Driving a steady flow of relevant traffic to your hotel website is integral to the success of your entire digital marketing campaign. If you don’t have online travellers landing on your website, it’s impossible to convert them into bookings and loyal, long-term guests.
An effective, multi-pronged SEO campaign will help establish your property as an authority in the eyes of Google, leading to higher search rankings, greater online visibility and boosted website traffic rates.
But even when you’ve put all the elements of your SEO campaign in place and secured high rankings in the SERPs, the work doesn’t stop. Despite what you may have heard, ranking highly for particular keywords is just one small (albeit very important piece) of the SEO jigsaw. Driving results with search marketing is an ongoing process and involves constantly adapting your strategy to stay up to date with the latest Google algorithm updates and search trends.
In today’s blog, we’ll look at the methods you can use to maintain the high rankings you’ve worked hard for.
1. Keep Your Content Fresh
This may sound obvious, but it’s something many marketers overlook. As part of its commitment to provide the best possible search results for its users, Google’s algorithm uses both content quality and freshness to determine ranking. So, ensuring your site is regularly updated with fresh text, videos and images is a great way to maintain your search position, while enhancing user experience for your guests and encouraging people to link back to your site.
2. Reduce Page Load Speeds
Site speed has been one of Google’s critical ranking factors for many years, but plenty of websites still don’t load as fast as they should – particularly on mobile, which accounts for the majority of search enquiries now. With around 2 million new pieces of content posted everyday, you can bet your guests will click away to another site if your website fails to load quickly.
Google says website owners should aim to reduce page load speeds to under one second for mobile devices, but even if you can’t achieve these ultra fast speeds, take encouragement from the knowledge that every second you shave off your website’s page speeds improves user experience and reduces site abandonment.
Using Google PageSpeed Insights tool will help you pinpoint the specific issues that may be slowing down your website’s page load speeds.
3. Focus on Link Building
When it comes to building a library of backlinks, quantity matters, but quality is pretty important too. If your hotel is ranking highly for a certain keyword, there’s no need to dedicate lots of time to building links to that particular page. Google can detect when a website is accumulating lots of links in a short space of time and may penalise your site if you are building links too quickly, or if the bulk of your links direct to one particular blog post or article.
To sustain your search ranking, you should build inbound links to all the different pages on your hotel’s website to create a diverse backlink profile. This will help build your site’s authority and win ranking points from Google.
4. Drive Social Media Engagement
Although the jury is still out on whether social media activity is used as a direct ranking factor, what’s clear is that Google views Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn as authoritative sources of content and information. This means gathering links from these major social platforms will help Google see your website as relevant and authoritative, and working to boost your visibility on social media by driving likes and shares may also increase your visibility in search over time.
Even the most carefully orchestrated SEO campaign does not generate results overnight. In general, you’ll need to wait a few months before you start reaping the rewards of your hard work. Implementing the 4 strategies above will help you rank highly long after you’ve achieved top positions for a particular keyword.
How do you protect your hotel’s search rankings? Let us know in the comments below!
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