Blogging can be an invaluable asset when it comes to hotel SEO, helping improve both on-page rankings and building links from other websites.
Livestreaming can also help connect guests and share unique local tips, while building trust with existing and acquiring new customers.
Crafting engaging blog content can be challenging. Here are a few strategies you can employ to make your posts more engaging.
1. Google E-E-A-T
Google provides information that Google deems relevant to travellers searching for information about your destination, and hotel blogs with quality content answering travellers’ queries are highly likely to appear among these search results – an effective strategy for improving search engine optimisation (SEO). Blogging gives hotels an excellent way to boost SEO.
Successful SEO strategies take an integrated approach and utilize multiple tactics and techniques to increase online visibility for their hotel websites. Blogging is one of the best ways to increase awareness and drive traffic towards them.
Optimizing blog posts for search engines takes extensive research and an in-depth knowledge of SEO principles; but the rewards can be substantial: search engines appreciate websites with dynamic updates regularly via blogs like those found at hotels. New content added via hotel blogs adds freshness and can capture search engine algorithms’ interest.
As such, the more hotel blogs are read and shared, the higher will be your hotel’s overall SEO performance. Therefore, it is crucial that you create an action plan for how you want your blogs to perform and monitor progress towards these goals.
Example: Create local tips and recommendations that your guests can find on your hotel blog to demonstrate its knowledge of the local area, which is key in creating Young, Men, Young Ladies content. Once these posts have been uploaded to the blog, track their success by measuring organic session counts resulting from them.
Focusing your blog content on specific geographical regions may also be useful. Doing this by targeting keywords that resonate with a certain target audience ensures your message reaches those looking for it when searching.
As you write your hotel blog, the primary goal should be usefulness and relevancy. By showing off your expertise in your field, your blog can provide insight to prospective customers that may help them choose an accommodation option suitable for their vacation plans.
2. High-quality content
Marketing your hotel can take many forms: advertising, PR or organic traffic generation are all possible strategies for getting noticed. Blogging can be an excellent way of drawing in targeted readers who may become potential guests; plus it can generate cost-effective organic traffic growth.
When creating your hotel blog, ensure to use the E-E-A-T criteria from Google to ensure the content is useful and engaging for your target audience. This will maximize search engine optimisation while increasing quality leads.
Maintaining updated and relevant content will demonstrate to web crawlers that your website remains relevant, while including images in posts will increase the chances that people share your material via social media.
Writing captivating, educational articles about your local area can be an excellent way to promote your hotel online and increase visibility within the local community. Doing this also allows potential customers to see that you are an authority in your field and will show potential guests you know exactly what you’re talking about!
Implementing a blog into your hotel website can also enhance user experience by providing visitors with additional details about your hotel and what’s nearby, making planning their travel simpler and building trust. A blog can make booking with you much less daunting!
Your own photos should also add an authentic tone and give your blog posts more of their own identity. Incorporating high-quality images will ensure that they’re appealing and engaging for readers.
As part of your hotel’s SEO, guest blogging for other hospitality blogs may help build relationships and open up opportunities. For example, guest writing for an influential travel blog could lead to your post being picked up by larger news sources resulting in greater visitors and exposure for your property.
3. Social media
Producing engaging, useful content for your hotel blog and sharing it through social media is great, but you must ensure people actually see it or else all your hard work will go wasted.
Blogging is an excellent way to boost the visibility of your hotel on search engines, particularly Google. Each new blog post adds another indexed page on your site and shows Google that you are actively providing useful traveller information. Incorporating keywords that target more specific search queries into posts, page titles and meta descriptions allows for greater organic traffic attraction.
Your hotel blog can serve more than one purpose – SEO being only one. By positioning yourself as an industry expert through blogging, the process of taking customers from realizing a need to confirming interest becomes much smoother and natural.
Sharing your hotel blog posts across social media platforms and in online groups and forums is an effective way to generate organic reach and exposure for your business, while potentially leading to quality backlinks (without spamming!). Doing this may also result in some organic backlinks from trusted sources that might help drive new leads for conversion.
Be sure to include images with each hotel blog to enhance the reader experience as well as engagement and conversion rates. HubSpot research indicates that posts featuring images receive 94% more views than posts without images; aim for high-quality photographs featuring real people over generic stock shots when possible.
Additionally, it’s beneficial to examine your competitors’ hotel blogs to get an idea of the topics and content that resonate with their audiences and may attract more visitors and bookings for yourself. By doing this, you can develop your own unique blog that stands out from the pack and draws more visitors and bookings than its counterparts.
4. Link building
As soon as you publish a blog on your website, other websites will have an opportunity to link back to it through inbound linking – an essential element of SEO strategy. A site with many inbound links tends to rank better in search engine results pages; they help your hotel become easier for people searching for it as well as increasing its value on Google’s radar screen.
As part of creating effective blogs, conducting in-depth research is key. This should involve both keyword research and competition analysis – this way you can discover what topics your audience finds appealing and create relevant blogs accordingly. Tools such as Google Keywords Tool, SEM Rush and Buzzsumo can be extremely helpful when trying to understand what people are searching for and which posts are popular among searchers.
Crafting blogs that are engaging, eye-catching and informative will increase the likelihood of people clicking them and eventually becoming paying customers of your hotel website. To make your post more appealing consider using captivating titles, making an easy-to-skim structure, including relevant images and using appropriate formatting (ie h1> header tag and secondary h2>/h3> etc).
As a hotel, you are the authority on your local environment. Establishing this role through blogging will enhance your authority and establish trust with potential guests – this is why sharing facts, history and other interesting details about your hotel in blogs is vitally important to establishing yourself as the expert!
Blogging for hotels offers many benefits that can have an enormously positive impact on online marketing efforts. If it hasn’t already become part of your plan, now is the time to incorporate blogging as an integral component in your marketing plan and see the results yourself!