of this job. A San Francisco client was ready to delete her gallery, and an afternoon of typing beside the photographs saved it without anything on the page moving.
Her page had none of it, and 56.9% of travel sites carry some against 70.5% of everything I audit, which is the one I’d have started on even if she’d told me not to. Another line of code does a related job, telling Google which copy of a page to keep, and travel finishes last of all 47 trades on that one.
The newest post on her site was from 2019, about a supplier trip she’d been taken on. 32.2% of travel sites publish a blog anywhere on them, under the 37% I find across small business sites, which still astonishes me in a trade whose entire product is a story someone wants told to them.
You sell the thing people write about when they get home. So what’s the date on your own last post?
And her Google listing carried eleven reviews, the newest of them two years old. 77.6% of the travel businesses I sampled hold even one Google review, where 88% do across everything I’ve counted, and all eleven of hers were lovely.
She’d run that company for fourteen years. Eleven people had said so where a stranger could read it.
The same page in July
Same photograph. Same script. Same six menu items, in the same order.
Put March and July beside each other and you’d struggle to say what I did. Her husband looked at both and told me flatly that he couldn’t see it.
Under the beach photograph there’s now a line of ordinary text saying what she sells and where she sells it from. Eleven words. Getting her to approve them took longer than writing them did.
Her hours, her phone number and her address are written into the code in the format search engines already agreed on, so nothing about the business has to be worked out from a paragraph about being passionate.
The two icons go to her actual pages, which was four minutes of work.
There’s a post from last month about one departure, with three of her own photographs in it, and there’ll be another this month, because she writes one on the first Tuesday and it takes her about forty minutes.
And every customer back from a trip since April has been asked for a review, out loud, at the airport, by her.
Four of those changes sit on the list of ten checks I score. The line under the photograph doesn’t, and I’d still have done it first.
Your own site is very likely carrying two of those four already, and you’d have no way of telling me which two. That isn’t a failing on your part. Nobody hands you a receipt for the parts of a website you never asked for.
What I turned down
I didn’t rebuild the site. I didn’t change the typeface, move the menu, or lay a finger on the beach photograph, which means I said no to most of the job she wrote to me about.
That’s an awkward conversation to have with someone holding a budget, and I’ve lost work by having it. The version where I redraw everything and hand it back looking current is the version I get paid more for, and she’d have been delighted with it for about six weeks.
If you’d been the one writing the cheque, which version would you have wanted?
The travel sites I’d point anybody at are rarely the most stylish ones on the street. They’re the ones a stranger can find, read and trust inside a minute, and a typeface has never once helped with any of those three.
Most of what I build for travel businesses now is this kind of work, and I’ve stopped apologizing for how boring it sounds on a call.
What I’ll promise you
I’m not going to tell you your phone rings differently next week. Hers didn’t.
Most of what a travel website does never reaches you as a ring anyway. A woman can read your trip page for two minutes on a Sunday night and book on Wednesday, and you’ll never put the two together.
What changed inside four months is small enough that I’m happy to put it in writing.
Type her company name today and the result comes back with stars on it and a line underneath saying what the business does and where it does it from. Land on her homepage and the answer to what is this sits above the beach instead of a scroll below it. And she owns four pages that didn’t exist in March, each about a real departure, each carrying her own photographs.
Four months. One evening a month from her. No new website.
If your page is the handsome one nobody can find, do those four in that order. Or send me the address, and I’ll tell you which one to start with, and I can promise you it won’t be the typeface.
