Hotel SEO: 14 Tips To Maximize Your Bookings

Are you looking for ways to improve the rankings of your hotels and get as many bookings as possible?

Well, if so, then you are at the right place! 

In the digital era, it doesn’t matter which location you are in, Search Engine Optimization is a must-have marketing technique to get more bookings and make your hotel grow! 

Let’s get started with what hotel SEO is, how it works, and why it’s important.

Why Is Hotel SEO Important?

In a world, where everything is just at the tip of your phone click, it becomes important to work on your hotel website and make it come before the eyes of your target audience. 

Given the fact, the websites that appear in the top 5 results get 90% of the traffic, it is significant to have an SEO strategy for your hotel business. 

Here are some strong benefits of having SEO for your hotel:

More Exposures

When the competition is too high in the SERP, SEO gives you the chance to be in an incredible position. The position makes a huge difference when it comes to growing your business and beating the competition.

More Bookings

Having a hotel website, you must be in want of getting more online bookings. Once the visitors are on your site, they will find some content and information that enhances their confidence that your hotel is the best choice for them. 

Tips To Maximize Your Hotel Bookings

Beating out the high competition is never easy; it takes time, but with the right SEO strategy, you can easily conquer the competition and stand out from the crowd.  

Research And Find Your Keywords (Phrases Associated With Your Hotel)

So, you have got started with the SEO for hotels, but focusing on keywords and creating your unique SEO keyword strategy is the base of your Hotel SEO strategy. 

Keywords are just words and phrases that your audience uses to search in SERP. When you know, your audience could be searching for a hotel in New York, you can choose to write a blog about, “how to choose the best hotel in New York?”

Since your audience would search for you with local intent, it is good to go with local keywords and local intent. You need to create content that satisfies the searches’ intent. 

Mainly, there are 4 types of user intent, prescribed by Moz. 

Let me show you how the user intent is going to work for the hotel SEO strategy. See the image below:

Google is getting smarter day by day. Google understands the searcher’s intent with long tail and short tail keywords. The more specific you get with selecting your keyword, the more clicks you will have on your site. And, it all depends mainly on your long tail keyword. 

The keyword, “hotel in New Jersey” might have a broad search, but a long-tail keyword, “hotel for business travelers in New Jersey,” may not have that many border searches, but it would be specific. 

How to find your keywords for hotel SEO

The answer is simple. To develop your keyword strategy, you must first focus on your hotel’s main features. 

• Target the keywords travelers use to describe your hotel. 
• Target why people visit your location
• Understand the things they wish to do 
• Add peripheral services that you provide, like, conference rooms, marriage hall and banquet hall. 

You can use keyword research tools to get such keywords for your hotel website. 

Click on the link to learn more about keyword research for local SEO.   

Focus On Your Hotel’s Location (Local SEO For Hotel)

As I have explained above, having a hotel means you need to be aware of its locations to implement SEO. And by location, I mean to say is, you need to emphasize on local SEO for your hotel. 

You have a hotel in New Jersey, of course, you would not wish to do international SEO. Since a person sitting in Australia would not search for a hotel in New York. 

For your hotel SEO, you need to go with local SEO. Tourists and people visiting New York would be searching for the keywords where your hotel website would rank. 

Ensure Your Page Load Speed

Having lots of appealing and high quality videos is important for your hotel website. However, these appealing photos could make your website slow down, resulting in harm to your website’s SEO and a rise in bounce rate. 

Your website’s ranking also depends on how quickly the page loads. Google would rank your site lower if it takes more than 3 seconds to load because people are quite impatient online. They don’t like to wait. When users leave your website without taking any action, Google would detect this behavior and rank your website lower in the SERP. 

You can use Google’s page speed insights to get an insight into your own website. This is a free platform provided by Google that would give you some customized page speed solutions. 

There are some common reasons for slow page speed, and here are some common solutions for improving page load speed. 

• Compress your images 
• Use CDN (Content Delivery Network) 
• Reduce the No. of plugins 
• Use browser caching 
• Get rid of 404 error 
• Reduce the No. of Java and CSS files

Click on the link to know more about the page load speed. 

Write High-Quality And Relevant Content

It is crucial to have quality and user-oriented content if you want Google to rank it in the SERP. 

To create a valuable content, you need to take care of:

1. Create content for humans first: Do you write content stuffed with keywords, thinking Google will rank it anyway? Well, it’s never going to happen like that. Google only prioritizes the content that is helpful for the user. Just don’t stuff the keywords and make content user-friendly. 

