SEO marketing is a powerful strategy used by businesses in many industries to heighten online awareness and drive traffic. For hotels, in particular, SEO can increase online visibility and more effectively target their ideal guests. With so many hotels available for booking, your great customer service can get lost in the crowd. The higher your website ranks, the more likely potential customers will find you and book a room. In this article, you’ll learn five ways hotels can use SEO campaign services to grow their business.
1. SEO-Friendly Web Design
Though it might not be common knowledge, site speed and mobile friendliness are intrinsically linked because Google wants to provide results that offer a positive user experience. Imagine clicking on a website that’s taking forever to load. When consumers are looking to book a hotel, especially when they’re comparing different ones, site speed is probably an unconscious checklist item. If your hotel website is taking too long to load, you may lose a potential customer before they even see the packages you offer.
Google’s Core Web Vitals update notes that a “good” site load speed is under 2.5 seconds while a “poor” site load speed is just over 4.0 seconds – that’s not a very big margin. Hotel websites often have a lot of content, including pictures, extensive write-ups, and videos. Therefore, you need to prioritize a professionally optimized website that can handle all the visual content. A web professional understands how to compress the images and videos used to showcase your hotel rooms and other parts of the property while keeping your site speedy.
Mobile-friendliness refers to how well your website adapts to different device screen sizes and orientations. Not taking the time to design a mobile-friendly website can vastly decrease your business. After all, most people have some sort of smartphone and often use that for frequent browsing throughout the day. A web service isn’t just for optimizing your desktop hotel web page, but for ensuring that your mobile site is just as reliable.
2. Link Building Services
Off-site SEO is just as important as technical SEO for the success of your hotel. One way to strengthen your off-site SEO is through backlinks. Building links from other reputable websites in the same niche is essential to help a website rank higher in Google. These other links can include related businesses such as car services, city guides, and more. When hotels acquire backlinks, those links signal to search engines that the website is trustworthy, authoritative, and relevant to the industry. As you obtain more backlinks for your site, those quality backlinks can boost your site’s perception and allow it to move up the ranks in search results.
Building links for a hotel website doesn’t usually happen by accident. While you may receive some natural backlinks without even trying, you’ll still need to create and post engaging content that other websites want to link to. Such engaging content should highlight connections to the community and local/special events. Whoever manages the hotel website can reach out to related websites in their niche and offer to write guest posts or do a link exchange so both sites can benefit
3. Keyword Monitoring
Keywords are the words and phrases that users type into search engines when looking for information, products, or services. Keyword monitoring helps businesses understand what their target audience is searching for. By staying up to date with the most relevant and competitive keywords, your website can become more competitive.
Digital marketers understand how to monitor keywords for best results using the best available tools such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and SEMrush. These tools help marketing professionals track your keyword performance, identify new keyword opportunities, analyze your competitors’ keywords, and optimize your keyword strategy. They can further analyze how well a keyword is doing throughout the week, month, or year. Talk to your marketing team to find the keywords that have the most impact on your hotel web content.
4. Conversions
The ultimate goal of SEO marketing is not just to drive more traffic to your website, but to convert that traffic into bookings. Conversions are actions that visitors will take when they are on a website or social media page. For most hotels, the preferred conversion is making a direct reservation. However, subscribing to a newsletter or filling out a questionnaire can also help hotel stakeholders see what customers are looking for and how they can tailor marketing to yield effective conversions.
According to Google, you should use clear and compelling CTAs to increase conversion. Something as simple as “contact us for a booking” or “click here for an ideal vacation room” can be effective. You can also incorporate hotel ratings on your website, add customer testimonials, and include links to social media reviews to optimize conversions. Social proof goes a long way in building client trust, as they’ll feel more confident if other guests have positive things to say about your amenities, service, and value.
5. Content
You can’t have effective SEO marketing for hotels without publishing quality content that stands out. You’ll want blog posts and social media content that can quickly attract viewers and keep them clicking through your site to learn more information. When they view a blog post, testimonial, photo, or video, they should feel they’ve learned something about your hotel and what you offer. No matter how many keywords, phrases, and analytics you enlist, it won’t matter if people don’t want to engage in your content.
With a solid editorial calendar, you can plan the type of content that will go up on your hotel website. Use evergreen content that will stay up year-round and supply information about the hotel that won’t change. You can also have seasonal content that caters to people on summer vacations, holiday trips, weddings, and so on.
SEO marketing is a powerful way for hotels to grow their online presence, attract more guests, and increase their revenue. SEO campaign services can ensure that your hotel builds a strong web presence and is seen by as many potential new customers as possible. But when you’re busy running a hotel, you shouldn’t worry about setting up your website, creating new blog posts, or posting on your social media pages. You can leave that work to the marketing professionals who understand what goes into SEO campaign services. At Digital Current, we stay updated on all of the latest SEO updates that can impact your site and help your hotel stand out for the right reasons. Contact us today to learn more.
