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When To Do Keyword Research For Travel Blog Posts

ByNina Clapperton Updated on

My travel blogger clients ALWAYS ask: when should I do keyword research for my trips??

Most of us start travel blogging without really knowing how to market it. So initially, this isn’t a consideration.

If you’re like me, you probably started your blog while you were traveling at your most intense. So you really didn’t have time to think about planning posts anyway.

But good SEO is planned SEO. You need a proper marketing strategy to succeed and have $100k/months like I have.

Trying to decide when to do your keyword research is a part of that. So let’s talk about the 3 options and which is most efficient.

TLDR;; I recommend doing the bulk of your keyword research before a trip. But there are some times when post-trip is best.

👉 Get Keysearch – my favourite keyword research tool – for 30% off with code “sheknowsseo”!

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When To Do Keyword Research For Travel Blog Posts

To write SEO optimized content, you need to do keyword research.

But it sucks to come back from a trip and realized you missed a high value keyword opportunity cause you didn’t do it.

Equally, it’s not fun to spend what should be a vacation doing keyword research every night (unless you’re me and keyword data is how you relax … yeah, I’ve got some work addictions to work through :p ).

Let me tell you the best time to do SEO research: while you plan your trip.

That could be days or weeks or MONTHS before you leave.

This way you can build destinations into your itinerary that will be good for you to write about.

I don’t recommend doing this research on your trip, as you’re likely to get stressed.

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How to Prep Your Keyword Research

There are so many ways to find keywords: zero volume keywords, competitor analysis, high volume/low competition research, etc.

There are so many, that I’ve filled a whole course with them!

Get the Profitable Part-Time Blogger here to learn how to do effective keyword research to gain traffic and passive income!

Now, to prep keyword research, I recommend building this in as a phase of your trip planning.

99% of us do research before a trip to figure out the best things to do, where to eat, and the best areas to stay. While you’re doing this, keep an eye out for keywords.

Look at who is ranking for the location or travel style, and mine them for keyword ideas.

You won’t write on every keyword – I’m not big on art galleries, so I’m not going to write on them – but you’ll find tons that you might not have thought of!

This way you can ensure you’re making the most of your trip for your content.

You can keep your research for all of your keywords more organized with my SEO Spreadsheets for just $9 here!

Step by Step Example

I’m going to Nashville soon. So I started researching the best gluten free restaurants, which hotels are dog friendly, if I need a rental car, cool hikes I can do near the city, and where to shop.

This is research I would do for any trip to ensure I have the best time.

As I researched and made a messy Apple Notes list of ideas of things to do, I also kept a list of the sites I kept seeing pop up, the Google Autofill I noticed coming up when I was searching, and any interesting posts I saw on social media or Pinterest that might have topics I’d cover.

I took the list of competitors and mined them for keywords, filtering by the word “nashville” or “tenessee”.

Next, I searched the individual keywords I found to see how difficult they are.

And lastly, I look at the related keyword ideas from Keysearch/Ahrefs to see what else I might be able to cover.

Sometimes there’s a museum or restaurant on your maybe list of things to do, but it turns out to be a super easy keyword with thousands of pageviews per month.

I’ll adjust my itinerary to add it in – if it’s relevant to my niche, my audience, and my interests.

For example, I’m not going to go to a waffle house that isn’t celiac friendly if I have a celiac travel blog. I don’t care if it’s going to bring me 50 million pageviews and has a difficulty score of 1.

It just doesn’t make sense for my niche.

Keep that in mind when you’re planning content.

👉 Get Keysearch – my favourite keyword research tool – for 30% off with code “sheknowsseo”!

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When to Do Keyword Research Post-Trip

That being said, I actually don’t travel for keywords.

I travel for me.

I may do some research before a trip to build my itinerary. But I rarely do extensive keyword research to find every single potential keyword, secondary keyword, LSI/must word, or full niche of keywords.

I tend to identify a few posts I’d like to write, but I analyze them in more detail when I get home. 

And often I discover things during my vacation from speaking with locals that I would never have thought to do keyword research on!

So I finish up the research once I’m home.

It does mean I might miss out on something high volume. But it also ensures I’m not just traveling for SEO.

On my trips, I try to work as little as possible, unless it’s a paid trip (but I don’t do those often).

So SEO comes during the planning stages.

It helps me enjoy my trip, ensuring that I hit a few points I’ll want to write about for sure (it’s how I can get 20 posts out of a week away!), but without being late for my dinner reservation because I’m trying to find one last keyword for the night.

Tips for Organizing Your Research

I like to organize my keywords and my itinerary plans for my trip in a semi-chaotic way.

That’s because I put them all in one Notes page so I can see them all at a glance.

I usually build out a list of things to do, places to eat, and tips into relevant bullet point lists. Then, I separate them into the days below.

