Navigating SEO Waters: Winners & Losers of the Cruises industry

According to the BBC, around 25 million people go on cruises every year. They’re an excellent holiday option with something for everyone; from partaking in sports and activities onboard, relaxing by the pool and of course, exploring lots of different destinations.

However, the cruise industry has suffered heavily following the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. With travel restrictions and health concerns, cruise lines have seen a decline in demand. In fact, all major cruise line operators have seen their year-on-year revenue drop by over 70%.

Little by little, the industry has managed to recover from COVID-19’s impact, and has been growing a lot in the past few years with more than 39 million passengers expected by 2027. As the industry gradually recovers, these companies have been working to regain their digital presence, adapting their SEO strategies to attract previous and new passengers.

Previously, we have investigated the winners and losers of other industries such as nutrition, and travel insurance. This time, we will explore which cruise websites are doing well, and which cruise websites have been affected by algorithm updates. . Especially after the recent spate of updates in Q4 2024. We’ll also take a look at which cruise line websites are sailing ahead in the race for SEO visibility.

Winners of the Cruise Industry

Costa Cruises

Costa Cruises, an Italian cruise line, has seen a growth in SEO visibility in the past five years as shown in the graph below.

The website has seen a boost in visibility since October 2023 and benefited especially well from the 2024 March Core Algorithm update (7). We have investigated the website, and came up with some hypotheses of what could have helped Costa’s website increase their visibility in the past few years.

What are they doing right?

We examined the inner workings of Costa’s site to see what they’re doing to increase their site’s visibility, starting with their backlink profile. A Link Graph can be described as a visual representation of the network surrounding a website. Instead of displaying a complex list of backlinks, it presents a site’s backlink profile as a web of connections.

Looking at their linking domains, we can see some really positive and valuable backlinks, from high authority domains like The Telegraph and The London Post.

Also, by having a look at the keywords they are ranking for, we can also see that they are brand related, or travel sector related as expected for a cruise line.

This is important because it confirms that their SEO strategy is aligned with their target audience and industry focus, ensuring they attract relevant traffic and strengthen their brand presence.

We also browsed their category pages to evaluate whether they follow best practices such as:

• Clear navigation
• Optimised content and URLs
• Intuitive filters
• Mobile responsiveness
• Engaging visuals

All the above are key elements for user experience and search engine visibility.

Category pages are user friendly with a consistent layout and design, showcase the products, and allow users to filter destinations, price, and cruise duration. Moreover, images are of high quality, and descriptions are clear and contain calls to action (CTAs).

Looking at their product pages, we can also see that Costa Cruises’ product page demonstrates strong SEO practices, including E-E-A-T. Their product pages include keywords aligning with user search intent, rich media, including high-quality images and dynamic visuals, and detailed content such as itineraries, departure dates, pricing, and ports of call provides value to users and signals relevance to search engines.

The page also includes links to other related cruises, making it easier for visitors to explore the site further and helping search engines understand and navigate the content better.

P&O Cruises

British cruise line P&O Cruises has a very interesting SEO visibility graph as shown in the chart below.

Visibility has gradually improved since 2020, with some ups and downs, and recently hit its highest point in early 2025.. This indicates that overall, the site has been successful in building and maintaining its visibility in Google’s search rankings.

What are they doing right?

Again, we analysed P&O Cruises website to figure out what they have been doing correctly that may have helped them improve their SEO visibility recently.

Firstly, we checked their backlink profile. P&O Cruises has a very strong backlink profile and even bigger than Costa’s profile, with links from many high authority websites. And as we can see below, they have a very extensive backlink profile, being linked to by some high authority websites such as The BBC, and MassPort.

We can also see that their anchor text profile is natural with branded related anchor text, exact match, and some generic anchor text as well.

The growth in visibility recently could indicate that P&O Cruises has invested in E-E-A-T, by creating high-quality content that showcases their expertise in the cruising industry, collaborating with authoritative travel experts, engaging with real customer testimonials to highlight their experience, and ensuring transparency in their online presence.

Their product pages have optimised content through the inclusion of targeted keywords integrated into headings, meta descriptions, and body text, and they also make use of high quality images.

We have also tested the mobile friendliness of the website. Not only is the site responsive, but also fast, which helps with user-experience.

This consistent growth shows effective SEO efforts that have likely improved the website’s authority and relevance over time. It is also important to mention that P&O Cruises are a big well-known brand, and their brand name has certainly also played an important role in strengthening their SEO visibility even more. Even when their name is mentioned online without a clickable link, it can still signal to search engines that the brand is popular and trustworthy, which improves their visibility.

Losers of the cruise industry

Hurtigruten

The Norwegian cruise line Hurtigruten has a very peculiar trend when it comes to its SEO visibility.

