Let's face it, SEO for Hotels can feel like a very complicated puzzle piece to a very important picture. Especially if you're down on the ground, face to face with customers, ensuring they have the best possible experience. The additional time needed to get things happening in the digital realm can make things feel overwhelming. And yet, SEO for Hotels is absolutely fundamental. We can’t brush over it.
The good news is, we have carved out what are 4 bulletproof tips when doing SEO for Hotels.
Key Phrase Mapping & Search Intent
The most simple way to explain Key Phrase Mapping is - highlighting significant destinations/pages on your website, and then finding the most applicable key phrases for those pages. When optimising SEO for hotels and, in fact, across any industry, an essential page is one that has the power to convert.
If your hotel offers a wedding venue, then we need to choose a key phrase that brings the right kind of traffic to the Wedding’s Page. And the right kind of traffic is always measured by how much intent the key phrase has, and by how much a key phrase can be narrowed down.
How to do key phrase mapping
Let's say, for example, we have a hotel in Torquay, South Devon. We need to make sure you target traffic with the intent to find a Wedding Venue in South Devon and more specifically Torquay.
As you might imagine, the two key phrases to target in this situation are Wedding Venues in South Devon and Wedding Venues in Torquay.
Now you're capturing two kinds of intent…
1. Traffic searching Wedding Venues in South Devon know they’re keen on South Devon, but where exactly is very much up for persuasion. This Key Phrase alone tells us how the page needs to be laid out, what the narrative of the page must be. It must highlight why this particular Wedding Venue in Torquay is the best Wedding Venue in South Devon.
2. Traffic searching Wedding Venues in Torquay know the exact town they want to have their wedding, this is a key phrase with incredibly high intent. And again, now we know that if people are typing this, we need to rank for the key phrase and show the traffic why our hotel in Torquay has the perfect wedding venue!
Content is always king
Where we really luck out when doing SEO for Hotels is the fact that content is always king, it always has been, always will be and there is so much to write about. Content is the backbone of organic rankings. 72% of online users read articles! That is a staggering number. Effectively, 7 out of 10 people will read something they’re interested in.
So if we’re talking optimising SEO for Hotels, we have to be looking at what people might search in relation to staying at your hotel and then passionately write about it in an article. Key phrase research can help us find what traffic are searching for, and this can help us find an appropriate article to write.
What content are people searching for
For example, if you have a hotel in Cornwall, we know that it is almost impossible that people won't go to the beach. Top SEO for Hotels is about having a constant stream of content and in this case, content can come in the form of telling traffic what “The Top 5 Best Beaches in Cornwall” are. Using the skills highlighted within this article, you’ll have your own articles ranking in no time at all.
And there's even better news!...
A well organised content campaign will not only have your articles ranking, but also boost the performance of your essential pages by pushing higher rankings on the key phrases integrated with them. This is why content is king.
Key Phrase Density
Key phrase density is measured by the number of times your targeted key phrase is mentioned within the content on the page. This isn't just good SEO for Hotels, this is important for every single website across all industries. The task of SEO is to make life easy for Google and if we achieve this, Google rewards us.
Google Bots crawl every website, they're looking for information. Now when they get to our website, they want to know what we’re trying to achieve, what are we targeting. The simplest way to tell them is to organically scatter it across the content. Let's do a quick test:
- Hold down Ctrl & F.
- A search bar will pop up on the screen.
- In the search bar, type in SEO for Hotels
Now you know most people find this article! Because we have told Google, we want to target the key phrase 'SEO for Hotels'. And we did this with Key Phrase Density.
Don't disrupt the flow
The trick is adding the Key Phrase to the content in a way that doesn't disrupt a sentence or the interaction with traffic. It has to look normal. In this case, only an SEO expert should know we’re targeting SEO for Hotels.
And there is a golden ratio to go by. Google suggests we have a Key Phrase Density of 5%. We would say, to keep the content as natural as possible. Try to get your Key Phrase in every 100 - 200 words.
In this article we have roughly 1200 words and our key phrase has been mentioned 14 times. Perfecto!
PPC - Pay Per Click
PPC is a conversion weapon. Conveniently, our same approach to search intent for organic rankings can be used for PPC. So when we know what people are searching for, and if that key phrase has the power of conversion because the traffic are searching with the intent to purchase; we can delegate budget to PPC.
For this reason, we recommend optimising your organic SEO for your hotel, like having your Key Phrase Mapping and Search Intent organised. And then simply transferring that data.
However, there will always be other key phrases, many of which have the same potential for conversions, but a website can only target so many. PPC is a great way to generate paid traffic for search terms that the site currently struggles to hold capacity for.
Target Location
A strong theme when doing SEO for Hotels is that there is nearly always a location in the Key Phrase. With PPC, though, you can target the location through the metrics. Which means you can target something with less intent, but Google will pull the Ad up in response to the locations added to your campaign, managing intent for you.
For example, if your Hotel in Torquay has a Spa, you might organically target the phrase Spa Treatment in Torquay…. But with PPC, you can simply target Spa Treatment. Google will do the rest!
Now You're set to smash SEO for your hotel
You’ve done amazing to get to the end! SEO for Hotels shouldn’t overwhelm hotel owners, managers and marketers. It should empower you! These 4 Bulletproof Tips will have you blazing ahead of the competition. Let us know how it goes?
Then again, it all takes time and effort to get this machine churning and driving traffic to your website. If you want someone else to take care of this for you, then pick up the phone and give us a call, we're hotel marketing experts after all and we know all the tricks in the book.