Responsible for delivering holiday planning travellers directly to your website, SEO is one of the most important components of your hotel’s online strategy. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the most difficult areas to master, with hundreds of Google algorithm updates to contend with each year and the layout of the search results pages constantly changing.
As marketers, it’s important to keep abreast of new tactics to boost and maintain visibility online. In today’s post, we’ll look at three of the SEO best practices your hotel should be focusing on as of now.
1. Neglecting Historic Content
One of the most simple, powerful, but also most neglected SEO opportunities lies with your older content. Once upon a time, content marketing for SEO was all about producing as much content for your website as possible. It worked, but search engines have got a lot more sophisticated since.
These days, it’s important to keep a closer eye on historic content to pinpoint which pieces are worth keeping, and which need to be edited or even removed completely. If you’ve been adding content to your site for quite a while, chances are you have at least some content that needs to be refreshed to stay current.
Older content needs to be either revamped or deleted to remove it from the search index completely if it is no longer relevant. By de-cluttering like this, you can drive more focus to important pages that you need to drive traffic to. Delve into your analytics so you can concentrate on those pages that bring the most highly converting traffic and spend some time refreshing the content.
Our tip: use a tool like Google Search Console to get a better understanding of how pages are performing in terms of keyword rankings and impressions, and focus your refreshing efforts on content that contains priority keywords from the second or third page of SERPs. These pages are your best bet for a quick boost to visibility.
2. Not Devising A Strategic Linking Plan
Despite what you may have heard, creating a strategic internal linking plan is still an incredibly important part of any comprehensive SEO strategy.
Linking to other related content on your site helps search engines crawl and index your website’s pages as well as improving the authority rating of your site. It’s also good practice to link to related external sites where you can to assist Google in understanding the context of your content.
To get started, use a content audit to identify which historic content should be updated, then develop a linking plan directing traffic between this and newer content.
3. Not Looking Beyond The SERPs
Boosting online visibility through SEO isn’t all about the search results pages. Don’t forget to optimize your hotel’s YouTube videos by adding a description, transcript, relevant tags, a video schema for each page and an eye-catching, optimised title. A recent Google report revealed that “how to” searches have increased in popularity by an impressive 70% - a growth which paves the way for a wide array of creative videos for even limited marketing budgets (“How to Have Fun On The Gold Coast” for example.)
Although these tips only scratch the surface when it comes to building and maintaining an effective SEO strategy, they’re a great place to start.
What are you doing to boost your hotel’s visibility online through SEO? Let us know in the comments below!
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