SEO for Hotels and Resorts
Competition is tough for online visibility and getting guests to your door. This is true whether you are a resort pushing to capture large groups of if you’re a medium-sized hotel with competition from homeshare networks like AirBnB.
Listing on an OTA is necessary, but it often drives your revenues down. You can do more to get noticed online, generate leads and boost your RevPAR rate.
One of the principles of digital marketing is using search engine optimization (SEO) tactics to drive online traffic. Driving online traffic in part means trying to get your site listed on the first page of a search engine, because, as we all know, rarely does anyone look past the first page.
SEO encompasses many tweaks that web developers and digital marketing experts know how to accomplish, starting with a review of the backend of your website. Load speed is paramount. If your images are too slow, the coding isn’t efficient in the background, you can guarantee your audience will leave you, causing high bounce rates. High bounce rates, in turn, will mean that search engines won’t take you seriously. Your website should also be responsive. Today, 43 percent of travelers search on their phones.
Secondly, fresh, relevant content uploaded on a regular basis is an absolute must to get visibility. Search engines will simply fade you away into the background as your competition posts blog articles, uploads news bits, videos, photos and more.
There are best practices to post content, aiming for a search engine to happily display you on their first page of search results to a business or guest who is looking for a hotel or resort … just like yours!
SEO Services for Hotels and Resorts
Search Engine Optimization for hotels and resorts is no easy undertaking. Thankfully, our full-service, in-house team of marketers, programmers, writers, designers, and developers are at your disposal to ensure your SEO efforts are worth it.
Some of our SEO services include:
- Website Audits
- Local SEO
- Technical SEO
- UI/UX Optimization
…and more. To speak to an expert and learn if SEO for Hotels and Resorts is right for you, contact us below.
Speak to an ExpertWhat is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the on-going process of improving the visibility of a website or web page in the organic search engine results presented in Google and other search engines. SEO focuses on growing what is known as organic traffic, which refers to traffic achieved through search engines rather than paid advertisements. Organic traffic is widely considered much more valuable than paid traffic as organic traffic is overall proven to more likely result in a conversion.
Today’s consumer is much more sophisticated than ever before. Whether we realize it or not, experts have estimated that the average American is exposed to 5,000 ads per day. Marketers have found that traditional advertisement is seen by consumers as intrusive, interrupting their daily lives with an attempt to sell. SEO changes the nature of the relationship between advertiser and consumer. With SEO, users are seeking out your products, services, or asking questions related to your niche, and you are providing them with valuable information. Information which, by the way, the user trusts because they found it with their own research.
SEO can be broken down into two separate categories: on-site optimizations and off-site optimizations. On-site optimizations refer to changes you make to your site which makes it Google’s algorithm friendly. This includes optimizing page titles and meta descriptions, content creation, page load speed, internal link-structure, mobile friendliness, microdata and more. Off-site SEO refers primarily to increasing authority from other websites and social media channels via backlinks and brand mentions.
Average Increase in Website Traffic
+97%Average Increase in Conversion Rates
+52%Monthly Total Leads Generated
3,000+We become an indispensable resource for our clients to drive traffic and leads.
SEO Tips for Hotels and Resorts
1. Start With an SEO Site Audit
The first thing you’re going to want to do when forming an SEO strategy for your hotel or resort is do an in-depth analysis of your website including:
- Identifying High-Opportunity Pages
- Searching for Crawl Errors
- Identifying Duplicate Content
- Missing Meta Descriptions
…and more. There are many tools, both free and paid, that exist that automate the site audit process, but the information is useless without the knowledge of how to fix those errors.
One of the advantages of performing an SEO audit of your website early on is being able to identify “low-hanging fruit,” or pages on your website that have the potential to generate qualified traffic. It’s entirely possible that some pages on your site are already ranking for certain terms on the 3rd or 4th page of search engine results and will only need a few simple optimizations to improve their position.
2. Focus on User Experience (UX)
You may not have heard the term “UX” before, but it’s an important part of SEO. UX stands for user experience and refers to how your visitors experience your site.
How do you judge good user experience?
Is your website up to date? Is it new or older than 6 or 7 years? If it ain’t broke don’t try to fix it, right?
To answer that: interfaces go through cycles and people navigate differently. Icons replace words. Hamburger menus replace left-hand menus. Regardless, you should match the way that people know how to navigate so when they click on something they get the response that they were expecting. If your site looks outdated it also mars your image a bit which could mar the trust factor in your company.
Check your statistics and see where potential clients drop off in the funnel. Where they abandon your site can signal any number of factors:
- Difficulty navigating your website
- Poor visual design
- You have broken links and 404 pages on your site
- You have intrusive pop-ups requesting personal information
The effort here is to describe just some of the UX factors. There are many more, as any front-end designer can attest. Performing UX optimization on your website can improve important metrics such as dwell time, click-through rate, and conversions.
3. Don't Be Afraid to Outsource!
SEO is labor intensive. Between keyword research, content creation, link-building, reviewing analytics, and technical SEO tasks, performing SEO for hotels and resorts is a full-time job. Large corporations have entire teams dedicated to SEO, and even these teams choose to outsource some tasks.
Outsourcing your SEO, or certain aspects of SEO, is becoming more and more attractive for businesses. Whether it be writing content or fixing technical aspects, outsourcing SEO can actually be more cost-effective that hiring an in-house specialist. This is especially true when you consider the many costly tools needed to perform SEO.
We have the tools, staff, and experience you need for your SEO for hotels and resorts to exceed expectations.
Speak to an Expert