It is quite tricky to market a hotel business, particularly when you have to do it online. There are innumerable ways to practice search engine optimization for the hotel business. You can hire an SEO company to bring you traffic, or you can avail Google advertising services, or you can pay other websites to advertise with them, and the options are numerous.
However, all these ways involve sound investment. Hence, if you want to save money then the best way to go is doing SEO for hotels, yourself.
So, how can you start with SEO management for your hotel?
Here, we have listed some really amazing tips that will help you do your hotel SEO flawlessly. If you don’t have any knowledge about basic SEO concepts like backlinks and keywords, check websites such as Backlinko, Moz, and Quick Sprout to gain sound knowledge.
Once you’ve gained the knowledge, check here the next steps to do a successful hotel SEO.
The Hotel SEO Guide to Improve your Google Rankings:
1. Begin Researching the Keywords:
To make your website a success, you must start with keyword research. Keywords are phrases, terms, or words used in the website to target potential visitors through search engines. Including keywords in your website can also increase search engine rankings and bring in organic results.
Select keywords that are relevant to your hotel business. It is because your website can rank better in the search engine only when you use the appropriate keyword or phrase.
It is best to target competitive keywords and try ranking for them. Being in the hotel business, you would definitely want your homepage to rank for your location and your business. But if you want to rank for internal pages, blog posts, and landing pages make sure you practice keyword research.
2. Position the Name of Your Brand Second:
Unless you are already a big, renowned brand, no one will search by the name of your hotel. Often, I see a brand placed in front of the Meta title. Google reads Meta titles and showcases them in search results. Also, Meta title is displayed on top of the web browser.
If you are creating your hotel website design with a content management system such as WordPress, it is convenient to customize the titles. Meta descriptions and Meta title fields are pulled in Google, which is why they are mostly used. Make sure that the target key phrase comes before the hotel’s name.
3. Target Main Keywords Using <H1> Tag:
No matter which way you search the keywords, it is important that you put them into your website. In addition to using the keywords in page titles and Meta titles, you must include them in the content of the website design.
There are a number of ways you can include keywords in your website design without being penalized from Google. The simplest way is to include a <h1> tag within the hotel site markup. Such tags let search engines know what your content is all about. Think of them like sub-headlines and headlines in a newspaper.
4. Write Content for People:
It is worth remembering that you must write for people. Don’t write content for search engines. It is not search engines that will buy what you are offering. So, it is extremely vital that the content must be easy to read and understood by people.
Write good content on a regular basis. Avoid spammy content. Write something refreshing and engaging and then optimize the content for SEO.
5. Design a Robust Structure for Internal Links:
Pat Flynn, Brian Dean, and Neil Patel are expert internet marketers, who frequently talk about the significance of inbound links for growth of your website as well as for organic search engine rankings.
However, they hardly discuss the importance of internal link structure for websites. Well, I believe that the internal link structure is extremely important for websites. It is because if your site visitors are unable to conveniently navigate from one page to the other, they would look out for the link or rather book with another hotel. Hence, without a proper internal link structure, you are at the risk of losing customers.
Considering the technical side, if your website is not linked well internally, Google crawler will not be able to find its way around the website easily. Hence, only a few pages of your website would be indexed. For this reason, there will be a limited supply of traffic to your website from Google.
6. Use Google Analytics and Search Console:
In order to gain success on Google, it is important to employ the two most vital functionalities of Google – Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Each of these websites has particular functions and they both work in sync to deliver maximum effectiveness and usability.
From Google Search Console, you can gain all information related to your website. You can also submit your website here to be indexed, to identify 404 errors and to avail a complete overview of search queries and terms, which people are using to reach out to your website. Hence, to gain success beforehand, it is best to use the Search Console right when your website goes live.
As compared to Google Search Console, Google Analytics is an absolutely distinct tool. With Analytics, you can collect insights, statistics, and reports about traffic received by your website. You simply have to log into Google Analytics and the first thing you will notice is the visitor’s count.
7. Mention Your Business on Google My Business, and Google Places:
Just like Analytics and Search Console, Google Places is an efficient tool that works best to bring more effectiveness to your business. It is excellent for businesses with a strong physical presence. Also, Google Places is great to boost the search engine rankings.
8. Design a Responsive Website:
A responsive website is an important algorithm for Google, which means that only mobile-friendly websites are rewarded with better rankings.
