Hi there, Brian Fitzgerald here with O’Rourke hospitality marketing. Want to continue our video series about vanity websites for branded hotels. And today I want to focus on search engine optimization or SEO, and talk about some of the benefits of SEO benefits than a vanity website can, can offer your property.

We’ll go back to this property that we’ve looked at in the past the Hilton garden in Atlanta downtown, when it comes to SEO, the opportunity really lies within the number of pages that your site has.

The more pages that you have, the more topics that you can cover through different pages, the wider, the breadth of keywords that you can go after.

And so in this case, this property has three pages. They have a homepage or rooms, page, and a gallery page, uh, which is inherently very limiting with only three pages.

There’s only so many keywords that, that that can be optimized for. Whereas on a vanity site, you often have a lot of that flexibility to create new pages and really provide a deeper detail on various topics about your property.

And so in this case, this is a Hilton property. And if I hover up here, I can see what their title tag is, which is often a good indication of what, what keyword they’re going after, and this is their homepage.

And so we can see it’s hotels in downtown Minneapolis. If we look at their rooms page, we can see it’s downtown Minneapolis accommodations, uh, their dining page, downtown Minneapolis restaurants, their local neighborhood page, it’s Minneapolis hotels near target field.

So they can really broaden the approach of different keywords and different topics that they’re going after. Uh, here’s one for weddings, wedding venues in downtown Minneapolis.

And so just the ability to have more pages and therefore go after more niche, keywords and different variations of keywords is a huge benefit to, to a vanity site.

The second thing I wanted to talk about is just the overall search results page or the, or the SERP as we call it.

And, uh, this is, uh, generally speaking, uh, a real estate game. You know, the, the more real estate that you can occupy on on this page, the better off you’re going to be the higher likelihood that you’re going to get that click from the consumer.

And so in this case, we’ve done a search for Canberra Asheville, and this first organic result is their vanity site.

And then this second organic result is their brand site. And what that does again, it’s a real estate game. We’re pushing somebody else further down the page and maximizing that opportunity to, to get that consumer, to click one of our results.

Uh, if you then pair that with some meta-search like they have here with this bar chart and over on the right, maybe you pair it with a paid search campaign you’re then capturing even more real estate.

And so having both the vanity listing and your brand listing is, is a good strategy from a, from a SERP standpoint.

And then the last thing I wanted to touch on is one of the things that, uh, Google and other search engines have been very vocal about over the years is they want to see fresh, relevant, interesting content.

And the way that that can often be done is through a blog. And this example, uh, we have, uh, some blog posts.

This is one about family-friendly things to do. And what this does is it offers you, and in this case, this property, the ability to create some longer form contact content that can go after again, many of those niche keywords that we know people are out there searching for, there might not be a ton of people searching for them, but even if you can capture a handful of new visitors to your site, by creating that useful, interesting, relevant content on an ongoing basis, this is another, um, another piece of the overall SEO strategy that can, that can really have a benefit, but that you can really only do through a vanity site.

Your, your brand site is not going to offer you the opportunity or ability to create this type of content. That’s really going to be valuable to that consumer.

And so, um, that being said in our next video, we’re going to do a deeper dive into the different types of content and the content options that a vanity site offers you.