5 Ways to Supercharge Your Hotel’s SEO Strategy
As a hotel marketing executive, your primary job is to get the most out of your digital marketing strategy. And you can’t win the digital game without dominating search. Your main goal should be to get your hotel on Google’s first page whenever a potential guest is searching for a property like yours. Nobody’s going to click to the second or third page of Google to find the right hotel.
Of course, we don’t have to tell you the importance of search engine optimization. The problem isn’t knowing to prioritize search. It’s figuring out how to stay on top of a highly competitive and constantly evolving space. Traditional SEO is a start, but it’s not enough on its own to get you the results you need. To win and defend highly coveted search engine results pages’ (SERP) territory, you need to get creative.
5 Ways to Take Your Property’s Search Engine Results Position to New Heights
Here are the five things you should be doing to optimize for your hotel’s overall SERP performance and stay a step ahead of the competition.
1. Backlinks Remain a Reliable Resource
Backlinks have long been an essential SEO tool. Rather than relying on what a business’s website says about itself, Google sees backlinks as a way to establish credibility. Think of inbound links as the rest of the web vouching for you. If you’re providing informative content or a fantastic service, you’re much more likely to receive mentions and links across other social media accounts and websites. For that reason, Google views backlinks as a measure of authority. The more links “in the wild” that point to your site, the more reputable Google will consider your website to be.
While that’s the general premise of how backlinks work, remember that not every link is equal. A link from a personal blog is less valuable than a link from a more reputable site. To improve your property’s backlinks, consider other sites your potential guests might encounter. Identify local event spaces, sporting arenas, seasonal festivals, the Chamber of Commerce, and other places in your community that bring people to the area. Ask whether your hotel could be listed on their websites as a place to stay if guests are visiting from out of town.
Use a free tool like The Hoth or ahrefs to check your website’s backlinks — and those of your competitors. These tools can uncover important competitive intelligence as you try to gain more inbound backlinks. More often than not, if you’re not showing up in search results, your inbound links are not as good as your competitors’.
2. Optimize Your Listings for the Local Search Ecosystem
Local search is exactly what it sounds like — search results that are tailored to highlight local listings. When users search for certain geographically specific phrases, Google returns a list of local businesses in addition to the typical search results. To get on that list, ensure your UNAP (URL, name, address, and phone number) are correctly listed in as many places as possible across the web. If Google finds your information doesn’t match across the various internet locations it checks, it won’t list you in the local search results.
To see if your information is accurately listed, use this tool to scan Google, Yelp, Facebook and dozens more maps, apps, search engines, and directories for your information. Hopefully, you’re in good shape. More likely, the tool will return mismatched names, addresses, and/or phone numbers. If that’s the case, reach out to your digital marketing partner for assistance.
With the rise of metasearch engines like Google Hotel Ads, traditional local packs of web search results have been blended to provide customers with a more comprehensive list of options. Google Hotel Ads allows hotels and other accommodation providers to list their properties and rates alongside those from other providers, providing customers with a more comprehensive list of options.
To improve your Google Hotel Ads results, make sure your website includes the most up-to-date information about the property, including high-quality images, room descriptions, and amenities. Additionally, having a robust online reputation management strategy and engaging with customers through online reviews and social media can boost visibility and attract more bookings.
3. Build Keyword-Specific Landing Pages for your PPC Campaigns
An effective way to enhance a PPC campaign is to build tailor-made landing pages that are user-friendly and have all the information that a potential customer may be looking for. For example, creating a specific landing page for a local conference or a landing page that caters to business travelers. These pages allow you to narrow your focus and let guests feel seen along with getting better quality scores from your ads.
This also includes having clear and concise headlines, detailed descriptions of rooms and amenities, and high-quality images of the hotel and its surroundings.
The landing pages should also have strong calls to action, such as booking buttons or contact forms, to encourage potential customers to take action. By having a well-designed landing page, the hotel owner can improve the user experience and increase the chances of converting website visitors into paying customers.
4. Claim Your Free Metasearch Listing
Metasearch is Google’s aggregation service in which they aggregate information from Expedia, Booking.com and other online booking services.
Google announced that it would now be possible to appear in metasearch results even without paying for metasearch ads. And free is good, right?
Ideally, you’d be running an ad that highlights your property, but a free listing is absolutely better than no listing. Find out more about claiming your free listing.
5. Take Advantage of the Rapid Rise of Voice Search
The growth rate of voice search has increased rapidly in recent years as more and more people adopt voice-activated virtual assistants, such as Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant and Apple’s Siri. According to recent studies, more than 55% of households in the United States have a smart speaker. In addition, the use of voice search is expected to increase by more than 30% annually over the next few years.
As consumers become more comfortable with voice search, it is becoming a popular way to find information and make purchases. Today more than 50% of adults use voice search at least once a day, and that number is expected to grow as the technology continues to improve. The widespread adoption of voice search has prompted many businesses to optimize their websites and online content for this type of search, as they recognize the potential benefits of reaching customers in this way.
To leverage voice search, consider adding something along the lines of an FAQ page. If you have content on your website already in the format of a question with an answer, you’re going to be better positioned to potentially show up as people are searching for things like, “Nashville hotel near opera house.”
And, as the technology progresses, more and more devices will have screens that allow you to interact with your voice while performing another activity. For example, a voice search for a hotel near an opera house might lead to a map displaying the hotel’s location on the device’s screen.
Follow These 5 Tips and Your Hotel’s Search Ranking Will Undoubtedly Improve
As a marketing executive, you’ve got a lot on your plate. It’s okay not to try every idea listed above at the same time, but try to work your way through each of them over a few weeks or a month. Remember, the sooner you get to them, the sooner you’ll start seeing results. If you’d like to hear more about how we help hotels like yours improve their SERP outcomes, let’s talk.