How Airbnb Built its 5 Million Keyword SEO Moat

Even though the tourism industry shut down for large portions of 2020, it taught Airbnb a massive lesson about the importance of their digital SEO moat.

So in today's video, I'm going to be sharing with you what Airbnb learned about their business during those lockdowns and exactly how they built up their digital moat today.

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0:00 - Introduction to How Airbnb Built its 5 Million Keyword SEO Moat

One of the things that Airbnb did about a year ago was they IPO. Going public brings with it a lot of things and one of those things is quarterly reports. And during one of those quarterly reports, their CEO revealed something that was incredibly insightful from an STO standpoint.

In fact, this article details it quite nicely and which it says "Airbnb slashes spend in permanent shift from performance marketing to brand."

So for those of you that don't know what performance marketing is, it's essentially when you pay for advertising. It's when you're spending a lot in terms of Google ads and other medium forms in terms of acquiring your next customer, but what Airbnb realized during this time period was that they could actually maintain a significant portion of their traffic just by organic means.

2:00 - AirBNB on SimilarWeb

If you dig into Airbnb on SimilarWeb, they have 75 million visits every single month on average. Bulk of their traffic is coming from direct and search, but search is a major function for their overall traffic - 28% in this situation.

Furthermore, what you see is that when you dig into their search traffic, they get a ton of keyword phrases around branded terms.

2:52 - How did Airbnb build SEO moat?

Taking a look at Airbnb's Ahrefs'profile, if we look at their organic search profile, you can see that their organic traffic has largely been pretty significant through the years.

And even though their organic keywords have gone down recently in the latest month versus the prior year, what you will see is that they have actually increased the number of top three spots that they are ranking for.

This becomes a really powerful SEO moat for them and essentially accounts for a ton of that direct traffic that is not branded phrases. So from Airbnb, what you can learn is that if you can think about ways that you can programmatically create a series of pages, it can be really powerful for your business.

5:17 - Jumping into Airbnb's Site

If we open up the stays page, for example, we'll see that this is a breakdown of Treehouse rentals on Airbnb. And something that you'll notice is that as we search the page for treehouse, it comes up 85 different times. And so this is an optimized page for treehouses, but furthermore, there's different pages that are similar in format to this that still follows that model of slash stays.

And even more powerful is if you can think about ways that you can get your users to generate content, then you can create those compilation pages and package that content together in different clusters to signal your authority to Google.

What I want you to realize as we are going through these pages is that Airbnb is using user-generated content to create these pages programmatically. These are essentially directory pages that are being consolidated by Airbnb. They're taking the content for example, of these four hosts and essentially using that as feeder content to the master page of this monthly state page, and they do this approach over and over again.

✍️ COMMENT BELOW:
What did you takeaway from studying Airbnb's SEO strategy?

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Видео How Airbnb Built its 5 Million Keyword SEO Moat канала Grow with Will - SEO, Sales & Entrepreneurship