Hotel SEO – Boost Your Digital Presence for Higher Revenue

Hotel SEO remains one of the most valuable tools in any marketer’s kit as hotel numbers in the United States climb. With over 165,000 hotels on American soil, yours must rank well to be on the average consumer’s radar. What is search engine optimization, and why is it important for hotels?

SEO for hotels encompasses hotel owners’ strategies to increase their position in search engine results pages. These strategies combine on-page and off-page tactics and local and advanced SEO, including keyword research, building quality backlinks, improving website structure, and optimizing a Google Business profile. Increasing your rank can improve organic traffic, lead quality, and hotel booking rates.

This guide to hotel SEO services will help you strategize how to capture the top spot and what it takes to remain there.

Understanding Hotel SEO

Search engine optimization, abbreviated as SEO, is a strategy for ranking better in search engine results pages or SERPs. Companies strive for the top position in the SERPs. While there can be only one, getting a spot on the first page is the next best thing.

The traffic on the second page of any Google search is under one percent, which has held steady since the mid-2010s. People don’t have the time or inclination to visit the second page when Google should provide all the info they need on page one.

What Is Organic Traffic?

Hotel SEO can produce organic traffic, referring to traffic generated by non-paid sources. For example, a PPC campaign produces paid traffic. Traffic might be traffic, but organic traffic is lower-cost and often more sustainable.

PPC campaigns come and go, but utilizing SEO practices to maintain your rank can ensure steady positioning for a long time.

How Can Organic Traffic Help Your Hotel?

As these points prove, your hotel cannot afford to ignore or understate the importance of search engine optimization. Without it, your hotel website won’t reach the first page. It won’t exist to more than 95 percent of internet users, hurting your bookings and revenue.

Search engines have evolved to prioritize the user experience. Using SEO is a great way to ensure your guests have a memorable experience from the moment they land on your website to when they check out.

Better hotel SEO begins with Mediaboom. Schedule your free 30-minute consultation to begin discussing your hotel’s ranking goals.

On-Page SEO

Hotel search engine optimization requires a combination of on-site and off-site measures to drive success. On-page SEO refers to strategies implemented on your hotel website to boost your SERPs.

The following on-page elements are critical for hotels.

Keyword Research for the Hotel Industry

Keyword research is a pillar of search engine optimization, but centralizing the terms you choose for your hotel will keep your keywords relevant to your audience.

Conducting keyword research is a great place to start. You’ll learn the keywords your target audience searches for through your research. Identify relevant short- and long-tail keywords and plan to incorporate them into your website copy, including content like blogs and landing pages.

Optimized Hotel Website Content

The next pillar of on-site hotel SEO is content optimization. This tactic improves the quality and relevancy of your content, optimizing it for your target audience. You should use the keywords you discovered during your research, incorporate title and meta tags, and write strong, evergreen copy.

Insert internal links to relevant pages and content on your website, and back up your claims and data with authoritative resources.

Mobile-Friendliness and Responsive Design

The hospitality industry hinges on customer service, which should extend to your website design. Your website must be responsive and optimized for mobile, rendering accurately no matter the device your audience uses to access it.

One in three travelers will use a mobile device and hotel app to book their stay, necessitating a mobile-first design.

User Experience and Site Speed

Another facet of the user experience to pay attention to is website loading speed. A survey of the 100 top global websites found that the average desktop website load time is 2.5 seconds. You have more leeway on mobile, where the loading time can be up to 8.6 seconds.

Utilizing Schema Markups for Hotel Data  

Structured data, also called schema markups, is a search engine language. When search engines like Google crawl your website, they’ll use your hotel schema markups to determine what’s on your web pages.

Using structured data if you aren’t already should help your rank. Google can recognize more than 30 schema types, from articles to datasets, events, FAQs, how-tos, learning videos, podcasts, Q&As, and videos.

Local business markups are especially pertinent for hotels. The information you’ve optimized on your Google Business profile will inform the data here, such as your hotel’s address, hours, phone number, and email address.

Google will show this information on the side of SERPs or in a Local Business Panel.

Mediaboom’s digital marketing experts can assist as you prioritize your on-page SEO efforts. Book your free call to discuss your needs.

Off-Page SEO

Hotel SEO cannot be successful with on-page measures alone. You must also use off-page search engine optimization, which are measures outside your website. These positive changes come back to your site, pushing it further up in the SERPs.

These strategies can act as the guidebook for your off-page plan.

Link Building for Hotel Websites

The most substantial pillar of off-page SEO is link building. It’s not about adding just any links, but high-quality, reputable links. Google and other search engines will see these trustworthy links associated with your site and increase your SERP position.

Backlinks can include no-follow and do-follow link. The latter generates the link juice you seek, while a no-follow link stops the momentum. 

If your hotel website doesn’t already have a blog, that’s a free, engaging way to generate links. Reviews, which we’ll discuss later in this section, are another excellent link-building resource for hospitality businesses.

Guest posting and engaging in your community, such as through sponsorship opportunities, will also help your hotel build strong links.

