Search Engine Optimization for hotels, or SEO for hotels, helps your hotel’s Web site earn a higher ranking in search engine results. SEO is very competitive, particularly in the cutthroat business of hotels and tourism.
If you build your online profile in a way that speaks directly to your customers’ wants and needs, you will find greater success in booking rooms. Look at these statistics about travelers:
- When deciding between two hotels, 65% of people say that seeing a management response would sway them to book with the responding hotel (Forrester)
- Personal (45%) and business (54%) travelers make travel plans based on reviews from others (Google, Think Insights)
- Personal (40%) and business (46%) travelers use social networking to share their experiences (Google, Think Insights)
By understanding how SEO works in promoting your hotel, you can expect more page views on your Web site, which will ultimately lead to more bookings. Reputation Rhino, a New York SEO company recently published an amazing FREE eBook called: SEO Made Simple, which you can download by clicking the link immediately below:
SEO Tips and Strategies
The more indexed Web pages, the better! A HubSpot survey found that the more pages a Web site has, the more leads it generates…by a lot. For companies with over 311 pages, they averaged 74 leads per month. For companies with Web sites between 176 and 310 pages, those companies enjoyed only 22 leads per month.
What does this mean for hotel Web sites and SEO for hotels? Create pages for every important element of your hotel, from the restaurant to the spa, complete with landing pages and subpages. The more content you create, the more you will get noticed.
SEO Tactics
The latest trend is to focus marketing budgets on inbound marketing, and away from outbound marketing. Besides SEO for hotels, inbound marketing tactics can include social media sites and virtual events.
1. Keywords are king. The most important thing you can do for SEO on your Web site is to determine the appropriate keywords and use them often throughout your many Web site pages. The key here is to choose keywords that your user will be using to search for your hotel; so think in layman’s terms. Also, always include your location, since location is one priority for travelers (the other being price).
2. Make your pictures count. Pictures are just as important as the text on your Web site when it comes to SEO. Customers want to see pictures to get an idea of the quality of your rooms and other areas of your hotel, so your Web site should have many pictures. The important thing for SEO in this instance is that search engines can read the file names of your pictures within the HTML code. Rather than naming your files “Room139020” give it a better descriptor: “Two Double Beds and Mini Bar.” Next, create an alt tag for each photo, which is a short piece of code that allows you to tag each photo with a short text caption. These text captions also are searchable by search engines.
3. Hire the best SEO company. As a New York SEO company that has worked with some of the largest hotel and travel services companies in the world, we know there are many choices for an SEO company, but here’s what you need to look for to ensure the best SEO for hotels. First, look for a company that understands the laws in your state for hotel marketing. Next, make sure that the company presents extraordinary writing, since the writing is what will get you noticed by search engines. Be wary of the “affordable” SEO companies, since they typically outsource their writing and other SEO activities overseas.
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