Search engines, and particularly Google, remain one of your guests’ favourite tools for researching and planning their breaks online. This means creating and maintaining an effective SEO campaign is a huge component of building a successful internet presence for your hotel.
Here are 5 tips to work on to improve your property’s search strategy.
1. Create engaging content
Website content has always been right at the heart of SEO, but a string of Google updates in recent years has made it even more vital. Today’s content must be not only unique and optimised with relevant keywords, but in-depth, user focused and engaging.
If you’re not prepared to invest in quality website content, you can bet you’ll have a problem with your search rankings, which means your booking rates will suffer, no matter how much time you spend on social media, advertising and email campaigns.
2. Schedule and Strategise Your Content
When it comes to content, quantity matters too. The more content you create means the more opportunities you have to target keywords and attract guests to your website. Building additional content also boosts the quality scores of your pay-per- click campaigns, while decreasing their cost per click.
Drive bookings by creating additional content around local events such as major upcoming concerts, sports games, local college graduations and more. Keeping abreast of local news will help you become aware of these events ahead of time so you can plan your content campaigns and schedule them to gain traction in the lead up to the event.
You can also look for opportunities to develop content related to popular attractions in or near your city, such as theme parks, zoos, museums and art galleries. Adding pages like this to your website and its off-site extensions will help your hotel’s library of content grow slowly but surely each year.
3. Understand Mobile Best Practices
Google favours mobile websites that feature high quality image and text based content that is original, fresh, engaging and optimised for the search engines.
Setting up a mobile version of your hotel’s website is just the first step. If you want to secure high rankings in mobile search, you need to focus on mobile web specific marketing strategies, as well as planning, implementing and maintaining your usual SEO campaign for your desktop website.
Remember that mobile search engines mainly serve up local content for their users, so you will need to make optimising your hotel’s local content on Google listings and other local directories a priority.
4. Blog Regularly
Google values freshness. Undoubtedly, the best way to ensure your website is supplied with a steady stream of fresh content is to blog.
Adding blog posts to your website regularly will keep your guests up to date with the latest developments at your hotel and let them know about exciting events in the local area; while at the same time helping you win favour with Google and drive more traffic to your website to convert into bookings.
5. Maintain Local Search Listings
Since the update nicknamed Google Venice in 2012, local presence has become more and more important. The search engine results pages have gradually evolved to incorporate an increased number of local results, which means it’s crucial to ensure your property’s local search listings are complete and up to date. This means taking time to upload high quality photos, make sure all information is accurate and that your text description is optimised.
Creating a strong presence on Google+ is another essential component of SEO success. Although the platform does not yet have the same membership figures of Twitter and Facebook, it’s the most useful social site when it comes to climbing the rankings. Maintaining your hotel’s Google+ page, adding relevant people to your circles and engaging with other users will boost your visibility in the search results and ensure your property shows up more often in your guests’ personal results.
Do you use any of these strategies to boost your hotel’s search engine presence? Let us know in the comments below!
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