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Hospitality SEO

In the digital age, travellers are quick to jump on their laptops or smartphones when looking for a place to stay. This means that your property should be online and ready to take bookings, but not only that, it also needs to be among the first results. That’s where hospitality SEO comes, which has the power to help you grow your website’s organic traffic.

Due to Google’s ever-changing algorithms and its many ranking factors, improving your SEO can be a complex challenge that may require expert guidance. Don’t fret, though. Just because it’s difficult doesn’t mean it can’t be done.

Let’s get into all the tips and tricks available to improve Hospitality SEO.

Not sure what you need? Book a free consultation with one of our SEO experts.

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What is Hospitality SEO?

If you aren’t already familiar, then this definition of SEO for hospitality will be helpful. SEO, or search engine optimisation in full, is the process of improving a website’s chances of ranking highly on search engine platforms like Google. For the hospitality industry, this basically means getting your company to rank on Google, thus getting traffic, which leads to revenue.

But how do you do SEO for hospitality? In short, by focusing on all aspects that impact traffic, including writing helpful content, using the right keywords, ensuring a seamless user experience on your website, and so on.

The Importance of Hotel SEO

The hospitality industry is a highly competitive industry, so taking advantage of any and every opportunity to beat out competitors is crucial. When someone searches for a place to stay on Google, there are often many results. But only the first few are clicked on or even considered, which is what makes hospitality SEO so important.

From a revenue perspective, SEO often offers the highest return on investment versus other forms of marketing, including advertising. Plus, the return on the initial investment can pay off for years, as opposed to advertising, which depends on your last payment.

Of course, we still encourage doing some form of paid advertising, like PPC for hotels if you’re a newer brand.

Tips & Guide to SEO for Hospitality

Now that you understand what SEO is and its importance for hospitality companies like yours, it’s time to learn how to do it. These actionable tips and guidelines have been tried and tested on hundreds of hotels, lodges, B&Bs, and the like.

If you’d prefer to have your SEO handled by professionals with proven results, consider looking at our SEO services for travel.

Use Strong Keywords Throughout the Website

Google and other search engines decide on which results to show based on the query, and the top results mainly get the spots because they use strong keywords across the entire site. Sure, other factors come into play, but they would never get those results without keywords.

Ask yourself, do the phrases that people use on Google when looking for a place to stay appear on your website? If not, they need to be included. But racking your brain trying to figure out what phrases people use seems daunting and time consuming, right?

Well, that’s where keyword research tools come in — they can help you figure out what keywords you’ll need to include for that specific page. First-party tools like Google Search Console and third-party tools like Ahrefs and Semrush are ready to help with finding travel keywords.

With your strong keywords in hand, you can start improving your SEO by updating page titles, meta descriptions, and subheadings.

Blog and Write SEO-Friendly Content

Keyword research is a staple of content creation and whenever it’s being talked about, the conversation is most likely about content writing — referring to blog posts. Outside of your main service and room pages, blogging is an incredible way to get organic traffic.

Blogging is often part of a sound SEO strategy because, with it, you can rank for phrases related to your location, nearby attractions, and even the main keywords you’re targetting. For instance, if you’re a pet-friendly hotel, you can write a blog post about pet-friendly things to do in your area. In it, you can then insert a heading about where to stay and mention your hotel because someone visiting that area likely needs a place to stay, too.

If you’re a newer website, we recommend starting small and then scaling up your content efforts. Do this by targeting long-tail keywords instead of the main keywords, for example, writing a post about “things to do in New York with teenagers” instead of “things to do in New York.” While the longer keyword does get a lower search volume, it’s also less competitive than the other, giving you a better chance to rank for it.

Focus On Your Website’s Technical Performance

Another important aspect of doing hotel SEO is appealing to the visual needs of your readers. This is achieved through the use of images and videos, which need to be high-quality, and photos must have appropriate alt text attached.

Speaking about images and videos brings us to the next point — the website’s loading speed. The size of images and videos plays a large role in loading times, with larger media files meaning the site will take longer to load. And that’s a large no-no in SEO in the eyes of Google and the reader.

Website visitors are thin on patience as they expect a page to load quickly, and Google agrees with them. As a result, a site that takes longer than three seconds to load will likely see high bounce rates, which Google will ultimately penalise and it also loses you guests.

Optimise the Business’ Google Business Profile and Local Listings

SEO for hotels doesn’t just depend on what you do on your website, there are external factors that matter, too. One of the most important ones for hotels is the Google Business Profile and other local listings.

Often, people searching for hotels may use Google Maps to find hotels near them or wherever they’re going. The only way to appear on this map is to have an up-to-date Google Business Profile complete with geo-modified keywords.

GBP best practices include creating a FAQs item, managing reviews, using appealing images and videos, and highlighting what differentiates your hotel from others. The same goes for local listings in relevant directories, which always need to have updated information.

Get Links from Reputable Websites

Another external factor that helps improve ranking is the number and quality of backlinks on your website. If you aren’t familiar, these are just links received from other websites to yours, which act as a vote of confidence in the eyes of Google.

However, when doing link building, you’ll have to be sure to do it ethically and not just buy them. Why? Google is known for penalising websites with suspicious link activity, which includes getting a ton of links at one go, swapping links with many sites, or spamming links in user-generated content.

All in all, you’ll want to acquire links naturally and ideally from reputable sources like the local press, other businesses, and so on. You can do so by doing something inclusion-worthy and then contacting these entities, and they’re likely to report on that.

Track Your SEO Results

After all that work, you’ll need to track your results to see what’s paying off and what’s not with the help of Google Search Console (GSC) and Google Analytics (GA). As the name suggests, both tools come from Google, so they’re free.

GSC will show you all organic search related data, including the performance of your posts and pages, what keywords you’re ranking for, and how the site is performing from a technical point of view.

GA will show you all website performance, focusing mostly on user experience and behaviour. In it, you can see where traffic comes from, what visitors do on your website, and other engagement metrics that affect SEO performance.

Based on the results, you’ll have to continue optimising your website for improved SEO performance. If there are keywords appearing on GSC that aren’t on your page, include them. If there’s a page that has a particularly high bounce rate, do a practical investigation to fix it.

Once you tackle your SEO issues, you’re likely to see an uptick in traffic.

If that’s not enough to help your site out, consult a travel SEO expert to get assistance from a professional.

Get Travel Tractions Hosting and Support

We totally understand that running your own website can be a hassle. Websites need regular updates, security, troubleshooting, consistent uploads, and many other time-consuming tasks that most business owners can’t commit to. We’ve gone above and beyond other travel and hotel marketing agencies and developed our Hosting and Support package.

It was specially designed to provide the extra support that our clients needed. You’ll receive website hosting, monthly maintenance, troubleshooting and support, content uploads, automated backups, and much more. If you’re the owner of a website that generates income but you don’t have the budget to hire a full-time developer to keep things running smoothly, this package is ideally suited for you.

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