Who is making waves in the cruise industry?

The UK cruise holiday industry has seen an overall online growth of 20.2% in the last year, a new study into its performance has revealed.

Hatty Scaramanga, marketing manager at Inside Online shares the key details.

"The Cruise Holiday Digital Insight Report, produced by digital marketing agency Inside Online, examined 47 of the top UK websites within this competitive retail market.

In the report, Inside Online focused on searches, keyword competitiveness, year-on-year visibility, link acquisition and quality, and social influence: all key aspects that should be considered when embarking on a digital marketing strategy.

When it comes to searches, Thomson Cruises is topping the table with 165,000 searches per month. P&O isn’t too far behind, with 135,000 searches per month, followed by Co-op Travel, on 90,500 per month.

An effective search strategy will constantly review keyword competitiveness, examining short, medium and long-term goals. Some of the highest visibility keywords in this industry are ‘Caribbean cruise’, ‘Norwegian cruise’ and ‘river cruises’.

Looking at year-on-year visibility, the study discovered that Kuoni and Iglu Cruise have shown the greatest increases in visibility on search engines. Big brands that have seen decreases in visibility include Thomson, Norwegian Cruise Line and Saga.

The rate of link acquisition is key to domain authority. The greater the number of links a site has pointing towards it tends to correlate with the authoritativeness of the domain, which in turn tends to correlate with organic visibility. Therefore, not only is the current state of a domain’s link profile important, but it is also vital to understand who is building new links the quickest (and how they are doing it!).

It is not just the amount of links that your domain has, but their authority. In light of recent Google updates, the quality of linking domains has never been more important or under as much scrutiny from Google. Domain authority tends to be divided into: very authoritative (70-100), above average authority (50-69), average authority (30-49) and low authority (10-29). Silversea is by far the brand with the largest number of linking domains, with Iglu Cruise coming second.

Social influence is starting to affect search engines more over time. We’re seeing a shift from your standard ‘how many likes does a page have’ towards engagement with the user. Active pages that promote great content and engagement have higher performance metrics than those who build pages purely with the motivation of having a well-liked page. Sites who have been best at promoting engagement through social channels are MSC Cruises, Royal Caribbean and Thomson.

There are a number of sites in this industry that are underperforming organically who have an obvious major common factor: they have a limited number of unique linking domains (almost a quarter of that of the performing websites). Each of the sites listed ranks reasonably well for one or two of the generic organic keywords, but rarely more than this. Sites highlighted by the report as underperforming include Regent Seven Seas Cruises, Oceania Cruises and Variety Cruises.

With online competition at an all-time high it is important now more than ever for companies to solidify their position within search engines."