Hotel SEO

If you’re looking for a way to increase traffic to your hotel website, SEO strategies are definitely the answer. SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of improving a website’s visibility to search engines, so it can gain a higher position on the search engine results page (SERP). When you consider the newest online travel booking statistics, the importance of hotel SEO strategies becomes blindingly obvious. According to Google’s latest research study, “The 2014 Travelers’ Road to Decision,” search engines are some of the top sources of inspiration for travelers. In fact, last year more than half of all travelers relied on search engines when they begin to plan their trips. And online searchers tend to overwhelmingly concentrate on hotel websites that appear among the top search engine results; more than 90 percent of searchers never even look past the first page of results.

What does this mean for your hotel? If your website doesn’t earn a high position on search engine results, your hotel could be virtually invisible to the majority of travelers during their trip planning process. That’s why SEO is so important to hotels; it is the best, most reliable way to raise your website’s position in search results.

How SEO Works

When prospective guests enter a query into search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, the search engines use complex formulas to compute where each website will appear on the search engine results page. Search engines try to assign the highest places in their results to the websites that do the best job of providing the requested information. Search engines consider virtually every element of a website when deciding which site is the best answer to a user query, looking at page titles, keywords, image tags, Meta data, outside page links, and more. While the large OTAs are still dominating the top few spots for many travel-related search terms, by carefully applying SEO strategies to your website, we can help your hotel capture a place on the all-important front page of search results.

How we will use SEO to increase traffic to your hotel website

When correctly and consistently applied, hotel SEO strategies can make a drastic improvement to your website’s performance in search results.  In the past many hotel owners engaged in keyword stuffing and other “black hat” SEO behavior to try to raise their search position, and they suffered severe Google penalties as a result.  Travel Tech Strategies will employ the full range of “white hat” SEO strategies to your hotel website and internet marketing strategies. It’s important to keep in mind that SEO strategies won’t improve your website performance overnight. It will take some time for Google and the other search engines to index the changes we make, but once they do you‘ll be able to watch your website’s search performance improve in a dramatic way. Some of the hotel SEO strategies that we can enact include:

Mobile-friendly responsive hotel website design

Mobile-friendliness has recently been added to the metrics Google uses to determine websites’ positions in search results. Updating your website to a responsive hotel web design is the best way to satisfy Google’s requirements – in fact, Google listed responsive web design as the website format it prefers! Travel Tech can provide you with a responsive hotel web design that will help you please the many travelers who now rely on mobile devices while raising your ranking in search results so you can reach a wider audience.

Keyword research and analysis

Travel Tech Strategies is experienced at seeking out the latest trending keywords that are being used by hotel guests and the travel industry in general.  We will choose a rich assortment of keywords and phrases to ensure you get the widest marketing reach, including keywords that match search terms, long-tail phrases, and the more casual phrasing that is typical for the verbal searches performed on mobile devices.

Hotel website optimization

Once we’ve found the best trending keywords for your hotel, we will incorporate them throughout your website. We’ll include keywords in your title, content, and your Meta Description, as well as ALT tags on your images and videos. We will optimize all of your web pages for the best performance on search engines, making sure links are reputable and correctly targeted, assets are minimally sized for fast loading, and every element of your hotel website works toward gaining a top spot in search results.

Strategic link building strategies

Another factor that Google considers is the number and type of links you have to your website. Travel Tech Strategies will work to gain you the high-quality links that Google loves. We can help you gain links to reputable websites related to the hospitality industry, and employ social marketing strategies with intriguing content that guests love to share so they will link to and direct others to your hotel website. In addition to gaining you the valuable links you need, these strategies  publicize your hotel web site, lead visitors to your blog, and generate some non-search engine traffic. Google views this additional traffic as a clear indicator of the relevance and legitimacy of your hotel website, and rewards your site by raising its position in search engine results.

Weekly hotel blog

Starting an interesting, engaging hotel blog is the ideal way to apply SEO strategies to your website on an ongoing basis. A weekly or biweekly blog allows you to continually add new content to your hotel website, which is one of the elements Google looks for. This fresh content keeps search engines interested and crawling your content so your website stays on top of search results. If you choose to have the professional SEO copywriters at Travel Tech Strategies write your hotel blog, we will write relevant blogs that feature new keywords according to topics trending in the travel industry. This will help you to gain new links from interested readers eager to share your content with others, which in turn will help raise your position in search results.

Are you ready to start enjoy the benefits of improved search performance? Call Travel tech Strategies today for an SEO audit of your hotel website.  We’ll identify any elements that are hurting your search performance, and explain what we can do to help raise your position in search results.