2. Make it unique: When creating content for the user. Don’t just copy and paste it. Try to make something unique and appealing to the user. 

3. Ensure Your content is informative enough: Try to provide some value to the user through the content. If your content doesn’t have the value that your user wants, he will go to your competitors. 

4. Your content must have relevance to the users’ query: Make sure the content that you have written on your site matches the intent of the user’s query. If it doesn’t, people will leave your site, leading to a higher bounce rate, and Google will ultimately rank your site lower in the SERP. 

I hope you have read Google’s new helpful content update.

Read More: 8 Valuable Tips To Create SEO Content Strategy

Get Links From Other Websites

Till now, we have only discussed the basics of hotel SEO, but this is an advanced SEO tactic for your hotel SEO. One of the most important SEO elements that Google looks for before ranking a site is the number of backlinks it has. 

A website having thousands of links has a higher chance of high ranking rather than a website having none. 

Basically, the more a website is talked about, the more Google will view it as an authoritative source. 

This process is known as “link building”. Link building means getting backlinks from other authoritative websites. It includes no. of strategies to build links to your site like, guest posting, the skyscraper technique, or creating content that is worth linking for. 

Here are some tips for link building:

1. Take care of relevance: Even if you get a backlink from a site that is not relevant to your niche, it is never going to help you with your website SEO. 

2. Anchor text matters: The anchor text on which you have got the backlink matters. You cannot just get a backlink on any random text. Google takes the anchor text as a ranking signal. 

3. Outreach to writers and influencers: Connecting to the influencers and writers that will give links to your site. 

4. Take care of link positioning: Google also notices the position of the backlink that you have received. 

Add Your Hotels To Bookings Sites (Google, Tripadvisor And More)

Many of your top competitors are ranking well because they are using free directories like Google and Tripadvisor. 

You can use the same services to boost the search visibility of your hotel. 

Here are some of the benefits of having your site on Google and Tripadvisor. 

1. You will have high visibility 

2. Builds trustworthiness 

3. Easier for your customers

4. Incorporate advertisements 

How to add your hotel to Google

1. Sign up for GMB (Google My Business) 

2. Add your hotel information 

3. Engage with your customer reviews

How to add your hotel to Tripadvisor 

Here is how you can add your hotel to tripadvisor

1. Request a listing

It is a little similar to the GMB. You can list your hotel, simply by visiting the website and clicking on the button, “list it now.” 

2. Add your information 

Before getting your business listed, you need to provide personal information about who you are, and what your business is. 

3. Include your hotel information and property details 

Now, you need to add your hotel information to TripAdvisor. The information that you add, will be visible to all the users once it is live. 

The tripadvisor will ask you several questions about your property details. 

• What accommodation type best describes this property?
• How many rooms or units does the property have?
• How frequently is the front desk or check-in location staffed?
• What are the check-in hours?

You can also select the amenities that your hotel provides:

4. Add hotel descriptions and photos

According to Bright Local, businesses with more than 100 images in GMB get 1038% more direct searches. 

Of course, it is important to distinguish your hotel from other hotels. 

5. Submit your hotel listings 

The final step is to confirm that whatever details you have shared are true and then submit your hotel listings. 

After that, TripAdvisor will verify your details from its end and submit your hotel listings. 

Add Direct Booking On Your Site

You can increase bookings on your site by making people book directly through social media. This will increase your brand’s reputation, and mark you as a big brand in the industry. 

Two ways you can add direct booking on your site:

1. Use plugins for it: plugins are helpful for the websites that receive fewer bookings through websites. Many business owners love to choose it because it is reliable, easy to use and gives notifications. 

2. Use API on your site: API is an application programming interface that is going to help you add bookings on your site. This is also indexed easily by the search engines. 

Apply Structured Data To Your Site

Structured data, known as schema markup, is a code that helps Google better understand your content and addresses the searches and intent. 

Applying schema markup on your hotel website would help Google provide a clear and informative results like this:

However, you may require a developer who can add schema markup on your hotel website. 

Main 3 core objects for hotel related schema markup:

1. A lodging business: There could be an example of a hotel, hostel, or resort. Ideally, it is a place or local business that houses the actual units of the establishment. 

2. An accommodation: It includes the relevant units of establishments. (hotel rooms, apartments, meeting rooms etc)

3. Offer to let a hotel room: let a hotel room for an amount of money

Get SEO Optimized URLs

Having SEO optimized and clean URLs is another way to determine your hotel website’s SEO success. Google also suggests having clean, and concize URLs and avoiding having too long URLs.

