Optimise your Hotels website for search engines (SEO)
This article will be your guide to help you understand the ins and outs of hotel SEO and increase the number of visitors.
Your website visitors get to your site from search engines.
This means that your hotel website should rank higher in search engines to attract potential customers and ultimately convert them into guests of your hotel.
What is SEO for hotels?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing rankings, optimizing content to improve the ranking of a hotel website on search engine results pages.
This allows you to establish yourself online, drive traffic to your website and increase hotel bookings.
SEO is an integral part of hotel marketing and it is now difficult to find a hotel that beats its competitors without SEO.
Why is SEO important for hotels?
Whenever a prospective hotel customer searches for a hotel location, he receives a list of results from search engines. Typically, the user goes to the web page that ranks first in the search results.
According to the survey, the #1 result on Google receives 31.7% of all clicks.
This percentage drops to 2.2% for the last result on the first page.
How to do SEO for a hotel website correctly
In this article, we will give you the most important and effective SEO tips for hotels.
1. Define your target audience
You need to determine your target audience: who visits your hotel, where these people are from, what they like, how long people stay at the hotel, how they book the hotel.
2. Make a list of keywords
Keywords are words and phrases that people use to search for websites like yours. Search queries that your audience will enter into the search bar. The best keywords for hotels are search phrases that contain the word hotel and a second word indicating the region, city, or locality.
Of course, you will need more of these terms to improve your hotel website’s Google ranking.
3. Work on your page meta titles, meta descriptions, and URL.
The web page title, meta description, and URL play an important role in the SEO of your hotel website.
Because these are the 3 elements that will appear in the search engine results.
Page title
The page title appears in your browser tab and tells the user what your web page is about.
Meta description
A meta description is an HTML tag that summarizes the content of a page. Search engines show the meta description right after the meta title.
Web Page URL
A URL is the address of a page on your hotel’s website. Ideally, the web page’s URL includes a keyword.
4. Optimize your website content
Let’s start with the content of your page. First, each page must have an H1 title that includes the target keyword.
Then add the same target keyword in the first paragraph of your text.
The text itself should be about 1000 words or more, including target keywords and their synonyms; it is advisable to add images and tables inside the text.
5. Add Alt Text to Images
Image alt text is alternative text that will help search engines understand what is in the picture. This is why it is very important to write appropriate alt text for each image
6. Place headings and subheadings within the text
Headings help users and search engines read and understand the textual content of your site. Structured content is easy to read for users, which is better for your hotel’s SEO. They define which parts of your content are important and show how they are interconnected.
7. Optimize your site's loading speed.
Loading speed is another factor that is critical to the SEO of your hotel website. No one wants to wait a long time for a site to load and will most likely decide that the site is not working.
8. Make your site mobile friendly
According to research, almost 60% of people use a smartphone to search for information on Google. This is why it is important for you to make your hotel website responsive for different devices.
9. Create a Sitemap.xml file.
A sitemap is a file that needs to list the web pages of your hotel website to tell search engines about the structure of your site.
10. Sign up for Google My Business
Google provides an excellent free advertising option for businesses that register with Google My Business (GMB).
11. Voice search
In the era of Siri and Google, more and more people are using voice search.
12. Create backlinks
Backlink building is the process of obtaining hyperlinks to your website from other websites.
13. Work on local SEO for your hotel
Local SEO for hotels is an effective way to promote your hotel regionally. Therefore, on your hotel website you need to mention the location, address and other contacts of your hotel.