Natural link building is a must, as skirting around the best practices can lead to low-quality backlinks that affect your online reputation. Working with reputable websites and publishing strong content can ensure good backlink generation practices. 

Use anchor text diversity, playing up the phrase variety you implement. This signals to search engines authoritativeness and credibility. 

Content Marketing for Hotels

The next off-site strategy to focus on is content marketing. You’ve already begun producing excellent content to grow your SEO ranking. Now, it’s time to strengthen your strategy and double down on your approach.

Begin by researching your target audience if you don’t already have an identified group in mind. Identify the keywords they search for, understanding their search intent.

Build your content around keywords, naturally inserting short- and long-tail terms. Create an editorial plan and write briefs for each piece of content to ensure it meets search engine optimization requirements.

Next, market your content, sharing it in your email newsletter, on social media, and other websites in a guest blogging arrangement.

Social Media Presence and Engagement

Your hotel must have a social media presence, as this is one of the most influential off-site steps you can take. Meet your audience on their preferred social media channels, posting engaging content.

Optimizing your social media presence for better SERPs includes adding profile information such as your business address, email, phone number, and website. Upload photos and videos, as your hotel should have plenty to share.

Guide your website visitors to your social media pages with social sharing links on your homepage.

Local SEO Tactics for Hotels

We’ll speak further on local search engine optimization shortly, but it’s considered an off-page element, so it should be mentioned here. National vs. local hospitality SEO is a tough choice for hotels to make and boils down to the size and scope of your presence.

If you’re a locally-based hotel, you should use local strategies to increase your rank. A hotel with a global presence should broaden its SEO scope.

Guest Reviews and Reputation Management

Your reputation is everything in business. A lack of reviews can hurt your reputation, so encourage your guests to leave reviews after staying at your hotel. You can send an automated follow-up email after checkout.

You might incentivize your audience to write reviews by offering money off their next stay.

Sixty percent of consumers will refrain from a business if it has enough negative reviews. Reputation management involves searching for mentions of your hotel brand across third-party reviews websites, social media, and elsewhere on the web.

Respond to negative comments promptly with offers to fix the issue, and consider recurring feedback you get, positive and negative. The negative feedback can help your hotel improve and generate more positive reviews.

Are you ready to implement an off-page campaign but need help from professional marketers to achieve your goals? Mediaboom has free consultations to discuss your hotel’s marketing and SEO goals – book today.

Technical SEO for Hotels

You can take your hotel SEO beyond on-page and off-page measures, getting into advanced search engine optimization strategies. These technical tactics will help search engine crawlers comb your website to determine its rank.

Technical SEO for hotels should incorporate these strategies.

Site Structure and Navigation

We’ve attested to the importance of site structure for navigation and crawlability, two elements that will increase your SERP positioning.

Here are some pointers for building your website architecture or structure:

• Determine which pages on your site are most important and prioritize them
• Create a hierarchy for groups
• Make groups of related content

The point of building a site structure is to help your audience reach where they want to go on your website with as few clicks as possible. This will improve navigation, UX, site usability, and search engine optimization.

URL Structure and Optimization

You should also focus on your URL structure, optimizing it to assist search engine crawlers in determining the content on the page. Proper URL structures will also help your audience find the content they need.

Don’t miss these tips for optimizing your URL structure:

• Naturally incorporate keywords into your URLs
• Make your URLs descriptive but not overly long
• Separate words with hyphens
• Don’t use special characters
• Match the title and the URL

XML Sitemaps and Robots.txt

If you think of your website architecture as the layout of a building, an XML sitemap is a map of its contents. An XML sitemap indicates the most important pages on your website, telling the search engine to crawl those first.

What if you have a large website or only want search engines to crawl specific pages? Use the Robots Exclusion Protocol, also known as robots.txt.

Robots.txt indicates to search engine crawlers which pages they cannot visit. Reasons to exclude web pages from a crawl include duplicate content and unfinished pages.

HTTPS Implementation for Security

Most web pages you visit use HTTPS, short for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure. The extra layer of security is encryption-based to make web browsing on your website a safer experience.

Some web hosts offer HTTPS security as a standard. For those that don’t, you must obtain a TLS or SSL certificate, renewing as necessary.

Mobile Optimization and AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)

You’ve already optimized your website for mobile, but you can use a related advanced strategy to improve your search engine ranking.

Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMPs are an HTML framework introduced by Google to compete with Apple News and Facebook Instant Articles.

This open-source framework can improve the loading speed of your mobile web pages. The framework uses AMP cache, AMP JavaScript, and AMP HTML.

You can expect faster loading speeds and an enhanced user experience.

Elevate your search engine ranking with Mediaboom’s technical SEO services. Book a free consultation today to discuss how we can serve you.

Local SEO for Hotels

Let’s delve deeply into the local SEO elements for hotels mentioned earlier.

Google Business Profile Optimization

You must have a complete Google Business profile, as the information on this profile can appear elsewhere online, especially in NAP (name, address, phone number) directories. Further optimize the page by uploading high-quality images and videos of your hotel.

