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Lonely Planet

SEO Audit

Xinyi Li

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1

Introduction

2

Competitor analysis

3

Website Evaluation

4

Keywords Evaluation

Table of Content

5

On page SEO performance

7

Conclusion and Recommendations

6

Off page SEO performance

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01

Introduction

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Story: Lonely Planet is the world’s leading travel media company. The founder Tony and Maureen built this company on the commitment to provide travelers with the most useful and relevant travel information in a convenient format. Lonely Planet enable curious travelers to experience the world and get to the heart of a place via guides to every destination on the planet, an award-winning website with booking capabilities, a suite of mobile digital products and a dedicated traveler community.

Background

Industry: Online Travel

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Target

Target Audience

  • 55% of Lonely Planet's audience is female and 45% is male.
  • Most of them are regular domestic and International travelers, they usually have 4.8 US trips and 2.2 international trips per year. A whopping 91% of lonely planet's travelers frequent use the internet as a source of information before or during their travels.

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02

Competitor analysis

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Competitor analysis

Rough Guides is a British travel guidebook and publisher, Its travel titles cover more than 200 destinations

Fodor's  is a publisher of English language travel and tourism information and the first relatively professional producer of travel guidebooks

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Fodors.com

Roughguides.com

Lonelyplanet.com

Keywords

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03

Website Evaluation

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First Impression

Lonely Planet

  • Dynamic images give a good visual effect
  • Pop-up video introduction is annoying
  • The page has no obvious line segmentation, and it is very smooth to navigate.
  • Ads show up on top when you do search

  • Five main navigations: Video, Destination, Bookings, Shop and Sign in
  • Prominent “Search” makes you to search the places you’d like to explore
  • Sub navigation contains specific guides for a destination like hotels, things to do, activities and so on

My perspective evaluation

Site navigation

Content

  • Plenty of information about each place of travel include food, hotels, sights, articles, location and activities
  • Some of destinations don’t have enough pictures
  • It’s hard to update all information in time

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Site Ranking

Site Speed

Site Engagement

Site Hierarchy

3.521seconds

Global Rank: 6740

In United States: 4976

Estimated visitis:10.7M

Time on Site:00:02:08

Pages per visit:2.41

Bounce Rate:67.65%

Site performance

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04

Keyword Evaluation

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The keywords show on page frequency

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Keywords ranked by monthly searches

Several words search which are connected to “lonely planet” is in low competition but the searches are high

“travel books” looks like a popular word for users to search

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Ranked with high competition, The bid of keywords containing “lonely planet” is not very high, The bid of keywords containing “ travel book” is a little bit high but with not so good searches

Ranked with medium competition, The bid of keywords containing “travel book” is not very high and got nice searches

Besides, the lonely planet magazines have a competitive searches with a low bid price

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05

On Page SEO Performance

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The website has 23% duplicate content and as the details shows on the right side, all of them belongs to Lonely Planet

I think it’s okay to have different website based on the areas, but cities like Italy or Peru can be put in areas categories.

Duplicate Content

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Sitemap and robot.txt

 Site uses a "robots.txt" file: https://www.lonelyplanet.com/robots.txt

However the robots.txt file disallow the search engines access to some parts of your website

The website has a sitemap HTML file: https://www.lonelyplanet.com/sitemap.html

https://www.lonelyplanet.com/sitemaps/dotcom-sitemaps/sitemaps.xml

https://www.lonelyplanet.com/video/smap.xml

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Titles and URL

Page title: Lonely Planet

Meta Description

Love travel? Plan and book your perfect trip with expert advice, travel tips, destination information and inspiration from Lonely Planet.

Meta Keywords: Not found

H1 headings: Top scenic USA train routes, Make the most of your travel, Thrills and chills: North America’s most spectacular winter destinations, Introduce someone small to a really big adventure, Island hopping: a beer lover’s guide to essential island brews

H2 headings: The Travel Atlas, Trips by Lonely Planet, Featured videos, Travel inspiration, Prepare for your trip, Sign up to our newsletter, Before you go...

URL: https://www.lonelyplanet.com/

Rel="canonical: https://www.lonelyplanet.com and https://lonelyplanet.com resolve to the same URL.

Rel=“nofollow”

The webpage does not use the nofollow meta tag. Search engines will crawl all links from webpage.

Linking Domains: 136.2k

Inbound Links:8.4m

All links from the webpage are SEO friendly.

The webpage contains "img" tags without the required "alt" atribute.

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06

Off Page SEO Performance

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3.619 million followers. Pinterest show landscape pictures to people by dividing the area and theme of travel

Pinterest

2.3 million followers, most of the pictures use story telling or just give travel information

Google+

2.2million twitter followers, Twitter focus on in-depth articles, inspiring photography

Twitter

1.3 million fans in Facebook. Besides, 37,884 members are in their travel group.

Facebook

1.9million followers and user engagement is high on Instagram

Instagram

Social Channels

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Traffic performance

Traffic overview: 10.74 million total visitors in last 6 months and the peak seasons are June and July. As a very broad rule of thumb, a website bounce rate of under 40% is good. Between 55% to 65% shows significant room for improvement.

YOUR TITLE

Traffic by region: Most of the traffics are from US and UK.

But through the negative growth rate, we can see that the attraction of lonely planet is gradually decreasing.

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2.28%

13%

82%

10%

Social

Referral

Search

Direct

Traffic performance

Lonely Planet have several source, search brings most of the traffic to the website, second is direct source

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Inbound link and Anchor text

Most of the anchor text contain a city or place or “lonely planet ”keyword

All top 10 Inbound links are Wikipedia

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07

Conclusion

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The design and navigation of the page are clear except a little big long page loading time. The location of the ad slot often causes the user to click by mistake

Website evaluation

On Page performance

Off Page performance

Keywords

Keyword “lonely planet” is in low competition but the searches are pretty high. “travel books” is a competitive keyword but with a higher bid

The titles and meta description are doing well except missing the Meta Keywords

The website uses Rel="canonical to make sure there is only one URL

All links from the webpage are SEO friendly.

The webpage contains "img" tags without the required "alt" atribute.

Most of the traffic by region are from USA and UK, by source are from search, referral and direct

They have several social media and most of them have at least 1.5+million followers. Each media channels has its own focus

Conclusion

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08

Recommendations

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The size of the webpage's HTML is larger than average and the site loading speed is slow than average. This can lead to slower loading times, lost users and cause high bounce rate.�

Lower bounce rate

Improve the traffic from social media. Most of the traffic is from search and direct but lonely planet have several social media channels and each of them has a certain number of followers

Traffic Performance

99% of the search is organic and the 1% paid keywords are “lonely planet”. Lonely Planet could bid on some high searches and medium to high level competition words like” travel books

Keywords

Adding meta title and The webpage contains "img" tags without the required "alt" atribute.

On Page performance

Recommendation

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THANK YOU

Lonely Planet

SEO Audit Analysis

by Xinyi Li

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Reference