Our Top Five Hotel SEO Tips
Google is a tricky beast. We need it now, more than ever, in order to bring in customers and fill bedrooms but for some reason your hotel may not be appearing for the search terms you feel are the most relevant to you. If this sounds familiar, then don’t worry. Here are five top tips that Wired Media knows will work for anyone working in the hospitality industry:
#1 Make Sure Your Hotel Website is Responsive
The amount of people who book their hotels online via a mobile phone or tablet currently accounts for around 50% of all traffic – and this figure is rising. Making sure that people are finding your website is hard enough, but it’ll be even more difficult if the majority of your users simply bounce off again.
Traffic engagement is one of Google’s ranking factors, so your hotel website design must be responsive to ensure that you not only have a better looking website, but a much better performing one as well!
#2 Get on Local Listings
Google maps can be your friend, especially if people are looking for hotels in a specific area. Make sure that your hotel is set up on local listings so that you’re showing up for all these search terms. This is a relatively simple thing to set up and it doesn’t require all that much management when it’s done – just remember to ensure that all your contact details etc are correct.
#3 Good Keyword Research
You know those search terms that you want to be found for? Well, making sure that they are relevant and finding out what the competition is like is very important. There are lots of different ways to conduct keyword research, but even more importantly is knowing what to do with it when you have it. Ensuring that your core keywords are included in your landing pages and are utilised properly in your meta information is absolutely vital. You may also have found some other relevant keywords that may not be ideal for landing pages, but these can be used in blogs to help bring in relevant, highly engaging traffic that’s likely to convert.
#4 Be Social
Like it or not, the importance of social media simply cannot be ignored. Not only is it a brilliant way to help increase awareness of your hotel and push out any offers or content that you have, but social shares are becoming more and more important as ranking signals. You don’t have to be a social media guru in order to master using these platforms for hotel SEO benefit. In fact, all you need to do is occasionally log on and share links to your unique content and promotional offers every now and again – the better you do this, the better your results will be.
#5 Use Analytics
Knowledge is power, and you can tweak, chop and change your website around till you’re blue in the face but without Google Analytics you won’t know the impact you’ve had. This system allows you to see how your visitors are engaging with your website, see where your referrals are coming from and find out whether or not your customers are converting. Setting this up is as simple as adding a bit of code to the header of your website and monitoring can be done simply without any in-depth knowledge of the metrics that are being used (although this definitely helps!).
The Alternative?
Hire in the professionals to do the job for you. Being a hotelier, in all likeliness you are far too busy to be trying to optimise your website for hotel SEO, so why not let someone else do it for you?
Wired Media is a Hotel SEO Specialist Agency with a catalogue of success stories across a range of different properties. If you’d like to find out what we can do for you, then give us a call on 0117 930 4365 or email our helpful team who are happy to talk you through our services.