Also, choose keywords related to hotel SEO, your brand, and most importantly, focus on what the user is expected to find.  

Keep Up With Your Meta Tags

Website optimization starts with the meta tags. With the help of meta tags, Google determines if the particular content is relevant to the searcher’s query or not. 

Title tag: it is the main heading of the website that appears above on the page. It is displayed on the SERP as well. 

Meta description: Meta description is a short summary or a mini ad of your landing page. 

See the image below:

If the meta tags are appealing, people are going to click on your site for sure! 

Click on the link to learn more about meta tags.

Build And Submit Sitemaps

Most hoteliers don’t even know about the sitemaps of their sites. Let’s understand how you can do that. 

Most of the time, the CMS generates sitemaps on its own. An XML sitemap is a file used by search engines to find the URLs on your site. 

However, creating an XML sitemap is not enough. Once you are done with creating the sitemap, it’s time to submit it to GSC. 

This task is going to be a little technical, so you can ask your designer to add sitemaps of your website to Google Search Console. 

Work On Voice Search

As you can see, voice search has risen in the world of Siri, Alexa, Cortana, and Google Assistant. More and more people have started using voice search. 

Google has also reported that 20% of mobile queries come via voice search. 

You must move toward voice searches because, 

1. Voice search is transforming the booking process

2. Voice search creates personalized user experience for your website visitors 

3. Your guests will feel more comfortable with your brand

Read More: Voice Search Marketing: The Future Of Digital Marketing

So, it is necessary to have your website optimized for local SEO. 

Make The Most Of Google Hotel Search

Do you know, Google rolled a new design for hotels. These particular search engines are designed for hotel services only. 

As you know, there are mainly two ways people search for hotels.

• Hotel in (new york, new jersey) — hotel in (location) 
• Hotel marriot near me — (hotel name) near me 

Your goal as a hotel SEO must be to spot the higher rankings and the first page in SERP. 

However, getting to the top in SERP is never easy. It is going to take lots of time and effort. Here are few ways you can use:

1. Have HD quality photos to increase conversions

2. Encourage your guests to leave comments 

3. Give useful information like, hotel description, and amenities

Track Your Site Traffic

I always say, what you can measure, you can improve. To be consistent with your hotel SEO, you constantly need to track your site traffic. For that, you can use free tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console. 

Also, you need to keep a check on your core web vitals such as, site speed, responsiveness, HTTPS security, to make sure if your site is fulfilling all the criteria for ranking in search results. 

How to track performance in Google Search Console 

Here are the following things that you can check through GSC

1. Impressions: Impressions refers to the visibility in SERP. Each impression shows the no. of times your website has appeared in SERP.  Your impressions must increase to get more visitors to your site. 

2. Clicks: This is very easy to understand. Clicks are how many times people have clicked on your site through search results. 

3. CTR (click-through rate): Click through rate is the ratio of total clicks you got from the total number of impressions. 

4. Position: This parameter shows you the average position your site is getting in SERP.    

How to track your hotel website performance via Google Analytics:

Google Analytics is also a free tool provided by Google. Here is how you can track your website performance through Google Analytics:

1. Organic sessions: This is the detail of how much traffic you are getting through SERP, organically. 

2. Bounce rate: The bounce rate is the rate describing how many people are leaving your site without taking any action into it.  

3. Average session duration: You can check out the average session the users are taking on your site. If you have a higher duration of session time, that means, people are taking an interest in your web content.   

4. Goals and conversions: Set the goal for your website conversion. Since you have a hotel website, your goal must be to have more and more bookings. 

Conclusion

Hotel SEO mainly depends on local SEO. Through local SEO, you can get more bookings and increase brand awareness for your hotel. 

If you follow all the local SEO strategies specifically for hotels that I have mentioned above, you are going to see zillions of tremendously positive changes on your site. 

Or, you can contact our SEO professionals to help you with one-on-one meetings.

FAQs

1. Why does your hotel need SEO?

Hotel SEO will help you in various areas like:

• Brand visibility & awareness 
• More rooms booking 
• More exposure in the outer world

2. How fast does hotel SEO work?

Hotel SEO can take 3 months to 6 months to show results of your domain name, if you have already worked before on your site. However, you should also understand that, hospitality industry is quite different and you can’t apply the same SEO strategies again and again. 

3. Can I do hotel SEO on my own?

Yes, of course. You can perform hotel SEO on your own. By reading SEO blogs and watching YouTube videos, you can learn how to do hotel SEO on your own.