I plan at least 1 thing per day, but often leave a lot of free time. This allows me to adjust the trip if I learn something from a local that I didn’t think of, if I am exhausted, or if the weather isn’t what I expected.

Having the list of all of the options on the same page makes it easy for me to find things to do when I do have the time, energy, and desire to do more.

Then to mix in the keyword research, I’ll have a list of my top 5-10 post ideas at the bottom of the Notes.

I put an asterisk (*) beside anything on my things to do list or itinerary that’s vital for my content planning.

This is what it looks like:

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Typically, these are the things I desperately want to do anyway, so it’s not an issue.

But sometimes it involves walking an extra block to take a photo of that famous piece of graffiti or being sure I don’t miss the free thing next to the museum I wanted to visit.

Since I have the memory of a goldfish (thanks to 2 concussions in uni), I really need to make sure I don’t skip something I really wanted to do or that would massively help my blog.

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Planning Affiliate Content for a Trip

Writing a great affiliate post means experiencing the thing.

There’s a reason Amazon review sites nearly got wiped off the map in early 2022. So many of them had clearly never used anything they were talking about. They just reiterated the Amazon listing.

Travel bloggers can make some of the highest affiliate earnings there are in blogging, but we’ll greatly increase our ability to do so by ranking #1 for posts on the topic.

And an easy way to rank #1 is to have EEAT to back up your review(s).

Now, I’m definitely not telling you to do all 15 white water rafting tours in the city. That’d be way too much.

But you should do at least one, especially if it’s a higher competition keyword.

If you’ve never been white water rafting, have no idea what it’s like, and haven’t either fallen out of one or seen someone else fall out of one, can you really speak helpfully on it?

Maybe, but not always.

If there’s an affiliate keyword I see massive earning potential in, I will make it a point to do the tour, stay at the hotel, book the car, etc. so I have the experience to help that post rank higher.

For example, I recently went on my first cruise and I knew I wanted to write some content around it for my audience – including a small section about how I handled my incredibly bad seasickness.

So I bought all the gadgets off Amazon for seasickness: the weird blue goggles, the wrist bands, the metal bands, seasickness meds, peppermint oil, etc. Then when I was on the cruise, I took photos and videos of myself using them.

If I hadn’t thought ahead for my content planning, I wouldn’t have bought all that stuff. I wouldn’t have taken those photos or videos when I was feeling seasick out my eyes. And I wouldn’t have made notes comparing which worked best during a storm.

Well, I might have bought them since I do get really seasick. But I definitely wouldn’t have done the rest.

In fact, even going on the cruise was planning for some affiliate posts!

Not sure if an affiliate is worth you booking the tour/hotel? Check out my affiliate income calculator here to get an idea!

My Favourite Keyword Research Tool

I’ve tried a LOT of keyword research tools over the years – from Ubersuggest to SEMrush to Ahrefs to Lowfruits – but my favourite has always been Keysearch.

I have a full tutorial on how to use Keysearch here:

I walk you through how to find low competition keywords, long tail keywords, and location-specific keywords. I also show you how to mine competitors for keywords and how to find LSI words.

All that in a 100% free video you can watch here!

👉 Get Keysearch – my favourite keyword research tool – for 30% off with code “sheknowsseo”!

Conclusion: Planning Your Keyword Research for Travel Blogs

I’m not the most organized person in the world, but this is the method that’s worked best for me.

I know many other people who never do any keyword research until they’re home from a trip. But I get epic FOMO so I’d be heartbroken to find out I missed out on an epic keyword.

That being said, I’ve written many posts for old trips I did years before I started blogging – so I’d definitely skipped the keyword research! And those posts still do very well.

You can supplement those posts with expert quotes, image link swaps, and even going back to the place if you need to for them to rank.

There are things I did when I was 8 that at 28, I wouldn’t feel confident writing about. And others I did 4 years ago, but I didn’t know to take photos at the time – or they’re all crooked and blurry, which is a common problem for me.

There’s no real “wrong” way to plan your keywords for travel and no perfect time to do the research.

This is the way that I’ve found most efficient for my writing and I hope it helps you feel more in control of your content planning, too.

Read More About Travel Blogging!

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Nina Clapperton is the founder of She Knows SEO.

She started blogging in 2018 and spent years doing everything “right” while earning $0. Then she stopped guessing and learned how search actually works. She rebuilt her travel site around audience intent and structure and grew to 50,000 sessions in 6 months. Within a year, the blog was bringing in $30,000 months and later crossed 243,000 pageviews.

She took the same audience first SEO approach and built her education business into multiple $100,000 months.

Now Nina teaches bloggers and online business owners how to build search powered businesses grounded in strong positioning, clear structure, and monetisation that actually supports their audience. She covers traditional SEO and AI driven search without the tech bro noise, and she’s known for explaining complex strategy with analogies you won’t forget.

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