Visibility was very low in 2019 with only minor fluctuations until early 2022. After that, the website has fluctuated a lot, with smaller peaks in visibility. The visibility shows periods of slight decline and recovery, especially evident around early 2023.

What could have made Hurtigruten a loser?

Just like for the winners, we have come up with some hypotheses that could have made Hurtigruten a loser in SEO visibility.

The second big drop on the website’s visibility was after a Spam update (C). This can have impacted them in two ways:

• Sites that link to Hurtigruten may have been devalued
• Sites linking to Hurtigruten’s second-degree connections may have lost value.

Looking at their anchor text links, we can see that there might be an overwhelming amount of brand terms here. Words like “official,” “website,” “site,” “visit,” and “book now” suggest overly promotional or commercial anchors. If a disproportionate number of backlinks use such text, it may appear unnatural to Google’s algorithm.

We have also analysed the website’s structure, including categories and product pages.

When looking at their categories page, we can see that they could have improved a few elements, including better descriptions, titles.

We have also tested the page for structured data, and no markup was detected on the website.

Schema mark-up helps search engines like Google read and understand the content of a webpage. This is unlikely to have caused them to drop, but again, it is something that the website needs to work on improving.

We have also tested the page using Google’s Page Speed Insights test:

Not only they have failed the Core Web Vitals Assessment, but they have also scored 46/100 for its mobile performance, which is considered to be low:

Their actual time load speed is also high, and it takes 6.2 seconds for the first content on the page to load, whereas a good amount of time for the first content of the page to load should not be higher than 1.8 seconds according to Google. Optimising your website for Mobile Speed is a ranking factor for Google and other search engines.

Regent Seven Seas Cruises

Regent Seven Seas Cruises (RSSC) is a luxury all-inclusive cruise line based in Miami, USA. The graph below shows the SEO visibility index for RSSC:

While they may not have experienced growth in visibility, this does not necessarily indicate a loss. It could suggest limitations in their scope of offerings or a potential stagnation in content.

By looking at the graph, we can see that the company has been struggling to gain visibility ever since November 2023 (M). The website has seen some improvement lately, but the overall trend is still lower than usual.

What could have made RSSC a loser?

Again, we had a look around RSSC’s website to try to find reasons that could explain why RSSC has struggled with SEO visibility. First of all, we have checked their backlink profile to see how natural or spammy it is:

After some investigation, we have seen that the website has a strong backlink profile, linking to some high authority websites, although there are some spammy websites too.

We also had a look at the anchor text linking to their website:

After analysing, we can see that the anchor text looks natural, with branded, and exact match, and some generic anchor text.

Our next step was to analyse the website’s structure, looking at its categories and product pages.

By looking at their category page, we can see that they have sorting options, and use high quality images across the website. However, when compared to the winner, we can see some missing features like better and optimised descriptions for each cruise, highlighting unique aspects of each cruise.

Their product pages are good as well, but there are some missing features. Firstly, the page URL is not user or SEO friendly, and it could be simplified to be more SEO and user friendly. For instance For instance, instead of a long, complex URL with unnecessary parameters (e.g., example.com/product?id=12345&ref=abc), it could be changed to a clean and descriptive format to better reflect the content, improve readability, and enhance keyword relevance for search engines. The site also lacks some more detailed information about the itinerary, destinations, and unique onboard experiences.

We have also tested to check if the website uses schema mark-up language, and we have found that the website also does not make use of schema mark-up:

Moreover, we have also noticed that their page load time is slower, so we have checked Google PageSpeed insights to see how fast the website is:

Not only the website failed the core web vitals assessment, but it also has a very poor Performance score, scoring 27/100 for its mobile speed.

All those reasons could have contributed to the website’s overall poor performance in search engines.

Conclusion

As we have seen, there are a lot of improvements to be made for the losers to regain visibility in search rankings. Websites should keep an eye for Google’s algorithmic updates in order to consider in which direction to take their SEO strategy while still taking the following into account:

• Content Quality and Relevance: Creating informative content that aligns closely with user intent and Google’s guidelines.
• E-E-A-T: Showcasing expertise and authority with clear author bios, trusted information and testimonials or reviews to build credibility.
• Backlink Profile: Focusing on high-quality, relevant backlinks from trusted sources in the travel and cruise industry, while disavowing toxic links.
• User Experience Optimisation: Ensuring fast load times, smooth interactivity, and responsive design, particularly on mobile.
• Technical SEO: Regularly auditing and fixing technical issues to ensure the site is accessible and fully indexable by search engines.

We noticed that even though the cruise market has seen growth in the past few years, they still have a long way to go to recover in SEO. This gap could be preventing these websites from maximising their strategy.

By improving their websites to meet both technical and content requirements, they could improve their SEO visibility and position in search rankings.