5 Essential Hotel Blogging Tips For Beginners

Posted on Jun 1st 2017 in Content Marketing

Engaging, SEO boosting, and powerfully promotional, blogging is a tool hotel marketers ignore at their own peril.

But it’s one a lot of hoteliers are still in the dark about, or see as an optional ‘extra’ that they’ll get round to now and then when they have time. In reality, maintaining a blog is essential if you want to reach your guests online and it shouldn’t eat massively into your valuable time and resources. That doesn’t mean you should just throw any generic content out there each week and expect clicks and bookings to come rolling in. Here are some simple tips to help make your hotel’s blog a success.

Carefully Consider Your Approach to SEO

Despite anything you may have heard about the so-called ‘death’ of SEO, it remains a vital practice for any business that wants to get found by their audience online.

The key with blogging is to sprinkle target keywords throughout the content in a way that seems natural, rather than simply shoehorning them in as many times as possible. You’ve probably come across a few company blogs that try this tactic, and most likely, they made you bounce pretty quickly in frustration.

The aim is to engage and inform your readers and give them a reason to come back for more, and the way to do this is to use keywords prominently but sparingly as they would naturally crop up in your content. Happily, since Google favours high quality content that is of real value to its readers, this is also the way to climb the SERPs.

Find a Schedule and Stick To It

Posting consistently helps grow your readership base, while climbing the rankings thanks to Google’s preference for fresh content.

The key in the infancy of your blog is to establish a schedule that allows time to create genuinely engaging blogs, without becoming overwhelming. If you can, aim to build up a library of posts that you can dip into as needed so that you don’t risk falling behind with your schedule and rushing a post that doesn’t offer any real value. In general, a schedule of one blog post a week or one a fortnight is a good frequency to aim for.

Invest in Quality Blog Design

No matter how great your content, if your interfaces are clunky and your blog doesn’t perform optimally across devices, you’re going to struggle to gain readers.

A good blog template should be responsive, intuitive and attractive with at least one high quality, eye-catching image. Online readers demand visual impact, so don’t let them down.

Don’t Just Sell, Educate and Inspire

This one is obvious but important. Very few people enjoy the hard sell. If all you’re going to talk about on your blog is yourself, your audience are going to get bored pretty quickly. While the odd promotional post is ok, if your blog posts are regularly simply a thinly veiled advert for your property, it’s time to reconsider your approach. If you can offer your guests some engaging, funny and genuinely helpful information about your city, travel tips and local attractions then they’re more likely to remain loyal readers in the long-term than if you simply blow your own trumpet at every opportunity.

Promote, Promote, Promote

Unfortunately, a successful blogging campaign is about much more than simply posting great content and hoping it will be discovered. If you want your guests to know about your blog, you need to tell them about it, and regularly. The more you get word out there about your blog – via email newsletters, social media and networking with other bloggers and local businesses – the better.

Do you have any more beginner’s blogging tips to share? Let us know in the comments below!