Hotel SEO Excellence

Thousands of travel company entrepreneurs hope for improved traffic from Google.

You can have that traffic, but you must be much more strategic than you are now. You’ll appreciate this more after you read more of my posts on travel marketing, content development and advanced SEO strategy.

Over my 26 years of SEO and content work, Google is the only company that’s kept growing its user base and value proposition for marketers. However, the requisites of ranking and traffic delivery have steepened considerably.

Today, content must be more sophisticated serving many different objectives simultaneously. It’s not easy to serve new visitors, returning customers, brand ambassadors, bloggers, influencers, journalists, and travel consumers. There’s a lot of inputs for ranking success, however advanced SEO strategy is number one.  After that, it’s funding, content creativity, and strong promotion that creates search engine leaders.

Here’s your advantage: that big travel companies can’t and won’t optimize well. They have branding, communications, and customer service priorities that kind make content lame and general. But Google’s not looking for that kind of content. It’s looking for content that’s more authentic, specific, fresh, and engaging. And it likes adaptable “representative pages” that might act as credible entryways to your website — special pages that please more visitors and gain more ranking power than specialized pages such as your product pages.

Smaller Hotels Can Compete Smart and Aggressively

And while Bookings.com, VRBO, Expedia, Hotels.com, Trivago, Airbnb and major hotels are also well aware of the power of Hotel SEO and have big outreach via social media and PR to dominate rankings, smaller travel businesses shouldn’t shy away from organic traffic sources.

The biggest travel sites enjoy tens of millions of visits per month. They get most of their traffic from Google and Bing.  A good number of smaller hotels might not feel confident in their ability to compete so they don’t.

The corporation SEO strategy is powered via ppc advertising, PR, portal sponsorships, events, and their industry and business partnerships.  This big budget spending generates a large amount of free publicity, backlinks, and brand mentions.

It’s unlikely your hotel has this great budget, so you’ll need to be more strategic — designing your content to appear more valuable to searchers.

I’ve helped a major hotel chain doubled its yearly traffic from 1.2 million to 2.5 million, so there is potential via organic content marketing including hotel search engine optimization.

Ideally, what do Hotels Need?

  • content creators who can develop interesting, engaging, backlink building content
  • visual content creator (e.g., travel photos, local cultural and leisure photos, and videos)
  • search engine optimization consultant to provide keyword and topical research and strategy to rank well on Google and Bing
  • PPC manager to optimize ad campaigns to reduce spend while growing the highest quality leads
  • graphic web designer who can craft the website and downloadables into visually attractive pieces
  • content strategist who can weave content experiences to engage visitors and generate leads/bookings

Chances are that most agencies won’t be able to ace this list of must have’s.  Some agencies do specialize in travel, however it may result in conflicts of interest with other clients.  Good talent is very hard to find, which is yet one more reason why small travel agencies, hotels, tour operators, and others give up on trying.

My client, a major hotel found me, and we worked some magic.

Attracting Big Audiences

Yes, gaining visibility and then attracting visitors in the thousands per day is the minimum goal. If you want those kinds of results, you’ll need a strategy.  It may not look like much effort goes into search engine optimization, but successful companies always do a thorough audit of their capabilities, opportunities, value proposition and objectives.

Your copywritten content, photos, and videos all together create SEO assets — things that influence travel bloggers, travel business partners, and search engine ranking algorithms.  Videos, pages, blog posts, downloadables, webinars, and other events are good examples.  Align them strategically for a better impact. The power of focus.

Your Website Must be a Great Experience

Your website offers specific helpful content, but also it gets the brand message across laser clear. Getting backlinks means web publishers believing you have something valuable to share, something that makes them look better.

Your content should provide a rich experience overall with selected content that focuses your value proposition to customers. This engages and immerses them in your content.  Then your interesting content pieces, images, videos and products are eagerly shared online. User-generated promotion is a big part of SEO.

The faster you get your customers to your site and making bookings, the better.

Today, it’s all about the customer journey, the experience they have while searching. That search may begin with “cheap hotel rooms” but with excellent search engine optimization and expert content strategy, the path that travel consumer takes can be managed. We an show them a better solution than cheapest hotel rooms, New York, or San Diego hotels.

SEO is just the beginning. Content strategy and content engagement pave the way to hotel bookings and revenue

How much Traffic can Hotel SEO deliver? A lot.

In fact, I doubled a major hotel’s traffic and made a big impact on their bottom line. This was traffic generated via Google, Yahoo, direct visits, and other website referrals. Adding a million new visits per year makes Hotel SEO a respected profession. I’d be delighted to perform SEO for your hotel brand.

I do love travel and hotels are recognized as convenient, safe, and comfortable accommodations. Your SEO specialist should have a passion for destinations. My personal favorites are Banff, San Diego, Costa Rica, Whistler BC, and Florida. Any many more locales await!

And while AirBnB has put a good deal of pressure on the hotel industry, hotels have innovated.  Years ago, hotel marketing communications were formal and narrow thinking. Today they’ve opened up to more personal and creative interactions with travellers looking for fun, helpful and engaging content.  There are alternate paths on the hotel customer journey. These can help smaller hotel chains more competitive.

What do You Need to Win your Google Rankings?

  1. bold, confident keyword selection (head and longtail both)
  2. clever, engaging content constructed as a whole on your website
  3. high performing EPIC level visual content
  4. high quality, sharable blogs, pdfs, videos, photos
  5. interesting, engaging blog posts using semantically relevant copy
  6. high quality travel-related stories

Good Content for Engaging Behavior

Align SEO and brilliant content strategy to create unbeatable high quality experience for your visitors and customers.  Let’s get your Web presence optimized from top to bottom.

 

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