An SEO plan is the main difference between success and failure of your hotel in the hospitality or tourism industry. Marketing your hotel digitally and optimizing your official website for search engines is a tricky business, whether you own a B&B, casino hotel, vacation rental, or a serviced apartment. When your potential customers search for a hotel online in your city, they are more likely to choose a place that has a legitimate website, higher rankings, and positive feedback. Google since has provisioned its own exceptional content result block, search features, and booking assets in the market, the hotel niche has become more aggressive than ever.

A lot of businesses register themselves on the travel comparison websites to increase traffic and drive new customers. However, paying a comparison website or search engine to advertise your business can easily cost you a handful of thousands. Not to mention, you will need to consistently lighten your wallet to stay on the top and rank high in search engine page results, which can put the squeeze on your margins. However, it isn’t a lost cause. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an effective strategy that hotel owners can use to raise the bar for and drive traffic to their sites.

1. Create Dedicated Landing Pages

To get started with the SEO for your hotel website, the very first thing you need to do is to build dedicated, relevant landing pages for each service offered. It’s because Google searches for individual pages when crawling websites to show results in SERPs that align with the particular query. If your domain ranks in the relevant results for a condition, it signifies that the site’s most dedicated pages are ranking, not the entire website.

As a marketer, rather than focusing your efforts on improving the search rankings of your entire website, you should establish targeted landing pages with low competitive keywords such as long-tail keywords that meet narrower search criteria and don’t give your potential users an easy exit. Doing so gives you the ability to target various audience segments and increases your chances of getting found by search engines and being noticeable in SERPs. For that reason, the web presence of your business will be improved, encouraging more and more visitors to interact with your brand and allowing you to convert them into potential leads and customers.

2. Select & Optimize your Keywords

The next step is to research keywords and use the hotel related phrases in your SEO strategy, which will improve the positions of your website on search engines and increase your organic traffic seamlessly. While there might be several reasons for a site to rank healthily, either because of location or high-quality content, it’s crucial to identify rich keywords targeted towards audience’s specific interests to enhance performance, drive search traffic, and outrank competitors.

Aiming to rank for keywords such as ‘hotel,’ ‘book hotel,’ or other highly competitive, popular phrases will take too long, especially for new websites, as they are short tail keywords that generate hundreds of thousands of links. Conversely, targeting long-tail keywords yields less but spectacular search traffic and increases site rankings since they are longer and specific to the query at hand. That said, long phrases usually bring higher quality and “ready to buy” kind of deals. Keywords such as ‘pet-friendly hotels in Rancho Cucamonga’ or ‘best California hotels near Victoria Gardens’ will be easier to rank for and generate more bookings. By using a reliable keyword tool, such as Google Keyword Planner, you can create a quick list of phrase terms and ideas that reflect your hotel’s services while directly speaking to visitors’ needs.

3. Optimize your Website Structure

Unless you are Marriot, Hilton, Hyatt, or another well-known brand, it’s highly doubtful that people are searching for your hotel’s brand name on Google. That’s why it’s vital that you optimize not your keywords only but the entire website structure including Meta Titles, Meta Descriptions, and H Tags. Search engines read meta titles and often display them in their SERP, in the search bar. Both your site’s meta title and meta description act as organic advertisement text. While meta titles help in determining how a search engine will rank your content, meta descriptions constructively impact the Click-Through Rate (CTR) of your organic results.

The absence of H tags is one of the biggest reasons why most websites fail to thrive and generate business. They indicate to bots and users what the content on the page is about.  Using an h1 tag to wrap your keywords into your hotel website enables you to highlight the most indispensable text, achieve better SEO results and rankings, and offer an improved user experience.

4. Build a Strong Inbound Link Structure

What could be a better way to lift your conversion rate and site’s domain authority than using internal links and building strong citations. Some people think that inbound links aren’t important for a website, but that’s not the case. In actuality, internet marketing experts often talk about how critical these two factors are to boost your organic traffic and rankings.

What your potential customers need is information, and if they don’t get it from you, they will go somewhere else. For instance, an online user visits your website through your landing page. They start out exploring your accommodation options for a deluxe room. However, they can’t navigate from the current page to the deluxe room page. In this scenario, what do you think is more likely to happen? Most probably, they’ll leave and book services with other business instead.

With an excellent link structure, you significantly reduce the risks of losing your leads and improve your chances of converting those visitors into paying, loyal customers.

If you are looking for cost-effective, reliable SEO and digital marketing services to elevate your hotel website’s rankings as well as conversions, get in contact with us.