SEO is essential to a successful hotel marketing strategy. If you’re not sure how to do hotel SEO, it might be time to consider outsourcing.
First, let’s start by defining what SEO is in terms of hotel marketing. That might give you a basis of what you should be looking for when considering an outside agency, or even doing it yourself.
What is hotel SEO?
Hotel SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a strategy for improving your hotel’s website performance by increasing the number of visitors that discover you via search engines. If you’ve ever heard other hotels referring to being “top of page 1” on Google results, that’s what your SEO is aiming for when it comes to the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
Making sure your website is SEO ready is no simple task. If done incorrectly, Google could punish you by not pushing your site to one of the results pages. When done correctly, you could see a serious uptick in traffic.
Focus First on On-Site SEO
The best place to begin is with your main website. This refers to the entire site, not just the home page where people land when they first visit. To make sure your site is fully optimized and SEO ready, here are some things to consider:
- Keywords – A keyword is a topic that all the information on your page revolves around. This should be carefully defined so that you can develop multiple keywords across your site to answer any number of search queries.
- Hotel Keyword Research – To better understand which keywords you should focus on, do some research in your industry. Use tools like Google Keyword Planner to get an idea of search volume and popularity. Top performers should be things you include on your website.
- Quality – Creating content for the sake of it won’t help your SERP results. You need to make sure every page and piece of content on your site adds value and answers questions.
Move onto On-Page SEO
On-page SEO is a piece of your on-site SEO puzzle. They go hand and hand. On-page typically revolves around content creation and how that content presents to search engines and users.
Things like blogs, about pages, and information guides are considered on-page SEO. This content should be relevant to what you’re trying to sell. 72% of marketers say that relevancy in content is what will improve SEO most.
Think carefully about Meta-descriptions.
If you know what a meta-description is, you know how important it is to your SEO. It’s 160 character HTML tag that summarizes the content on the page for search engines. A good description will uniquely describe the page contents and contain your relevant page keywords.
After great content, your meta-description is one of the most critical aspects of your SEO.
Don’t forget about Image Alt Text
Especially for hotel sites that have a lot of images, Alt Text is ultra-important. The Alt Text shows up when an image fails to load on your website and lets users known what they’re missing.
Not only does this improve the experience, but it also gives your image value for search engines, so that they can index your page accurately. Images are essential for hotels, so make sure yours are optimized.
While these are great tips, knowing how to do hotel SEO takes some real experience and an understanding of SEO best practices. For faster and better results, consider working with an outside agency.
