Search engines have come a long way since the early days of the internet, which means search marketers have had to change their game plans quite drastically in their attempts to master them.
Keywords remain important, but you’ll need to do far more than just stuff your content full of them if you want to achieve the higher search rankings.
But that doesn’t mean things need to get complex. In 2015, winning at SEO is all about giving search engines exactly what they want, which is engaging, helpful and relevant content to serve up to their users. If your website can provide this high quality content, Google and the other search engines will be happy to connect their users to it via a prominent search ranking.
Does your content fit the bill? Making sure you tick off these 4 attributes for great SEO will help keep you on track.
Free of Technical Errors
Even if your content is engaging and persuasive, your guests won’t stick around for long if the page takes too long to load, the embedded video doesn’t work and several of the links contained in the text are broken.
Because of the importance of providing a good user experience for its users, Google rewards websites that function well with prominent positions in the SERPs, and pushes those which are not technically sound further down the rankings.
If you haven’t already, make sure your site provides an optimal user experience and is easy for the search engines to crawl and index by:
- Boosting page load times
- Correcting broken links
- Optimising images and videos
Answers the Questions Your Guests Are Asking
‘Where can I get good Asian food in Brisbane?’ ‘What’s the best budget hotel on the Gold Coast?’
Whether stated directly or implied, every time a user makes a search they are asking a question, and the results Google serves up are the answer. Unsurprisingly, Google wants to keep its users happy and coming back for more by providing only the best answers to the billions of questions it gets asked everyday.
Of course, if you are going to stand a chance of providing the best answers for the questions your guests are asking, you need to understand what they are asking, which means putting in the work with persona based keyword research, and planning your content around your findings.
Mobile Friendly
Did you know Google searches on mobile devices have officially overtaken those made on desktop computers? This is true in 9 different countries including the US and Japan, and all signs point to an even more mobile future.
What this means is that a mobile friendly website for your hotel is no longer an optional ‘extra’, it’s a necessity and failing to provide a great mobile experience for your guests will mean your search rankings, traffic levels and booking rates will suffer.
Shareable
Much like links, social signals (Facebook shares, comments, likes etc) are a good indicator of the helpfulness and popularity of web content to its users. It makes sense then, that Google factors these signals into account when indexing web pages, and that driving shares can only mean good things for your organic search rankings.
You can make sure your hotel’s content is easy to share on social media by including prominent share buttons on your website, by creating compelling calls to action encouraging shares and by implementing social schema markup like OpenGraph to integrate your website content more closely with Facebook.
How is your resort tackling SEO in 2015? Let us know in the comments below!
RELATED PAGES AND BLOG POSTS:
- 5 Critical SEO Mistakes To Avoid
- How Often Should You Adjust Your Resort’s SEO Strategy? Part One: On-Page Elements
- How Often Should You Adjust Your Resort’s SEO Strategy? Part Two: Off-Page Elements
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