When it comes to optimization, hotels are very similar to bars and restaurants. Although you should have a properly working site to close leads, you’re not that dependent on traditional organic search. Instead, these companies get most of their website visitors from local searches.
In other words, when a person is looking for accommodation in a city, they’re most likely to find one by scouring local maps. And while third-party aggregates remain the best method of making profits, you still need to find ways to drive organic traffic through your own platform.
In this article, we talk about SEO for hotels, potential benefits, and best practices. Check it out!
Why is hotel SEO important?
Running a hotel is, first and foremost, a digital business. Unlike brands that have traditional brick-and-mortar stores, hotels make all their booking online. While you might argue that these businesses make a chunk of their profits from tourist agencies, they’re mostly dependent on website traffic for generating new leads.
In other words, it’s not as if someone’s going to stroll into their building and ask for a room. No, the entire process is scheduled weeks in advance by using booking platforms or by directly contacting the establishment. With that said, here’s how a hotel SEO strategy can help these companies:
In many ways, local SEO should be the focus of your digital marketing. However, that doesn’t mean you can slack with other optimization strategies. In the end, you’ll still need lots of high-quality content and numerous external links from reputable sources.
4. Keyword research
Finding the right keywords is one of the pillars of search engine optimization. Your task is to find search queries that the ideal customer persona is using when planning a trip. Otherwise, you’ll never be able to convert organic traffic that you get from Google and other relevant search engines.
Besides user intent, you should also focus on keyword difficulty and volume. Basically, each phrase gets a certain number of clicks every month. Ideally, you should rank on top of that Google for all these keywords. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done because these lucrative keywords have high competition making it hard to get any traffic.
So, your task is to find an ideal combination of volume and difficulty. In other words, you’re looking for phrases that get enough clicks, and you can realistically rank for them. Of course, this is on top of the fact they’re relevant for your users and have a high chance of converting.
Understanding search intent
Before you start using keyword research tools to find relevant queries, it’s important that you understand user intent and ideal buyer persona.
In a nutshell, your target audience is people looking for a vacation venue in your city. However, by analyzing data in Google Analytics, you can get a better understanding of who these people are, where they come from, and how much money they have. As for keywords, we classify them into four categories based on search intent:
Most importantly, don’t make excessive promises with page titles. While they should be interesting enough to attract clicks, they should be misleading. Your meta descriptions should also provide an accurate and concise description of the post, ensuring that the users get what they’re looking for.
It’s also not a bad idea to include numerous internal links pointing to other pages on your site. If you manage to keep the readers on the platform for a while, this will send a strong signal to search engines, increasing the article’s placement. Furthermore, a reasonable structure helps rank keyword clusters and increases the likelihood of conversion.
6. Link building
You can’t perform SEO for hotels without links. Since the inception of search engines, they’ve been considered the most important ranking factor, indicating the quality of pages.
However, not all links are made the same. Getting numerous links from smaller sites is often worse than getting one strong link from a top-tier luxury hotel. Furthermore, it’s also much better to get links from websites related to the hotel industry than those that have nothing to do with your profession.
Ideally, you should hire an SEO agency such as MiroMind to perform link building. Otherwise, you might start building links that don’t provide any value and might even get you in trouble with search engines. However, if you do decide to perform this task yourself, here are a few methods you might consider using:
- Guest posts are the easiest and quickest way to build backlinks to your site. Although some SEOs argue that this approach can be risky, we tend to disagree with this statement. As long as the link comes from a reputable source, there’s nothing to worry about.
- Organic outreach is another good way to get exposure and links. Unlike the previous method, this one is much harder to execute. Basically, not everyone is inclined to link to your site without compensation. However, if you manage to perfect this tactic, you can start getting some valuable exposure that you couldn’t get otherwise.
- Link bait content includes approaches such as expert round-ups, interviews, and case studies. With some of them, you’re betting on the fact that an influencer will link back to your article after being featured. In other cases, you’re looking to attract attention with quality posts.
Whatever the case, you shouldn’t shy away from trying different approaches. If you have enough skills, you might even consider using a combination of link-building techniques.
Lastly, if you need help with hotel SEO services, contact MiroMind today!