The Basics of SEO for Hotels
As a hotel owner, you probably haven’t thought much about SEO, especially if you’re not a marketing guru. We’re going to walk you through what SEO is, why it’s important to your business, and what you can do to help increase awareness of your hotel.
When you’re finished reading this article you should be able to go away with enough knowledge to start planning and implementing an SEO strategy that will bring more guests to your hotel.
What is SEO?
Several Elegant Ostriches? Sandwich Eating Otters? SEO is neither of those things. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. Simply put, this term refers to a number of different marketing practices that help get your landing pages to the top results when someone searches for a certain word (or set of words) in Google (and other search engines, but we’re just going to use Google as our example because it’s much easier).
Google uses a very specific algorithm to decide how it’s going to display its search results. If it showed people things they didn’t want to see, people wouldn’t use Google to look for things, would they?
There are 3 key properties Google takes into account when prioritising its search results: accessibility, relevance and usability.
A destination page’s accessibility defines how easily a search engine can index it. Relevance and user experience of the page determine how well the page aligns with the expectations of the searcher.
Poor user experience or irrelevant content makes users doubt the validity of the results that a search engine presents, eroding over time the user’s confidence in the search engine.
SEO is a set of strategies and tactics used to make your site more visible to Google and improve the likelihood of your site being found and ranked highly for key search terms. It basically says to Google “Hey, we’re a trustworthy site with the relevant information; show us to your users!”.
Why should I care?
Travelers turn search engines before visiting a hotel’s website. This is just one reason why search engine optimization is critical in gaining an edge over the competition.
Let’s say you have a hotel in Bournemouth. You want people to discover your hotel when they search Google for “hotels in bournemouth” — but there are a lot of other hotels in Bournemouth who want the same thing. You’re all competing with each other to get to the front page of Google (because who really looks at the second page?).
If you take certain measures and steps, you can help improve your position and increase your ranking in Google, resulting in more direct bookings and less commission paid to online travel agencies (OTA’s).
How do I optimise my hotel website for search engines?
Search engines work by crawling through the web and building an index of webpages with crawlers. This process provides users with a ranked list of the websites search engines have decided are the most relevant.
The process involves “crawling” and “indexing” all the billions of pieces of data on the internet. The search engine then uses this data to provide answers to user queries, usually through a list of pages that it’s retrieved and ranked for relevancy.
What are search engines looking for?
SEO is like a tree with many branches. Components of SEO include a multitude of various practices — we’re going to look at the key ones for hotels, which are on-page and off-site SEO.
On-page SEO
Keywords
Search engines rank content pieces in their results pages by relevancy and authority built through the content on your website. Keyword research is still the cornerstone of SEO. Rule number 1 for on-page SEO is to consider keywords your target audience will be searching, and ensure those keywords are present on the page.
Content Quality
You need unique and high-quality content that’s relevant and different from content on other sites in both wording and topics. This gives a real boost for your site’s online presence. It’s better to have longer, more meaningful pieces of 450 words or more.
Meta Tags: Title and Description
What’s written inside the title tag of your pages is shown in search results as your page title — this makes your title tags important for keyword placement. The title tag should be 65 characters or less, with the keyword towards beginning.
While the description tag itself isn’t a ranking factor, it appears within the search engine page results, and the click-through rate (CTR) is a factor. A higher CTR can lead to higher rankings. You should include the primary keyword within the description with a strong call to action and keep it to 145 characters or fewer
URL
Having your keywords in URLs will help a lot towards SEO. If, for example, the keyword you want to rank for is “budget hotel rooms”, you should include that in your URL — http:// yourhotel.com/budget-hotel-rooms. Remember though, if you don’t have the keywords in other part of the page, you can’t rely on simply having them in the URL.
Images
While search engines can’t read images, they can read the descriptions in the image file name and tags. You should include keywords in both of these, but they need to accurately describe what the image is (whether it’s a lobby, guest room, or banner ad).
Linking Internally
Internal links help users navigate and help establish importance to search engines by the number and quality of links to a given page. These are generally keywords or phrases that are linked from one page to another within your website.
Off-site SEO
Most SEO depends on off-page optimization. This is about building your website’s online authority though inbound signals from other websites. Off-site SEO is all about the quality and relevance of links to your website, which establishes your SEO authority and determines your search ranking results.
Link Building
Links from external websites is the main way search engines evaluate and rank your website. Link building is where you get other sites (preferable with high page ranks and domain authority) to point towards your website. So you need to think about four key things when link building:
Quality — the popularity of the page that links to you
Authority — the trustworthiness of the domain pointing to you
Quantity — the more high-quality, trustworthy pages that link to you, the better.
Diversity — you will want several variations of the anchor text on the target page.
External links are similar to internal links: they utilize anchored keywords but point to another domain’s page, rather than to a page from your own website.
As a hotel, you should think about partnering up with websites of local restaurants and attractions, community organizations and annual events groups, and also influential travel bloggers to share their content and vice versa. You can try writing articles or guest blog posts for these people and giving them a backlink on your website or blog in return.
What else do I need to think about?
While on-site and off-site SEO are the key players in climbing the rank ladder of search engines, there are a few other things you can do that also boost your position.
Social Media
Social media creates connections with customers, allowing businesses to have an open dialogue with them about their products and services. Although search engines don’t use social activity metrics — such as Facebook or Twitter shares, followers and likes — directly into their search ranking algorithms, social activity can have a powerful secondary impact on your SEO efforts.
Successful social activity can lead to increased visits, higher engagement, and brand signals (from users searching your site). With your content in front of the right users (i.e., influencers) all of this could lead to more links directly to your website and further sharing, and these secondary effects can significantly boost your SEO efforts. These are the most popular social platforms to build engagement: Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and Pinterest, but you should consider some of these in your marketing efforts:
Tripadvisor — More of a travel website than a social network site, it assists customers in finding travel information, reviews and opinions of travel-related content and engaging in interactive travel. Primarily user generated content, this is a direct platform to your customers.
Trover — This is an apps for those looking for travel inspiration. The home screen presents you with many different feeds of beautiful images to view.
Bootsnall — A travel community for independent travellers.
WAYN — Like some other social networking sites, WAYN enables its users to create a profile and upload photos. Users can search for other users and link them to their profiles as friends
Localisation
It’s important for local businesses — like hotels — to make sure can be found by local customers looking for their products or services.
For hotels, being optimized for local search can help increase the number of same-day bookings, especially if travelers can find your hotel website easily when they’re moving around, trying to find last minute rooms.
Information from local search properties like Google My Business, Bing Places for Business, and Yelp! are becoming more and more important as local search grows. Local results from these channels are prominently displayed in the search engine results on all the major search engines.
Citations (or “web references”) are mentions of a business name and address on a web page, even without a backlink to the website — for example, in an online yellow pages directory where a business is listed, but not linked. Exact match citations are important in the same way that inbound links are important to a website and each citation counts as a vote for a listing.
Mobile Optimisation
Search engines consider the format of the site and will rank pages based on how that page is going to look on a mobile screen. This is boils down to user experience: A mobile user wants a relevant page that they can read on a mobile device.
As of April 21st, 2015, mobile-optimized websites rank higher in Google mobile search engine rankings, which makes it all the more important to make your hotel website mobile responsive.
So that’s just scratching the surface of SEO for hotels, giving you an overview of how it works and what you can do to improve your rank in Google.
If you take these points into account, you can start working on improving your own landing pages, getting some quality backlinks, and improving your social activity and localization efforts.
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