In this digital planet, running a hotel business without a website is the fastest way to decrease trust, credibility, and profit.
But, a hotel with a user-friendly website will surely enhance credibility and guest quantity daily.
Undoubtedly, thousands of visitors visit websites through search engines.
This is the way an SEO for hotel industry becomes important.
The blog would be your guided destination to understand the complete strategies of hotel SEO and beat your competitors.
What is the Role of SEO in Hotel Business?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the technique of optimizing and enhancing the ranking or visibility of a hotel website on the major search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, Duck Duck Go, and others).
Improving hotel booking, accelerating hotel presence online, and boosting traffic to your website is the importance of hotel SEO.
More interestingly, SEO is an essential technique including hotel digital marketing, and is a proven strategy to beat your competitors’ websites.
Why Hotels Need SEO?
When someone browses their needs online, they discover plenty of results from the search engines.
Mostly, they click the website that is visible on the top of the SERP, as they believe that it gives them exact answers to their questions. This can be their immediate action.
A minimum number of people will click on second, third, or fourth-positioned websites. To be in the top place, you’ll require seo strategies for hotels.
According to the Backlinko survey, no.1 posited in Google always gets 31/7% of all clicks.
The percentage decreases to 2.2% for the last result on the first page. So, you got the reason why Search Engine Optimization is important for maintaining the #1 result in Google.
If your hotel website is not visible on the First Page of Google, then the odds are, that the audience won’t find your hotel. Even, you’ll lose your targeted booking via your website.
SEO for Hotel Industry: Strategies for Your Hotel Website Ranking
A variety of proven hotel SEO tips: but, it’s quite essential to understand which ones are quite effective for website ranking. That’s why, we have some interesting SEO strategies for your hotels that ensure the ranking of your website. So, let’s get started:
- Identify your potential audience
This is the initial step to do SEO of your hotel website. First, you must have a smart plan to identify who is your target audience, what they like, and what are their booking methods.
Let’s understand through some examples:
|
Accommodation Types |
Highly Engaged Target Audience
|
|
A hotel with multiple entertaining activities |
Leisure travelers, sightseeing, Millennial (including families and friends),
|
|
Business Apartment |
Corporate or Business Travellers |
|
Resorts |
Millennial (Families, groups, and couples) |
|
Hostel |
Pocket-friendly, solo travellers, backpackers |
After identifying your audience’s tastes, consider what they will browse for their interested accommodations services.
For instance:
If you are a resort owner, then your potential audience will search for the following keywords:
- Best/Top resorts in “your area/city”
- Resorts in “your area/city”
These are known as “Keywords” or “Queries”. You have to research and find out the focus term that your audience mostly searches for.
However, these search terms are called KEYWORDS. Let’s figure out what, how, and why keywords are important.
2. Begin with keyword research
To implement strategic SEO for hotel industry, keyword plays a crucial role.
If you need to create a robust hotel SEO strategy, keyword selection becomes important. Basically, keywords can be terms, words, queries, and phrases that your target audience is using to find websites.
As the best SEO practice, monitor all the suitable search terms your audience may put in the search bar. The most usable keywords for hotels in Varanasi might be:
- Affordable hotels in Varanasi
- Best hotels in Varanasi
- Hotels in Varanasi
- Family hotels in Varanasi
- Hotels near Varanasi
- Hotels near Varanasi Airport
- Hotels near Varanasi railway station
These options help you to understand how you can discover the best keywords. However, you must have to check additional keywords to rank your hotel’s website higher on Google.
There are several keyword research tools are available such as Google Keyword Planner, Writers Zen, Ubbersuggest, Ahrefs, etc.
3. Create Meta Tag, Meta Description, and URL
The SEO in hotel industry can be ensured by structuring the webpage title, meta description, and URL.
These three are the essential elements that will be shown in the SERPs.
So, let’s discuss each one of them and create SEO-optimized content for your website ranking.
- Webpage Title: It is also called meta title, which is displayed on your browser tab and shows your audience what the webpage is about. Search Engine robots/crawlers and users also read this on your webpage.