Responsive website design is a design approach, which crafts a flawless viewing experience on the website. Responsive website design eliminates all hassles and takes care of all elements of a website including text, navigation, blog posts, images, and others. Ultimately, it aims to offer a rich viewing experience to the website visitors.
9. Increase Website Load Speed:
A vital ranking factor for websites and their performance on the search engine is the duration of time that the website takes to load. No matter which platform people are using to browse your website, it must load fast.
In order to boost the load speed of your website, you must use a photo editing software like Adobe Photoshop. This compresses the image size on your site without affecting its quality. If you are incorporating images in place of icons or buttons, using CSS, HTML, or icon fonts can boost the loading speed of your website.
10. Create a Blog:
Content can be really helpful to generate traffic for your site. Even if you have a great hotel, you cannot bring in traffic. Unless you are a hotel chain, nobody searches about the hotel’s name. Hence, to drive traffic to your site online, you must generate great content.
The best way to generate rich content is by building a blog using WordPress or any other content management system. For the hotel industry, SEO is well documented, however, content seems to be lagging behind. Also, it showcases great opportunities for the hotel website.
True, some hotels have a blog page, but most of them provide short news about the company, updates in policy, and other stuff, which is not at all entertaining. As a result, they fail to engage customers.
Moreover, if you don’t have good writing skills, you can create a podcast or a video blog. It is not necessary that you share content only in the written form. Simply, it must be relevant, entertaining, great, and insightful.
So, how often you must post the content? There is no fixed schedule. The only thing is that you must adopt a consistent approach be it every week, daily, every month, or once in fifteen days. This way, you can set your audience what to expect and they will plan accordingly.
11. Submit Website to Search Engines:
Along with Google, you must submit your website to other search engines as well. Remember, other search engines too exist and they are much simpler than Google. Websites like Yahoo and Bing have a growing user base that you must not ignore.
It is quite easier to submit the website to different search engines. There is a probability that on other search engines your website can gain better rankings than on Google. Hence, gain that exposure for your hotel business.
12. Include Long Tail Keywords:
When you are writing long content, there will be a range of keywords already into it. It will have the main keywords, primary keywords, and more. But still, you may not be able to rank well. This can happen if your content lacks long tail keywords.
So, in order to rank really well, your content must include long tail keywords. These keywords are more specific and longer phrases, which visitors are likely to use when they are close to making a purchase. They are slightly counter-intuitive and can be highly valuable if you use them the correct way.
13. Keep Your Website Updated with Fresh Content:
There are numerous content management systems available like WordPress. Though they make work simple for webmasters and website owners, updating your site frequently is vital for achieving a strong position on search engine rankings.
You must update your blog on a regular basis. Moreover, you can maintain fresh posts by linking to older blog posts. Most importantly, include the blog link on different pages of your website to keep them fresh.
14. Build Adequate Links to the Website
Backlinks are also commonly known as inward links, inbound links, inlinks, and incoming links. Such links are received by web page, website, a high-level domain, or directory website from another web platform.
Good quality backlinks are difficult to obtain. But if your website is able to do so, it symbolizes value and trust. People prefer visiting and reading content, which appears loyal to them.
15. List Yourself on Hospitality and Hotel Specific Websites:
Moreover, you must list your website on platforms, which are specific to your hospitality and hotel industry. This is beneficiary for hotel SEO in the long run. This can bring your hotel brand in the center and front.
There are various sites like TripAdvisor, Hotel Room Reviews, Mr & Mrs. Smith, where you can list your hotel business. Take benefit of this situation and use these platforms to reply to your guest, share experiences of others, be honest, and get ratings.
16. Extend Your Coverage:
You can get coverage for your hotel business in numerous ways. Coverage can be in different areas, in the form of backlinks, or getting new audiences. With more audiences you can expect more potential customers and guests, thereby increasing your page ranking.
17. Create a Website to Please Customers:
Finally, you can get direct higher SEO rankings if you have lots of happy customers, sharing their experiences and reviews on your website. Hence, design your website and services for your customers.
You can sit with friends and family members to navigate around. Plug the holes in your website’s funnel and maximize conversions right from the offset. Stay clear of opinions and practice stuff to make a logical and practical website for your customers.
Conclusion:
With proper SEO optimization, you can win half the search engine battle. Also, it can help you build a strong reputation online and on social media, which is great for your hotel business. Just plan a proper SEO strategy for your hotel business and strictly follow it. Soon, you will notice the difference yourself.