SEO for Hotel Strategy to Increase Your Website Visitors

Applying an SEO for hotel strategy is increasingly needed in running the lodging business in today's digital era. Tourists or potential visitors will search for hotel information on the internet and other digital platforms. Therefore, the competition in the hotel business is increasing.

Users tend to choose trusted hotels that provide details of the business operation on their websites. Even more so if the hotel is in the top results of Google when they look for the information online.

This guideline will show you the importance of SEO for hotel strategies and its best practices that you can apply to your hospitality business. Read more about it below.

What is Hotel SEO?

Hotel SEO is a method to optimize hotel websites in order to increase the number of visitors and achieve the highest ranking of the SERP. SEO for hotel strategies are a part of a hotel's digital marketing practices to win the competition against the other competitors on the search engine.

The purpose of implementing hotel SEO is to build brand awareness, bring potential customers to the website, and increase the number of hotel bookings on the website. 

The Importance of SEO for Hotel Strategies

The importance of SEO for hotel strategies is for your business to have a greater chance of getting bookings on the website. This is because most of the transactions that occur on the website come from organic traffic.

However, online consumers tend to only visit websites that are in the top three rankings. Therefore, organic traffic can only be obtained if your website gets a top ranking on the search page.

By implementing SEO for hotel websites, you can get many benefits such as:

• Bringing organic traffic: SEO brings organic traffic that can be obtained for free for a long period of time.
• Consumers with high intent: People who search on search engines tend to have high search intent to make purchases, especially in the type of transactional keywords.
• Hotel and travel search trends: Over the past few decades, searches on the topic of travel and hotels have continued to increase. If you do not take advantage of this trend well, then you will miss many opportunities.
• Commission-free hotel bookings: If you use an Online Travel Agent, you have to pay a commission for every booking you get. With your own website, you don't have to pay commission fees. You can save the budget for other marketing activities that have a positive impact on business, such as SEO content marketing and collaboration with brands that are relevant to the hospitality business.

Hotel SEO Best Practices

The best way to apply SEO for hotel strategies is to implement various best practices to improve website performance for users or search engines.

Some of the best practices that you can do are hotel keyword research, content marketing, on-page and technical optimization, and take advantage of Google My Business..

Conduct Research for Hotel Keywords

An important component that you must pay attention to to bring potential traffic to your website is keywords. Keywords are words used by users to search for a particular topic on search engines.

If you want to get a lot of traffic and potential customers, make sure you are targeting the right hotel keywords to your website. Hotel keywords contain various search queries that are used by the audience to find information about hotels.

There are four types of keywords that you need to know based on the search intent of your audience. These types of keywords are very important to know because they can help you understand the role of each one of them and develop a content strategy.

• Informational keywords: Keywords used to find information related to hotel topics. Examples: 'tips for choosing a hotel', 'tips on staying at a hotel', and 'how to check in a hotel'.
• Navigational keywords: Keywords used to search for specific brands or information from a hotel. Example: 'hotel harris in jakarta' or 'cancellation of booking at hotel santika'.
• Commercial keywords: Keywords that are used when users contemplate choices before making a decision. Example: 'best hotel in Malang' and 'hotel with private pool'.
• Transactional keywords: Keywords used when an audience is ready to make a purchase. Example: 'hotel room for two people in bogor' and 'cheap lodging rent'.

Produce High Quality Content

After determining the keywords to target, you can start producing content. There are various content formats for hotel websites. You can create articles, FAQs, product or offer pages, and so on.

Create high quality content that is able to answer the needs of the audience based on their search intent. Each of your content must also be trusted and able to provide a pleasant user experience.

Create SEO-friendly Titles, Meta Descriptions and URLs

Your content will not be able to get high rankings if it is not optimized. Some important aspects of content that you can optimize are the title or title tag, meta description, and URL.

In order to make your content appear in the SERP, you need to make sure the target hotel keywords are included in the meta title, meta description, and URL. Then, make your meta title and meta description unique and different from copywriting. Also, optimize the URL slug by making it not too long and easy to understand.

Image Optimization

Image is one of the important elements in a content. Providing photos of room interiors, waiters, or hotel facilities can increase engagement as they influence audiences to book hotels.

Make sure the images you use are optimized to improve the SEO. There are ways to do an image optimization, which are to reduce the image size below 100 kb, change the image format to Webp, use keywords in the image file name and alt image, and make sure the image is original or comes from a royalty-free website.

Increase Page Speed

Website speed performance is a crucial aspect that you should pay attention to in implementing SEO for hotel strategies. A slow website will give a bad experience to visitors. This issue needs to be avoided since user experience greatly influences the purchasing decisions of potential consumers.

Some aspects that affect website speed are hosting, file size such as images and programming code (CSS, HTML, and Javascript), use of caching, URLs with 301 redirects, and use of AMP. To effectively increase page speed, you can learn more through our guide to speed up website loading.

Ensure the Websites’s Mobile Friendliness

Most people nowadays access websites via smartphones because of its practicality. Therefore, every website must provide a mobile friendly interface for smartphone users.

There are a variety of free tools to test how well a website looks mobile. One of the tools that you can use is the Mobile Friendly Test from cmlabs.

Use Structured Data

Do you want to increase your website's visibility and CTR on search results pages? The tip is to use structured data. Websites with structured data can make it easier for search engines to understand the content and how it is presented on the SERPs.

The benefit that you will get when using structured data is that your website will look more visually attractive on the SERPs compared to regular search snippets.

If you want to create structured data easily, you can use the JSON-LD Schema Generator from cmlabs which is available for free.

Use Local SEO Strategies

Local SEO is a method to increase traffic, leads, and brand awareness in local searches. The hotel business needs to implement this strategy because 76% of consumers tend to search for information on a search engine before visiting a local business such as a hotel.

If your website manages to rank on the first page of the SERP for local keywords, then it will be more easily found by potential customers. Check out this local SEO guide if you want your hotel business to dominate the local market.

Google Business Profile Optimization

In addition to website optimization, you can also implement other SEO for hotel strategies such as optimizing your Google My Business. This free feature from Google allows you to display hotel profiles such as addresses, contacts, and website links on Google search pages and Google Maps.

In addition to the optimization of the Google Business Profile, you are required to do a periodical monitoring of customer reviews and Google My Business ratings. To increase the level of engagement, you can interact more with comments left by users and improve services according to criticism and suggestions from customers.

At last, we have come to the end of a discussion about strategies to implement SEO for hotel strategies. Understand and apply all the guidelines above so that your website can get a lot of potential visitors.

If you need help running an SEO hotel, cmlabs provides SEO consulting services to improve the performance of your website.