If you’re like most hoteliers or small business owners in the hospitality industry, you go out of your way to ensure your visitors have the time of their lives. So, you probably also want to guarantee that they have a stellar online experience to match, right? And this all starts with search engine optimisation for hotels.
Learning how to build a strong hotel SEO strategy can get pretty confusing, and it’s difficult to know where to start, but we’re here to remind you that you don’t need bucketloads of experience or even a “techy” personality to succeed at the web search game.
If you want to turn on the tap to an abundant flow of quality website traffic from users who actually want to book a room in your hotel, there are plenty of simple steps that you can implement right now at little to no cost. But first, an explainer…
Contents
- Simplifying hotel SEO: What Is It?
- Your Hotel SEO Building Blocks: basic principles and keywords
- 17 Actionable Tips To Kickstart Your Hotel SEO Strategy
- Quickfire dos and don’ts
- Add Hotel SEO To Your Marketing Toolkit
Simplifying hotel SEO: What is it?
Hold your horses. What on earth is SEO anyway?
SEO is an initialism for search engine optimisation and it’s a process by which you improve your website and website content to achieve greater visibility on the top search engines such as Google or Bing.
If you want to take first dibs at persuading the 35 million annual hotel users in the UK to stay at your holiday accommodation, you’ll want to snatch the top spot on Google’s search engine results pages. But why? Here’s another factoid for you: 53% of all web traffic comes from organic search. That means that having a strong presence on search engines can significantly boost your hotel’s online visibility and attract potential guests.
Why SEO is vital to the hotel industry
With millions of users relying on search engines to find accommodations, securing a top spot on Google’s search engine results pages becomes a crucial aspect of your digital marketing strategy – especially as number one gets you an eye-watering 31.7% of the clicks!
So, if you’re aiming to stay ahead in the competitive hospitality industry, mastering the art of hotel SEO is not just a luxury but a necessity. It’s the key to ensuring that your accommodation stands out and captures the attention of those 35 million hotel goers we just mentioned, giving you a better chance of turning clicks into bookings.
Without the jargon: hotel SEO helps you hoover up more business by getting more eyeballs on your website and more direct bookings from your guests.
Your hotel SEO building blocks: basic principles and keywords
Before we take the leap into hotel SEO, it’s worth pausing and taking in the basics. These principles should inform every aspect of your overall strategy, allowing you to refine your actions and serve up content that will reach your specific audience, turning clicks into bookings.
Refining your brand message
If you don’t already have tight brand guidelines that account for your digital output, this is your cue to make a start on them. Crafting a strong online presence requires a cohesive brand identity that users can identify with your offering and recognise.
Define your hotel’s personality, articulate a unique value proposition, and maintain a consistent tone of voice across all digital platforms. You’ll also want to choose a colour palette, logo, typography, and imagery that aligns with your brand, ensuring that crucial recognition and professionalism.
And if you want to go the extra mile, extend brand consistency to social media and collaboration efforts, regularly reviewing and updating guidelines to stay relevant and aligned with your business objectives.
Defining your target market
Getting inside your audience’s head is key to a solid SEO campaign. Understanding the demographics, preferences, and behaviours of your audience allows you to tailor your content and SEO strategy to meet their specific needs.
Usually, this all revolves around search intent, i.e., what queries your audience is making and what sort of content satisfies your queries. Having this in-depth understanding of your particular niche enables you to outcompete competitors and turn one-time customers into repeat visitors who appreciate and look forward to your offering.
Getting to grips with keywords
Dive into keyword research not only to discover what terms are popular but also to understand the search intent behind them. Recognising why users are searching enables you to align your content with their expectations, increasing the likelihood of capturing their attention and converting clicks into bookings.
By incorporating insights into your audience’s mindset, you can refine your approach, making your hotel more visible and appealing to the right people in the competitive online landscape. It’s all about speaking their language.
Now put a pin in that – we’ll come back to it in more detail very soon.
17 actionable tips to kickstart your hotel SEO strategy
Now we’ve covered the basics, are you ready to get to grips with the nitty-gritty? Here are 17 practical tips you can put into practice from today.
We’ve broken them down into 4 main categories to make things easier: website, content, links and complementary strategies. Let’s take a look.
Revitalise your website
When it comes to SEO, the best place to start is your website. It’s your company’s digital shopfront and the bedrock of your hotel SEO strategy. Once you’ve optimised it for search engines, it will be much easier to keep that valuable traffic on your web pages and travelling along the journey towards bookings.
1. Make it a breeze to use
Making your website easy to navigate and intuitive to use is hands-down one of the best things you can do for SEO. Cast your mind back to a poor website you may have stumbled upon in the past – could you find what you were looking for? Was it confusing or badly organised? Chances are, you clicked off it and never gave it a second thought.
While it’s true that hotels within a chain often lack substantial control over the appearance and structure of their websites, there are ways to improve things without an in-depth knowledge of HTML coding, for example. And if you’re running a small, independent place, sure, you might have some input, but good luck trying to tweak the design yourself.
