Top 4 SEO trends for hospitality Industry

In a world where almost everything is available online at the click of a mouse, being visible in the eyes of the search engines is very vital for any business.

And it becomes all the more important for businesses in travel and hospitality industry which has cut-throat competition to be at the top of their game in Search Engine Optimization.

Here are the current top 4 SEO trends to look out for:

Mobile-first indexing

Google has tested mobile-first indexing throughout 2017 which means that they will be ranking websites using the GoogleBot — Mobile crawler based on the mobile version of a website.

What it means for you is that your website must be mobile responsive and make sure the load time is fast and easy navigation without any technical SEO issues.

When it comes to SEO, fully-responsive websites are a lot easier to manage than a non-responsive website and Google gives preference to mobile responsive websites in terms of search rankings.

If you separately have a mobile version of your website instead of responsive website( for example : http://m.yourwebsite.com) , then make sure the canonical tags are present and setup correctly.

Site Speed is also one of the most important factors that Google is placing more emphasis in 2018 with the mobile-first indexing approach. If your website’s site loading speed is low on mobile devices, then eventually your organic search rankings will also drop.

Implementing AMP (Accelerated mobile pages) technology on your website, using Content delivery networks(CDNs), using fewer scripts are some of the methods in order to improve your site loading speed. No matter what method you use, the ultimate goal is to make your site load faster for the mobile users.

Offer a secure web experience

If your site doesn’t have a SSL certificate, then the chances of your website going down in search rankings is inevitable as Google is very strict about protecting users’ information and giving them a secure web experience. Google will start warning your visitors about the dangers of visiting your site within the browser if you haven’t installed SSL in your website.

Anybody who is in the hospitality business will want to increase their direct bookings, and the first step for this to happen is to make sure you have a secure website. Google will show a “This website is not secure“ message in your “Contact us” form page if you haven’t SSL installed.

This will drastically reduce the number of visitors that are coming to your website and more importantly, the user will lose trust with your website and ultimately, your brand.

Rise of voice search

In 2016, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced at the Google Keynote I/O, “20 percent of queries on Google mobile app and on Android devices are voice searches”.

With the rise of voice search applications like Alexa, Siri, Google’s Voice assistant and Cortana in 2017, we can only assume that this trend isn’t going anywhere and will be there in more and more devices from smart speakers, smart TVs and more.

What It means for SEO is that, when you design the content of your website , make sure to have content in the form of non-branded variations such as “ find a family friendly hotel in Mumbai ” or “ What’s the best budget hotel in Goa “

These search queries are part of the preliminary research phase, so ensure that your hotel brand has visibility as part of the content.

Voice search also uses elements like local listings information, it is important to employ a strong local search strategy. Make sure your local listing information is used consistently across all platforms ( such as Google My Business, Bing Business pages, Tripadvisor, Booking.com, etc.).

Rich snippets will play a major role

If you have content that Google can use for it’s snippet when a particular search query is asked, then it doesn’t even matter if your website is in the first Google search result or not. Google has no signs of changing their tactics when it comes to featuring rich snippets on their results pages.

Make sure your content is designed in such a way that it answers a particular query in the most straight forward way possible so that Google can feature your rich snippet in their search results which gives an immense boost to your SEO efforts.

With the above trends, I hope that you can see where SEO is headed this year, especially when it comes to hotel websites.

This article was originally published in SiliconIndia magazine