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The hotel industry is becoming equipped with technology like every other sector. Every hotel business must maintain a solid online presence to boost their business and attract more customers. But only having a website doesn’t ensure more bookings. To boost your business, your website must follow good SEO strategies.
SEO refers to search engine optimization. It means adopting strategies that attract more traffic to your website by ranking it on the first search engine results page. In simpler terms, when a potential customer enters a search query in a search engine, like Google, that is relevant to your business, your website will be on the first page of the search results if it’s optimized. There are many ways you can improve the SEO of your hotel website.
It’s necessary for the success of your business, as the more people see your website, the more likely they are to make bookings at your hotel. Here are five ways hotel SEO will boost your business.
Link Building
This SEO technique is very helpful for hotels if they are located in areas where there is more competition. When Google ranks a website for a specific search term, the ranking majorly depends on the number of links on all sites that point to it. Simply, Google will rank a site better when thousands of links are pointing at it from different websites. If a website has only around ten links pointing to it, it will not get a higher Google ranking. Thus, ensure such SEO strategies that make your website popular and more talked about.
Link building is an effective hotel SEO strategy that simply involves acquiring links to your website from other websites. Link building can take different forms. Like, you can directly ask for links, guest post on other blogs, use a tool like SEMrush to spy on your competitors (you can do this even with a basic, free SEMrush subscription), or simply create viral content that naturally attracts more attention, which means more links. Although for hotels, it can be a bit tricky to earn or build links since the nature of the hotel business is not to create viral content. But you can do this easily by doing newsworthy things. For example, contact and notify the press about an event sponsored by the hotel, room makeovers in your hotel, or recent expansion in premises, etc.
Updated Keywords
To boost your hotel business, you need to upgrade everything about it according to the customers’ demands, including keywords. Keywords are terms that the users enter in the search bar, leading customers to your website. As a part of an SEO strategy, you need to incorporate relevant keywords to your website’s content, structure, and every page to make it rank on the first page of search results.
You need to update your website keywords as after the pandemic, the customers are now searching with different keywords. The pandemic has shifted everyone’s perspective as now people are searching with keywords like Covid-19 precautions, canceling policies, contactless service, etc. Thus, keep in mind a common post-pandemic traveler. Include local and relevant keywords as well. Like local keywords based on your hotel’s location, the special services people are looking for that your hotel provides, etc.
Online Direct Booking
By enabling customers to make a booking directly on your website, you will attract more traffic to your site, increase bookings and generate more revenue. The customer will prefer to make a direct booking instead of calling and asking the online travel agent. A good SEO strategy here will be to motivate the viewer to make a direct booking.
You can do that by giving the customers an incentive for direct booking. It can be any type of incentive, like a breakfast and dinner package, free breakfast, discount for a longer stay, free drink on arrival, etc. To improve SEO, add these packages or discounts in on-page content and description, and highlight the offers to attract more customers and increase your conversion rate. There are several ways of adding an online booking system to your website.
You can choose an external booking system and add the link to it on your website. You can also use plug-ins; a plug-in is responsive, efficient, and also able to send notifications. It’s also possible to get your custom-coded booking system; this is very beneficial in the long run. But the most SEO-friendly way is using an application program interface (or API) to add a booking system to your site.
Faster Page Loading
You need to make sure that the customer gets a quick, efficient experience when they use your website. If your website takes a lot of time to load, it will hinder your success. When you add too many images, video tours of your hotel rooms and services, etc., to the website, it will take more time to load. Though adding images is a good strategy, overstuffing your gallery with pictures will reduce the page’s loading time, thus reducing conversion rates.
It’s an important SEO trick to have a minimal page loading time for your website. Google rankings are also based on how long a website takes to load. The quicker the website loads, the higher the ranking. In this digital era, everyone wants more information in the least amount of time. So if your website takes ages to load, customers will switch to another website in a matter of seconds. Improving this part of SEO reduces your website’s bounce rates.
Don’t Forget Mobile Users
45% of travelers use mobile applications to book their accommodations and tours. This is a huge customer base that you cannot ignore. Having a mobile-friendly website is necessary to increase booking rates. Also, in 2019, Google switched to mobile-first indexing. This means that Google decides your website’s search ranking based on its ability to be mobile-friendly.
Ensure a better user experience by making a mobile-friendly website. The user should not need to zoom in or out to see the content, the graphics must auto-adjust to different screen sizes, it should not take too long to load on mobile phones, etc. Moreover, many customers use mobile to search for hotels, so they can contact the given numbers right away.
The hotel business industry is highly competitive. You need to employ effective SEO practices to stand out in this sector and boost your hotel business. These five SEO strategies will make your hotel business rise to the top.
