I'll admit it, I just love Hipmunk. In this post I'm going to outline an SEO strategy for them for all to see. I thought it would be interesting to get hands-on with a particular site (not something we do often here on the moz blog) and potentially handy for the Hipmunk team too! Interestingly there's a question of if they should even be investing in SEO at all right now but we'll get to that later :)

What is Hipmunk?

Hipmunk is a disruptive startup with a mission of making travel booking easy and fast. Their primary feature is a beautiful and intuitive UI for booking flights:

Once you use it once you'll be hooked. I was!

What Does SEO Look Like for Hipmunk?

We all know that SEO is links + content + social but how does that relate to the flight search space? Well for starters the space is fiercely competitive. Here are some of the biggest terms they'd like to target:

There are lots of established brands ranking already for these terms and with good reason, they're looking for a piece of that nice juicy keyword volume pie! What about some slightly less competitive keywords?

Yikes! Still pretty competitive even for these mid/long tail terms. So what's the plan batman?

Domain Authority FTW

So how are we going to compete with the big boys in this space? Well it's going to be the long hard slog of brand building and domain authority. Rand sums it up in one of my favourite graphics:

Earning links using great content is crucial to long term success. Fortunately, Hipmunk seems to be doing a great job of getting those strong trusted links. Just take a look at their press page! Their UI and core product is the great content that's earning them press mentions here which is awesome. Making a core product that is good enough to earn links is the win-win of online marketing. But those crazy cats over at Hipmunk get up to a little bit of linkbait too:

So it seems that Hipmunk don't really need any help link building! Take a look at the following graph (from MajesticSEO) which shows that hipmunk.com is almost gaining as many links per month as the big players like kayak.com and cheapflights.com:

Unfortunately, if we look at this chart in a cumulative view we see why Hipmunk is going to have a hard time:

TL;DR - keep doing what you're doing Hipmunk! This brand building/PR/domain authority building will pay off in the long run.

SEO in 2011 Benefits Hipmunk

However, there's one trick hidden up that cute little chipmunk's sleeve which is going to play in their favour. In a post-panda world we all know that cute animals as logos make you rank higher. Wait, that's not quite right. What I mean is that in a post-panda world Google is rewarding user engagement. I'm going to hypothesize that user engagement and brand loyalty is off the charts for Hipmunk - based on my own experience and the experience of my friends once you've used it once there's no competition....

Hand in hand with this is a strong social influence:

This strong user engagement and social signals will hopefully give Hipmunk a shot at ranking for the big money terms.

Building Out Scaleable Content

Behind almost every single successful SEO strategy is a plan for scaleable quality content. Patrick McKenzie argues very persuasively on this topic in his great startup SEO blog post. So how does this fit into the Hipmunk roadmap? There's clearly not a lot of scalebale content going on right now:

It's pretty obvious that in this niche the right kind of scaleable content is going to be focused on location-based searches. There's a lot of search volume for these kinds of phrases:

As I see it there are two main routes to go down with this type of scaleable content - one is powered by people, one is powered by machines.

Option 1 - Niche Destination Guides

One option to build out this scaleable content is to put together niche destination guides. They already successfully published a Grand Rapids guide (though with a lousy title tag...)

This is a strategy that I could see working - especially if you can publish content that's of a higher quality than most things out there. This guide was crowd-sourced from locals, if you can replicate that for other tertiary locations you might be onto something. Of course I'd look at trying to drop a pre-populated CTA on those pages to give people a quick and easy route into the flight search:

If you're going to go down this route I'd suggest starting with the uncompetitive locations and gradually getting more competitive as you progress. It's going to be a long hard slog but if you can make sure each niche destination guide gets some buzz and local PR as well (this guide was published just after Grand Rapids was named one of America's dying cities in the press) then you're still turning the bigger picture flywheel while simultaneously building out content that will earn links and rankings over time.

Option 2 - Just Buy This One Flight Data

The second option I see for scaleable content comes in the form of machines. While there are many formats this could take, one angle I particularly like is inspired by Just Buy This One (disclaimer: Reevoo are a Distilled client). The premise here is to use big data to make your decision process incredibly easy. The buying cycle here is for electronics:

But this principle could just as easily apply to flight search. Looking at the common destinations it would be easy to build out a similar "just buy this one" experience for flights. For example, analysing the most common flight patterns for various destinations would result in the ability for you to predict with confidence the "best" destinations and flight options for those destinations and provide a "book now" button that inspires confidence. The key here is confidence and you'd need to make it clear that if the user is looking for a flight with certain parameters (maybe flights from San Francisco to New York this weekend) then this flight is the least agony (a metric that Hipmunk uses extensively that's a combination of price and hassle).

Using this approach you would have to start at the opposite end of the spectrum and start with the most popular locations to ensure enough data to build a good user experience on those pages.

When Should Hipmunk Invest in SEO?

For many startups deciding when to invest in SEO is a tricky issue. You want to invest early to start building the foundations but in many cases you won't have the link authority to see direct ROI over the short term for your SEO investment.

The truth of it is that their team is likely busy working on other things right now. How should they prioritize these projects above what they already have going on? The harsh reality is that this space is competitive. There are big budgets being thrown about and even if Hipmunk were to roll out some of these pages they're unlikely to see an ROI from search just yet. They just don't have the links to compete with the established players right now.

Of course, it's never too soon to roll out pages that are good for users and I believe there are heavy overlaps between marketing and SEO here - these pages would be great PR and can gain them a bunch of links and exposure (especially with local press - a PR opportunity a lot of people overlook). Ultimately, the sooner that they can start building out their main site with pages aimed at specific keywords the sooner they'll be able to rank for these keywords. At some point further down the line SEO is going to be a very significant traffic driver for them and they should look at investing for that opportunity as soon as possible.

TL;DR Keep Up The Link Building - Oh And One More Thing

So in summary - I hope this makes the SEO roadmap slightly clearer for Hipmunk. Certainly the brand building, social and PR work that's going on right now is the best thing you can be doing so keep that up. Just don't forget that at some point you'll want to look at rolling out scaleable, indexable content focused around all those location terms. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow but someday.

Oh and one more thing while I'm here - you should really put the words "flight search" on your homepage so that Google can see them. You're ranking 17th for [flight search] right now and you'd likely get a bump for putting the words on page.

Disclaimer: Neither I, Tom Critchlow, nor Distilled have any affiliation with Hipmunk. I met with Alexis Ohanian (an advisor to Hipmunk) for coffee in preparation for writing this post but all thoughts herein are my own (for better or for worse!) and motivated by the love of the 'munk.