Online Directories and Citations

Your hotel’s presence in citations and directories can build your local SEO ranking. Research directories in your state or city/town, then contact them or complete a request to get added to the list.

While your appearance on online directories won’t influence your ranking overnight, you should notice more bookings and website traffic immediately.

Geotargeted Keywords and Content

Narrow your scope when localizing hotel SEO. The keywords you utilize should be geotargeted for your area to ensure local searchers find your website at the top when they input those terms. After identifying relevant local keywords, incorporate them into geotargeted content.

Managing Online Reviews and Ratings

Reputation management doesn’t stop in a local SEO campaign. It’s more important than ever to keep your audience happy, as they’re smaller and more targeted. Use the tactics from above to acquire more reviews and follow through on received feedback to keep improving your services.

Digital marketing agency Mediaboom are your local SEO experts. Schedule a free consultation to discuss your hotel goals, and we’ll build an actionable strategy.

Measuring Hotel SEO Success

SEO for hotels requires tracking metrics to gauge campaign success. Here are several to have your eye on as your campaign gets underway:

• Organic traffic percentage, a good metric you should continue building on with positive SEO practices;
• Keyword rankings, a positive metric that determines your webpage’s spot in SERPs for specific search terms; target relevant keywords to increase it.
• Conversion rate, a good metric for measuring successful hotel bookings; increase conversions by strengthening your brand, adding reviews and testimonials.
• Revenue, a positive metric gauging the amount of income your hotel brought in through its services; increase this with high rates of customer retention, such as through email marketing. 
• User engagement rate, a positive measure of how engaged your audience is; continue sending quality email content to hold their attention. 
• Bounce rate, a negative metric that determines how often your audience leaves your site; lower yours by improving site loading speed and navigability. 
• Domain authority, a positive metric determining your search engine score for an industry or search area; build quality backlinks and perform a site audit to raise yours.
• Backlink profile, a good metric which refers to how many backlinks your hotel website has generated. 

Mediaboom’s SEO expertise will help you build on KPIs that matter to long-term ranking success. Schedule a free consultation with our experts today.

How to Track Hotel SEO Performance

Measuring SEO analytics and performance is faster and more efficient with the right tools. Here are three industry standards for tracking KPIs during and after your search engine optimization campaign.

Google Analytics

A whole world of SEO and marketing insights awaits on Google Analytics. You must have an active Google account to explore the features, but free options are available for small businesses. Access to more advanced metrics and features requires a paid account.

Google Search Console

After using hotel SEO services for some time, you might not rise to the ranks as expected. Google Search Console is a valuable aid in identifying areas where you can optimize your strategy and helping you improve your website.

You’ll benefit from a stronger site and a higher SERP ranking, making your hotel a more credible option for consumers.

SEMrush

The extensive library of tools SEMrush offers makes it a verifiable treasure trove of information. The local tools are especially pertinent to hotels and include the following:

• Position Tracking for monitoring your spot in the SERPs
• Listing Management for managing your presence on directories
• On-Page SEO Tracker for reviewing competitors and improving your strategies
• Social Media Toolkit for scheduling content and mastering search engine optimization

Case Studies and Best Practices

Explore the best hotel SEO with these case studies.

JW Marriott

Mediaboom’s work with luxury hotel brand JW Marriott focused on their then-new Houston hotel. We offered myriad services, including search engine optimization, print design, website development, and web design.

Our services, timed for the hotel’s grand opening, helped position the JW Marriott as the top luxury hotel in Houston. Its website traffic also spiked by over 200 percent.

Musha Cay

The immersive vacation resort David Copperfield’s Musha Cay on gorgeous Copperfield Bay sought Mediaboom’s expertise. We provided SEO, animation, website development, and web design, including creating custom animations.

Our work positioned the Musha Cay website as an embodiment of the incredible vacation experience awaiting guests and elevated the brand.

Millennium Tower San Francisco

When Mediaboom worked with Millennium Tower San Francisco, the building’s goal was to debut a customized website with responsive design showcasing the luxury life in this stunning high-rise.

Through print design, search engine optimization, animation, branding, website development, and web design, we implemented interactive elements, new branding, and custom animations that strengthened Millennium Tower’s web design. 

The following best practices can also fortify your hotel search engine optimization:

• Focus on quality over quantity when building backlinks.
• Optimize your images, adding alt tags.
• Create a content hierarchy with tags like H1s, H2s, and more.
• Optimize your descriptions and page titles.
• Once you see results, continue with your strategies, even if your site’s position is the same. It can take months to see a positive impact on your SEO position.  

Hire a Digital Marketing Agency Now

SEO for hotels is required to discern yourself from the competition, attract more attention, and increase your bookings. However, the many elements of search engine optimization, especially the technical aspects, can be tough to master.

Hotel SEO services through Mediaboom can be the difference-maker. We have a proven track record of excellence with high-end clients. Hire us today to get the results your hotel needs.