In the struggle to keep up with the constantly evolving digital marketing landscape, it’s all too easy to lose sight of basic SEO practices we should all be using to get discovered by the right audience online. Although every new algorithm update inevitably requires a shift in thinking, many of the core principles which have defined SEO since the early days are getting overlooked.
If you’ve been marketing your hotel online for a while, you’ll already be pretty familiar with the best practices of SEO. But are you failing to leverage these tactics on your property’s blog? Let’s take a look at 3 common SEO blogging mistakes you may be guilty of making below.
Keyword Structure Errors
Keyword optimisation pushes specific web pages up the SERPs, driving clicks for the targeted search enquiries your guests are making and effectively acting as a lead generator for your hotel.
Following the rise of voice search, your focus should primarily be on conversational long-tail keywords, as well as phrases with a high search volume such as “tips” and “hacks.” Your blog’s headers, meta tags and content should all be optimised with targeted keyword phrases.
Over-optimized content stuffed with keywords will risk being categorised as spam, as well as creating a poor reader experience for your guests.
Neglecting Internal Links
Building internal links is one of the most important, but criminally overlooked aspects of SEO. When used correctly internal links will:
- Guide guests through your website.
- Increase crawl rate.
- Help search engines understand the most important pages of your website.
- Assign authority to your website pages.
- Index linked-to pages by the keywords used in the hyperlink anchor text.
Get started by conducting a comprehensive link audit to identify which pages on your website have the most authority. It’s then just a question of inserting internal links on these pages directing to other high-value pages to spread authority evenly throughout your hotel’s domain.
Forgetting To Optimise Images and Videos
It’s surprising how many businesses still ignore image and video optimisation when it comes to their blogs. Forgetting to do so can deteriorate SEO performance, but it’s easy to avoid.
It’s essential to optimise alt text to help search engines understand your content and help you rank in a targeted keyword image search.
If you’re including a video within your blog posts, create a video site map to help Google index your video content and include targeted keywords within the meta description, as well as a call to action to drive mailing list sign ups and bookings.
Are you guilty of any of these common SEO mistakes on your hotel’s blog? Let us know in the comments below!
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