Trip pages Google can read

Start with the facts table

A traveller who searches for the Annapurna Base Camp trek wants the same few facts from every company: how many days, how hard, when to go, how high. Most trip pages bury them in a paragraph. Google reads paragraphs too, but it reads a table more easily.

So open every trip page with a table of facts. For a seven-day trek to Annapurna Base Camp, its rows are:

• Duration: 7 days
• Grade: moderate
• Best season: March to May, September to November
• Walking each day: 4 to 7 hours
• Highest point: 4,130 m, at base camp
• Accommodation: teahouse lodges

Add transport, the start and end points, and the kind of trek. Use a real HTML table, with each label in its own cell, not a picture of one and not a row of icons with no words.

Give long pages a contents list

A full trip page runs long: the outline, the day-by-day itinerary, the cost, what is included, the map, the questions. Put a short list at the top that links to each section.

The traveller on a phone jumps straight to the price. Google sees the same list and can show links to those sections under your result.

Keep the headings in order

One main heading names the trip. Each section gets the next level down, and a part inside a section the level below that. Never jump from the main heading to the third level because the third looks better: change its style instead.

Our own advice here has changed. A developers’ note we wrote in 2020 allowed a main heading inside each section. Google copes with that, but one main heading with the rest in order is clearer to a screen reader and to anyone skimming.

Use the HTML that says what each part is

A page built only from boxes tells a machine nothing. HTML has a word for most parts of a trip page: header, nav, main, article, section, aside, figure and footer. A subtitle under a section heading belongs inside that section’s header, not in a loose box after it.

This costs nothing extra while the page is built. Added later, it means rebuilding every template.

Then add structured data

Structured data is a short block of code, out of sight, that states what the page is about in a vocabulary search engines share, from schema.org. Google recommends writing it as JSON-LD in the page template, so every trip gets it without anyone typing it in.

For a trip page, these say the most:

• TouristTrip: the trip itself, its itinerary and who it is for
• Offer: the price, the currency and the dates it applies to
• BreadcrumbList: where the page sits on your site

Structured data helps Google understand a page. It does not oblige Google to show anything extra. Since 2023 Google shows question-and-answer results for very few sites, and it does not show star ratings a business marks up about itself.

What it looks like on a real site

On Nature Excursion, every trip page has its facts and a printable itinerary with prices by group size. Its structured data covers the price, the rating, the map, the departures and the questions.