- Meta Description: It is also known as an HTML tag that explains a page’s content. After the meta title, Google displays the meta description instantly. This plays an extremely essential role in considering your ranking. A well-structured meta description is always valued by Google as well as its users.
- Webpage URL: Each page of your hotel’s website is structured by a URL. You can consider, how a webpage URL comes as a technique of your SEO strategy. Trust me, it contributes effectively to your SEO for hotel industry.
4. Optimize Website Content
Okay, we’ll start with the content of your homepage. You need to place the focus keyword in the H1 heading.
Next, add the same keyword within the middle of the sentence within the first paragraph of the body.
SEO experts also advise writing homepage content of 800-1000 words including the keywords and their phrases.
Formulate website content in the form of articles, newsletters, and blogs that engage your audience on a large scale. You’ll be able to monitor particular keywords with the content.
For example– you can make a relevant blog on mostly searched topics like “top 10 activities to do in Shimla or 10 places to visit in Shimla, and they will definitely land on your blog page.
Now, let’s check out how this technique enhances traffic. Some travelers also go with topic searches such as 10 activities to do in Shimla, and they visit the blog page.
By reading your blog, chances that they take action as booking your hotel (if your content engages them!)
Plus, you can create a blog about the city, traditions, famous foods or cousins, tourist destinations, and other topics for SEO for hotel industry.
5. Include Alt Text to Images
In case of not displaying an image in the blog, Image alt text is an alternate text option. Below are some importance of writing appropriate alt-text for each image:
- Google doesn’t understand images. Putting alt-text to the images will inform Google to index your images accordingly.
- Screen-reading tools easily read alt-text to explain what are images about to visually impaired readers.
- The factor is known as the image search engine, which is most important for SEO for hotel industry. You’ve to use this to ensure a higher ranking on search engines.
6. Set Headings and Sub-headings
The headings make your users and search engines understand what the is content about to your website. They describe which parts of your content are mandatory, and display how each heading is connected to each others.
Well-structured content is easy to read for the users, which is effective for your hotel’s SEO ranking. Moreover, headings provide you with an amazing opportunity to put your focus keyword.
It is considered that adjusting the heading tags should not be only for SEO purposes, but your content should be for website searchers and readers. Cross-check your content for better readability after putting these tags.
7. Enhance the website’s loading speed
The loading speed of a website is a major factor that impacts your hotel website’s SEO. You have to admit the truth that today’s audience is impatient. They value their precious time.
We understand it’s a quite hard task but this might be effective to make you understand what you should ask your website designer.
Steps to check the loading speed of your website:
- Visit Google Page Speed Insight
- Put your website URL and press the ANALYZE button
- Have some patience to see your website’s loading performance
- See what’s website score for mobile and desktop. It will also show the error factors of your website that need to be resolved quickly.
- Inform your website provider or SEO executive of these issues and optimize your website for better rank.
8. Optimize Mobile-friendly Website
According to the research, 65% of Google searchers are measured through mobile devices. It means you need to have SEO for hotel industry as well as a mobile-responsive website.
Steps to check your website is mobile-optimized:
- Go for “Mobile-friendly Test”
- Put your website URL and press the “Test URL” button
- Analyze whether your website is mobile-optimized or not
- See whether your page is mobile-optimized or not. In case not mobile-friendliness, it will show fixing issues to your website. Familiar with your website designer to fix it quickly.
9. Create and Submit the Website Sitemap
As the name indicates, a website sitemap is a map of your overall website pages. It displays all of your pages on your websites.
By listing your sitemap in the file, you tell search engines about the business of your site content. Search Engines analyze this file to index every page of the website. So, it is mandatory to build a sitemap as an integral part of SEO for hotel industry.
Conclusion
We hope you’ve understood the SEO and its practices for your hotels. If you need a professional, user-friendly, and SEO-optimized website, you can hire an SEO expert or drop a comment if you need an experienced digital marketing agency in Varanasi.
Keep in mind all these strategies of SEO for hotel industry that you can implement to improve your hotel website visibility on the world’s largest Search Engine Google.