How a Small Travel Blog Gained Topical Authority: A Case Study

When looking back on starting my travel blog, the first COVID-19 lockdown was probably not the best time to do it. It was certainly not the best time for travel or the travel industry in general.

From an SEO perspective, searches for travel-related terms had plummeted to zero. With everyone isolating, no one was thinking about traveling the world or even leaving their country.

When I started traveling around the globe in 2015, I always wanted to have my own travel blog, but I never actually found the time to start one. So, I took the chance when we couldn't leave our homes during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I simply had more time than ever to start writing. And although it sounds strange to write about traveling when you can't travel at all, my past travels were full of stories and experiences I could re-live and write about without having to leave my home.

And something else happened. Many other travel bloggers decided to start families, shifting their interests from travel. As a result, my competition was getting smaller, and it seemed that Google was hungry for new content.

I have to admit that I didn't start with keyword research. Firstly, because I was just writing about my travel experiences and didn't think a lot about SEO. And secondly, I wasn’t very experienced back then. I was still a civil engineer and was just starting to get to know the SEO industry.

After a year of blogging with little traffic, I decided to finally conduct keyword research — something I probably should have done from the outset.

But it wasn't easy. Thanks to COVID-19, nobody was searching for travel-related terms. So, the search volume in most SEO tools was down to zero. Many keywords were also missing, with the only exception being "travel restrictions in XYZ."

As an SEO manager, I had to think twice: Can I rely on this data? Is this search volume and keyword set representative of the future? Because there will come a time when we travel again.

I decided to use the keywords to generate a topic idea that I could tackle. But not heavily rely on certain keywords and their actual search volume.

That's when I found the topic of Interrail. One of my first big trips was traveling Europe with Interrail, so the topic perfectly matched my past travels. And I could still remember all the struggles we went through back then.

Interrail is a way to travel around Europe with a single train ticket, but it can be more complex than it sounds. Every country has different rules; some trains require extra reservations, and you need to ensure that a train goes from point A to point B, all while trying to decipher various different languages.

Since my blog didn't have a high Domain Authority, my strategy was to start with long-tail keywords, where there would be less competition.

The first article I wanted to write was about routes you could take in Italy with Interrail. It would cover about five different possible plans for exploring Italy by train. The main keyword for this article was "Interrail-Routen Italien" (German), which translates to “Interrail routes Italy”.

It didn't take long to analyze the SERPs to find the main problems I’d face:

• The competition was pretty big.

• None of the ranking pages were doing it the way I wanted to.

With every keyword around Interrail, the first few results were pages from the company Interrail itself (the main brand). Then, there were some general websites about traveling around Europe by train. After that, there were some well-established travel blogs that specifically focused on Interrail.

Every site had a much higher Domain Authority than mine did. My blog had a Domain Authority of around 2. Or even less. I hadn't done any link building and was just starting to get my blog on the main blog directories in Austria and Germany, such as Trusted Blogs and Blogheim.

Interrail is a well-established brand and website with a Domain Authority of 66. The main websites ranking for the terms had a Domain Authority of 30-40. Which sounds little, but in German-speaking countries, that's the standard for well-established sites.

On top of competing with high authority websites, when I looked at the keyword "Interrail-Routen Italien," I didn't resonate with any of the top-ranking pages. I was in love with my idea of offering five possible routes for anyone who wanted to travel to Italy by train, but I knew it was risky if no one ranked for a keyword like that.

I thought that maybe my idea was too niche or maybe the search intent wasn't what I expected. Maybe I should stick to what was working instead of putting a lot of time and effort into something that might not pay off.

I'm not sure what I would have recommended to a client at that time, maybe to play it safe. But I am my own worst client, so I went for it anyway.

It turned out to be a great decision and the breakthrough my travel blog needed. It also changed my approach to SEO forever.

So, I started writing and researching. I had some routes already in my head. But I wanted to give more than the typical “visit Rome, Florence, and Milan.”

