With increasing competition in the Hotel industry, SEO has become a more complicated puzzle in driving organic traffic to hotelier websites or landing pages. On the bright side,
it is still a cost-effective way to acquire recurring traffic that could lead to sales, if done properly. More direct sales would significantly reduce the commissions paid to OTAs.
If you are not familiar with what SEO means, take a look at SEO Moz‘s blog post. Here are the tips to
improve a hotel's position in search engines.
1. Have a Content Strategy
Most hotels overlook the importance of having a blog as maintaining it can be time-consuming but without a blog, it is almost impossible to develop a proper content marketing strategy. Search Engine users will be able to find your article if your blog post is relevant to them.
Create the list of articles that you want your team to publish every month and stick to the time table. Make sure you concentrate on the seasons and demography of the target audience to choose a topic that would
hold their attention.
If your hotel is in Singapore, an an example article could be 'Things to do in Singapore for newly wed couples' or if your hotel is in Madurai, one example would be
'Things to do in Madurai for Pilgrimage Tourists'. These articles would specifically target a set of audience planning to visit Singapore after their marriage or the audience planning a Pilgrimage
trip to Madurai. With high quality articles, you will be able to build a list of subscribers, which would lead to a surge in the number of bookings.
2. Focus on Long Tail Keywords
Using Long Tail Keywords as Page titles could give you a significant advantage over your competitors who make use of short tail keywords. Hotels employing short tail keywords such as 'Hotels in Beijing' would find it
extremely difficult to obtain a higher page ranking. Instead a keyword such as '3 Star Hotel near CBD, Beijing' would be more precise and offer your hotel a better chance of appearing higher on the search results.
3. Optimize the Images & include Image titles and alt Tags
Images - especially those listed in your blogs can often lead some traffic to your website. It is very important for your content writers to include visually appealing and pleasing images in your website.
Some developers believe high quality images can increase the page loading time because of their size. However, by optimizing the images using tools such as FileMinimizr, this problem can be sorted out.
Coming to the SEO part related to images, the title tag and alt tag have to be provided for the search engines to easily associate the image with a category.
Even though the image recognition and mapping algorithms & tools have evolved, these tags, especially those with long tail Keywords, can offer you a competitive edge.
4. Remove the Outdated Content. Stay Relevant!
How irritating would you feel if you find outdated offers in an ECommerce website? Do not give that feeling to your customers with the bad practice of not removing old seasonal offers. When you have time to keep your OTA listings relevant, you have to make time to remove outdated offers on your website and replace them with new ones, if any. If your website development firm has not provided you with the access to edit content, make use of a Content Management System.
5. Make use of Business Listings
Although, Google doesn't include every online Directory's link to be valid, it still accepts some. An easy way to gain links is to make use of these online directories. There are so many of them but to stay relevant to your market, make use of your local directories and only the top global directories. For example, if your hotel is in India, JustDial would be an automatic choice while in the US, you can not overlook Yelp. Irrespective of where your hotel is, Google Business Listing must have your hotel on it.
In addition to these 5 tips, make sure your website is responsive to mobiles and tablets as a signigicant chuck of online traffic is from mobile devices now.
Deepak founded VizConn in 2011 and writes about Digital Marketing, CMS, UX design and business in our blog. Got a question for Deepak? Let us know and we will pass it on to him. He responds to most questions via email.
