Content is King for Cleartrip

What's Cleartrip's story as far as SEO and SMO activities are concerned?

At Cleartrip, we have two separate teams managing SEO and the social media. Over the months the SEO team has sensitized the SM team on the impact of social media on organic rankings. The SEO team provides strategic inputs and best practices to the SM team and regularly reviews the output to ensure social optimization .

What all strategies do you use to get better rankings in search engines?

Valuable content is the single most important tool in our arsenal. Great quality content is an important SEO enabler. Over the years the search engines have learnt to move from optimized content to valuable content. The impact of social signals are testimony to that. So our primary strategy is to ensure quality of content through which we add value to our consumers, with the conviction that search engines will rank the same.

Tell us your success story so far!

We have recently shared our SEO performance on our blog (blog.cleartrip.com) with a hope that the SEO community will gain significant insights. To quickly summarize our SEO success over the last 12 months; the number of visits has increased by 205% and contribution of SEO to total site visits has increased from 9.2% to 18.7%. Also the SEO contribution to our internal product searches has increased by 123% for domestic flights, 417% for international flights and 83% for hotel searches.

What's your advice to those who are new to SEO?

With the single pointed focus and attention, concentrate on adding value to users. Create value in terms of structuring of information, breath of inventory, user experience etc for your users and the search engines will follow. For the remaining 10% of the game, you have to do traditional SEO like adding relevant meta tags for search engines, ensuring crawlability, reducing page load time, etc. Since search engines have the single purpose of guiding users to valuable content, ensure the content you add is valuable.