But hey, no need to stress! There are many tactics you can employ minus this expertise: for a start, you can pick a high-quality CMS that will serve your company’s needs and allow for best-practice SEO.
Other tactics include making sure that the site is mobile-friendly and functions well across devices. Ensure that key elements in your website’s design are foolproof – no one wants a broken booking system! And, finally, check that all of your URLs are working: you can use tools such as the Ahrefs Site Audit to uncover them for free!
2. Entice with appealing design
According to Top Design Firms, visual elements such as images, colour and videos are among the top elements that consumers value on a business website. So, while the technical stuff is important, ensure that your pages are uncluttered, visually appealing and offer eye-catching content.
3. Improve load speed
Load speed is another weighty consideration. In fact, Google considers this factor a key metric in its ranking process (PageSpeed). Crucially, a fast-loading website not only enhances the user experience but also positively influences search engine rankings. This means that low-loading pages can lead to increased bounce rates (AKA users leaving the page), affecting both user satisfaction and SEO performance.
You can optimise images, leverage browser caching, and streamline code to ensure swift loading times or simply avoid unnecessary dynamic content such as videos and animations – modifications that are typically considered more sustainable web design preferences.
4. Resurrect your blog
Does a hotel website really need a blog? Hell yeah! Even if you’re the smallest of small businesses, the benefits of a well-maintained and captivating blog can’t be understated. While planning, designing, monitoring and posting on your blog all take up time and resources the ROI can certainly be worth it.
Not only do they keep your website fresh and relevant in your niche, blogs are the hotbed of SEO results. Google and other search engines don’t tend to favour websites that are stagnant and collecting dust when they’re deciding what pages to rank on page one of the SERPs. And with so much website traffic originating from organic search, it’d be a bit daft not to use this to our advantage. And the best part? Anyone can do it, not just the tech bros.
If you’re prioritising business recovery right now, showing up consistently online is a wonderful strategy that can keep you on-trend, relevant and reaching the right audience.
Before your eyes glaze over in fear, don’t worry, consistent can look different depending on the available resources. Whether it’s once a week or once a month, blogging can be valuable as long as your posts go up on a regular schedule.
5. Accessibility = more customers
This step ties into a couple of the steps that we’ve mentioned above – appealing design and improved load speed. Ensuring your website is accessible to all users, including those with disabilities, is not just a moral imperative but a strategic business decision. An accessible website, featuring alt text for images and an intuitive interface, not only enhances user experience but also opens your hotel to a wider audience.
It aligns with the principles of inclusive design, making your digital space welcoming to everyone. Beyond ethical considerations, accessibility improvements can positively impact SEO by creating a more user-friendly environment.
6. Make sure it’s all wired up properly
One of the reasons that your website might not be ranking is that the structure is off. To put that into context, Top Design Firms found that 38% of users look at a website’s page layout or navigational links when visiting a website for the first time. Many will leave your site if it is poorly organised, so consider remapping your URLs if they’re messy and ensure every is signposted and logically laid out.
Create cutting-edge content
You might have heard along the grapevine that “content is king”. While it’s a tired phrase, it doesn’t negate the truth: content creation and content marketing are the bread and butter of SEO.
These next few steps will provide pointers on how to create content that will rank in search engines, keep eyes on your site and get users converting.
7. Give the people what they want
When you design and curate your content there should be two words at the front of your mind: search intent. Search intent is all about putting yourself in your audience’s shoes and serving up exactly what they want and need.
Take it like this.
If you picked up a book and its cover was designed with soft pastel colours and a couple gazing into each other’s eyes front and centre, you’d expect it to be a romance, right? Now imagine, you opened this book, and it turned out to be a sci-fi horror. Confused? Yep. Would you put it down? Probably.
The same idea is true of your website content: if you don’t provide what they want, need and expect they might click off your site in seconds.
To really succeed at your hotel SEO strategy, you need to underpin your work with an in-depth understanding of how customers and potential customers think. Consider what they’re looking for in a webpage and ensure that yours satisfies each of their requirements and more.
A good place to start here is by taking to Google and searching for terms relevant to your business – what are the related terms? What are people looking for? What are your competitors offering? The answers to these questions will point you in the right direction.
8. Seed your content with relevant keywords
Once armed with a list of targeted keywords (see above), strategically place them in key elements of your content. Incorporate them naturally into your headlines, subheadings, and throughout the body of your text. However, remember that keyword stuffing – the excessive and unnatural use of keywords – can harm your SEO efforts. Aim for a balance that enhances readability while signalling relevance to search engines.
9. Get the structure right
Just as your website structure matters, so does your page structure. A well-written piece of content necessitates the proper use of headers, hierarchically from H1 to H3 and so on. These header tags not only make for an easier reading experience but also aid SEO as they make pages easier for search engines to parse, boosting discoverability in the long run.
