Search engine optimisation (SEO) is one of the most valuable digital marketing strategies for hotels to stand out from the competition. It can generate more website traffic, lead generation and direct bookings.
A number of tasks and practices fall under the umbrella of SEO, including keyword research, content creation, copywriting, site organization and social media marketing.
1. Keyword Research
If you have a new hotel website and are looking to attract online guests, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the perfect way to get noticed. By creating relevant content, you can increase your search traffic and improve the conversion rate from online bookings.
When performing SEO, you must first conduct keyword research to identify terms that are likely to be searched by your target audience. This will help you to understand your customers’ intent and adapt your content accordingly.
The keywords you choose must be based on the information you have about your audience and their booking patterns. They should be aligned with the overall hotel website design, navigation and copywriting strategy.
You can find a number of free keyword research tools on the Internet to assist you with this task. Some of them offer a variety of features, such as search volume and competitive data.
To start off, you can look at the keywords that your competitors are using to rank for in your industry. This will give you an idea of which ones are popular and which should be avoided.
Another way to identify relevant keywords is to look at the searches people are making for hotels in your area. For example, if your hotel is located in a small town near a big city, you should look at the keywords that people are typing into Google when searching for a hotel.
Once you have a list of possible keywords, you can use a tool like Rank Tracker to find out how many searches are made per month for each term. These tools also let you apply filters for irrelevant locations, brands and words that may be indicative of low-quality keywords.
2. On-Page Optimization
On-page optimization involves optimizing individual pages of a website to increase the likelihood of them ranking high in search engines and bringing in new traffic. It includes a variety of different factors, including content, headlines and headers, image optimization, title tags, meta descriptions, and structured data.
Page titles and meta descriptions are important for SEO, as they help tell search engine users what each page is about. They also can help to increase CTR (Click-Through Rate) on search results pages, as well as providing information about how relevant the content is for the keyword or search phrase that is being searched.
It is critical to ensure that each page on your hotel’s site has unique page titles and meta descriptions. This helps to provide a more personalized experience for people who are searching for your hotel, and gives you an opportunity to use the keywords that you are targeting in an optimized way.
The content on your hotel’s website is one of the most crucial factors in determining its rank. Having a well-written, high-quality page that answers the questions of potential guests will help your hotel’s SEO and bring in more bookings.
Another important aspect of on-page optimization is making sure that your hotel’s website is quick to load. Google has made it clear that a fast, well-optimized website will rank higher than a slower one.
A slow website will have a bad user experience and result in high bounce rates, which can damage your rankings. Keeping your load times under two seconds will help to reduce these rates, and will improve the chances of your site ranking in search results.
On-page SEO should always be used in conjunction with off-page SEO practices, such as link building. In fact, links from other websites are considered an important part of on-page SEO because they can signal that your hotel’s website is a relevant, trustworthy resource for a particular topic.
3. Link Building
Link building is one of the most important SEO strategies for hotels. It can help your hotel rank higher in search engine results pages, so you can get more organic traffic to your website and increase your business.
Links are a major ranking factor in Google’s algorithms. They are also a way of determining how relevant a page is, so they are vital to your overall SEO strategy.
Getting links from high-quality websites is a great way to improve your domain authority and rank better in search engines. It can take some time to build a large number of high-quality links, but it is well worth the effort!
As a starting point, you need to identify the types of websites that are most likely to link to your hotel. You can do this by looking at the top search results for your industry on Google and identifying which sites receive the most clicks.
You can then target these sites using tools like Semrush’s Link Building Tool. This tool will let you quickly find prospects to reach out to and set up a link building campaign.
When it comes to link building, there are three main buckets of tactics and strategies: asking for links, adding links, and content marketing. Asking for links is the most effective way to get more links, but it can be difficult to find relevant opportunities.
Adding links is also a common way to build links, but it can be dangerous. Manually adding your own links is often considered a spammy practice and can harm your site’s reputation with search engines.
The best way to build links is to create quality content that people want to share with their audiences. You can do this by writing blog posts, guest posts on other sites, and by creating valuable resources for your audience. Having relevant content will help you attract high-quality links to your hotel’s website.
4. Content Creation
SEO is an effective way for hotels to increase their online presence and attract more bookings. It involves a variety of tactics, including keyword research and content generation.
The basics of SEO include optimizing content and page titles, using keywords in meta-tags, and obtaining backlinks from other websites. The latter is an important SEO strategy because it helps search engines crawl your website and index all of your content.
In order to maximize the potential of your hotel’s SEO efforts, it is important to create unique content that is relevant to your audience and demonstrates your authority in your industry. For example, a blog post about the top ten things to do in a given city is likely to be more useful to users than a list of restaurants.
Using unique, high-quality images is a great way to engage your target audience and help you stand out from the competition. However, you need to make sure that the quality of these images is up to scratch and that they are relevant to your content.
You can optimize your images for search engines by making sure they include a relevant keywords, using the image as a call-to-action (CTA), and using captions to explain what the photo is about. This is particularly important for photos of rooms, as Google likes to see them in context.
Using the latest technology, you can even use an algorithm to determine which pictures are most relevant and utilise them in your content. The best hotels use this technique to ensure they’re maximizing the number of visitors that land on their pages. This will improve your overall SEO efforts and give you an advantage over your competitors!
5. Social Media
If you’re looking to get more guests for your hotel, you need a strong digital marketing strategy. There are many ways to do this, including SEO and paid search.
Using social media in your hotel’s SEO efforts is a good way to increase your website’s visibility and generate more organic traffic from search engines. However, it’s important to remember that social media can be time-consuming and requires a significant amount of effort to be effective.
In addition, it’s essential to create relevant and valuable content for your audience. This is also crucial for your SEO campaign as search engines love quality content.
One of the best things that you can do for your hotel’s SEO is to include a large number of keywords related to your business in your content. This will help you rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).
When creating your hotel’s website, make sure that the keywords that you use are relevant to your business and the location of the property. This can be done by researching your target markets and finding out what people are searching for online.
Another way to boost your hotel’s SEO is by optimizing your images. This can be done through ALT TEXT, which is a short description of the image that can help the search engines understand what the picture is about.
Finally, it’s important to ensure that your site loads quickly. The search engines take into account how long it takes for a page to load, which can impact your rankings.
Getting more traffic to your hotel’s website can be difficult, especially in competitive markets. But if you use the right strategies, it can be possible to grow your organic traffic and increase bookings.