I searched every remote, secret place you could visit. I looked for connections to get there by train. Or if not by train, by some alternative way with public transport. I compared normal ticket prices to the Interrail price. This involved reading many travel blogs and spending hours on Google Maps and Trenitalia to find connections. After all the research, I had to get everything into words.

The article is one of my longest and most researched. It took me four months to write it, as I just had a few hours before work, in the evening and on weekends. It was finally published in January 2021.

It then took Google one day to decide it was worth ranking on page one for my chosen keyword. This was my first post that made it to the top 10 search results.

People started clicking and commenting on it. It turned out that my idea of writing a post with suggestions for routes to take in Italy was just what people were searching for, but no one had written anything like it yet.

What surprised me the most and changed my approach to SEO was what happened next. I started writing more articles about Interrail since the first one had done so well. And every single one of them performed well.

Google quickly indexed my Interrail articles, and they all ranked on page one with little effort. At the same time, I was also writing other articles about hiking, traveling alone, and so on. None of these were of any interest to Google. Indexing them took a long time, and they never ranked on page one.

My blog gained topical authority around the topic of Interrail, and you can still see this today.

Unfortunately, with Google Search Console, you can't go back to when the post was published, as you can only go back 16 months. And I haven't saved the numbers.

I'll still show you how my Interrail section is performing now, two and a half years later. Additionally, I just published a new article on taking your bicycle with you on Interrail, so we can see how that develops over time.

Performance of the “Interrail Routen Italien” article

Firstly, let's look at the “Interrail Routen Italien” article. It still generates most of my traffic to this day. The article ranks at an average position of 15.5 on the SERP based on all the keywords it is ranking for.

For the main keyword, “Interrail Routen Italien,” the article ranks in an average position of 2.8 on the SERP. The article never ranked before the official Interrail site, as it naturally can't beat the brand. Although I didn't go after the more general keyword “Interrail Italien,” the post ranks in an average position of 4.9 for that keyword also.

Here, you see a screenshot of the last 16 months from Google Search Console of the “Interrail Routen Italien” article. You see the seasonality as Impressions and Clicks drop in autumn but go back up when the next travel planning starts. The average position remains stable.

Performance of the entire travel blog

Now, let's compare the performance of my blog posts about Interrail with the ones about travel in general or hiking, as my blog is not just about Interrail.

In total, there are 125 blog posts on my website, and just 30 of them are about traveling with Interrail. So, roughly 24% of my blog posts are about Interrail.

Every post about Interrail does use the word “Interrail” in the URL. The newer ones are in a subfolder (/interrail/), and the older ones use Interrail in the title name, which is used to form the URL on WordPress. So, I can filter them out and look at these URLs separately in Google Search Console.

In this table, you see the comparison between non-Interrail articles and Interrail articles. These numbers are the average monthly Clicks and Impressions over the past 16 months. You can see that 70% of the traffic my travel blog gets comes from just the 30 posts about Interrail.

My blog is an excellent example of the Pareto effect. This Principle is also called the 80:20 Rule. It states that around 80% of the outcome of something comes from more or less 20% of the effort. In my case, you can say that 24% of my posts are about Interrail, but they contribute to 70% of the monthly clicks on my website.

So, what are the main lessons you can take from this case study?

• Sometimes, it's worth trying something new, especially if you see the value it will provide to users. You shouldn't just stick to what your competition is doing. Especially with the changes we face in SEO at the moment with AI-generated content. Creativity and new ways to approach a topic pay off even more now than ever before.

• Topical authority is a thing. It's better to focus on a topic to demonstrate your expertise than to write a blog where you cover a lot of different topics all at once. When creating content, always consider the E-E-A-T principles. In doing so, perhaps your website will also experience topical authority like mine has on Interrail.

• SEO efforts can bring results for a very long time. I built almost all of my Interrail pages over a year ago, and they're still bringing results even though I'm not updating them. SEO is worth the time and effort; don’t give up if you don’t see immediate results.

I hope this post about my blog helps you think differently about SEO and questions your assumptions next time you tackle a similar situation. Never forget that there are no fixed rules, and sometimes it's worth trying something you've never done before.