10. Write like a pro
Once you’ve got people on your page, you want them to stick around. And this is where a flair for writing comes in. You might have all the technical stuff like keywords and on-page SEO down, but if your copy is boring, well… It suffices to say that captivating and engaging content is the glue that holds your audience’s attention.
Craft compelling narratives, use persuasive language, and provide valuable information. Consider the search intent of your audience – what are they looking for, and how can your content meet those needs? Match that with your writing style and you can’t go wrong.
11. Build a sustainable content strategy
If you’re feeling a bit tapped out or your content ideas have all but dried up, don’t worry – you’re not alone! To market your hotel effectively you need a consistent and high-level stream of content and that’s not an easy feat!
In order to ease this brain-strain you’ll need to think about your hotel SEO strategy from a more tactical lens. One way to make things easier for yourself, for example, is to create a set of content pillars for you to draw inspiration from; ideally, these will include repeatable post types, streamline your process and help you maintain consistency across your blog and other marketing channels.
Psst! If you’re still struggling with content ideas, check out our previous blog all about finding blog topics that create a ‘buzz’.
Curate a healthy pool of backlinks
Building a robust backlink profile is a cornerstone of a successful hotel SEO strategy. Backlinks, or inbound links, are like digital recommendations that vouch for the credibility and relevance of your website. If you want to get into the nitty gritty, check out our detailed explainer into backlinks and how they help SEO.
12. Tap into local business directories
Tap into local business directories to fortify your backlink profile. These directories, such as Yelp or TripAdvisor, provide valuable citations that enhance your hotel’s online presence and get users hopping onto your site. Discover effective strategies for leveraging local directories with insights from our business listing breakdown – we have over UK 70 listings for you to consider!
13. Optimise your company profiles across the web
Your company’s online profiles from LinkedIn to Facebook can be thought as digital ambassadors that can significantly impact your SEO, positioning your brand as a serious and professional player on the world stage. Optimising these profiles across various platforms is a strategic move to enhance your hotel’s visibility and is a quick and easy way to improve your backlink profile.
14. Collaborate, collaborate, collaborate
Collaboration is a potent force in the digital landscape, especially when it comes to building backlinks. Engaging in collaborative efforts with other businesses and influencers can amplify your hotel’s online presence and organically grow your business – and for often very little expense, or even free!
Pair with complementary strategies
Another crucial thing not to miss is the opportunity for experimentation. Supporting your SEO efforts with other, complementary strategies can boost your ROI and ensure your overall marketing plan remains robust. And here is a trio that pairs particularly well.
15. SEO X social media
SEO and social media are like the dynamic duo of online visibility. Combining these strategies can significantly boost your hotel’s reach and engagement, keeping repeat customers loyal and new customers intrigued. Social signals, such as likes and shares, aren’t factors that Google takes into account when ranking your content, but they can impact SEO rankings indirectly.
Integrating your SEO efforts with a well-crafted social media plan ensures that your content resonates with your audience across various platforms and your brand awareness remains top-notch.
16. SEO X PPC
If you hadn’t heard, SEO and PPC get on like a house on fire. While SEO focuses on organic search results, PPC allows you to target specific keywords through paid advertising. The synergy between these two strategies creates a comprehensive approach to capturing your audience’s attention that makes the most of both existing and untapped audiences.
17. SEO X traditional marketing
In an era dominated by digital strategies, the combo of SEO with traditional marketing channels can offer a unique advantage. From print media to radio and television, traditional marketing still holds sway in certain demographics, such as the B2B space where networking events and panel discussions still hold prominence.
Quickfire dos and don’ts
Do revisit your keywords
Regularly update and refine your list of keywords based on changing trends and user behaviour. Stay relevant to what your audience is searching for and repurpose existing content to drive more traffic.
Don’t neglect the planning
Effective SEO requires a strategic approach. Plan your content, keywords, and overall strategy to ensure a cohesive and targeted online presence.
Do invest in SEO tools
Explore and invest in SEO tools that can streamline your efforts. From keyword research to performance tracking, these tools can be invaluable for optimising your strategy.
Do give your website regular checkups
Regularly audit your website for issues that might affect SEO, such as broken links, slow loading times, or outdated content. Keep your digital shopfront in top-notch condition.
Don’t bite off more than you can chew
Start with manageable goals and gradually expand your SEO efforts. Avoid overwhelming yourself with too many tasks at once. Consistency is key.
Add hotel SEO to your marketing toolkit
In the dynamic landscape of the hospitality industry, where online visibility can make or break your success, integrating hotel SEO into your marketing toolkit emerges as a strategic imperative.
We’ve watched many a hotel grow via these approaches and hope they serve you well. But if things are still looking murky, consider reaching out to an SEO professional for specialist guidance or to get the legwork done for you.
Sounds like just what you need? Make a ‘beeline’ to beefound.agency, the experts in hotel SEO, and elevate your online presence – your success story begins with a simple click.
