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The Importance of SEO in the Hospitality Industry
SEO is a very important component of any hotels website. Search
Engine Optimisation is the practice of gaining quality and quantity visitors to
your website by appearing high on search engine results.
Search engines, like Google, Bing and Yahoo are every traveller go to for researching holidays before they make a booking. Questions like, what packages are on offer? What activities are in the area? How much will the holiday cost? Where is Hotel located? Your hotel search engine marketing strategy is very important. Search Engines are effectively, “answer machines”.
How Do Search Engines Work?
As Search Engines provide answers, it makes sense to feed them all the information needed to answer your guest’s questions effectively. However, in addition to providing answers, we need to give the Search Engines confidence that the information we have provided is both relevant and accurate.
When a guest asks a question, the Search Engines look
through billions of pieces of content and evaluate thousands of factors to
determine which content is most likely to answer the query. If Search Engines can
rely on our content then our answers will rate highly on the results page. The higher
up on a search result your website features, the more likely a guest will view
it.
One of the most effective ways your hotel can improve
your search engine ranking is through BackLinks.
What Are Backlinks?
Essentially Backlinks are a nod to the search engines that the content on your site is good quality and relevant. Similar to real-life Word of Mouth Referrals. They are links from other websites that point to your hotel website. The more natural backlinks you have from high-authority (trusted) websites, the more likely you are to rank higher within search results. A better result for your hotel website SEO ranking.
How Do I Secure Backlinks for My Hotel Website?
A good option is to look at tourism business directories; Failte Ireland, Local Authorities, Community Councils, and Chamber of Commerce. As a member you receive placement on their websites, the first backlink is within the placement of their website. Easy!!
Other options are:
- Community Events – providing offers, vouchers, or competitions to local community groups is also an effective way of gaining backlinks.
- Local Visitor Attractions - Talk to your local attractions about reciprocal backlinks, perhaps building visitor packages together such as “Stay and Explore”, will allow you to gather backlinks from reputable visitor attractions.
- Local businesses and Sports Clubs - Contact businesses in the area to mention your hotel on their site. Even using it as a landmark gives an option for a backlink.
Building backlinks is a vital marketing function and should be reviewed regularly. Moreover, it is important to review your competitor’s backlinks also. Knowing where they are getting backlinks will give insight into their strategy and may open a plethora of new opportunities for your hotel. There are many tools available to do an analysis on your competitors; SEMrush, Link Miner and Moz Pro.
SEO Tips for Hotels: Keep an eye on competitor backlinks as well as your own
For more information on, the importance of SEO in the Hospitality
Industry read more Premium Digital blogs.
Premium Digital Working for Success in Hospitality.
Written by Dáire Dillon
References:
| Article title: | 5 SEO Tips for Hotels to Improve your Ranking in Google |
| Website title: | Revfine.com |
| URL: | https://www.revfine.com/seo-tips-hotels-improve-ranking-google-bing/ |
Great read this week Daire, SEO is a midfield and there are so many elements to it but backlinks are something that are so important to help the ranking. It is important to ensure that there are keywords in some of your back links as this helps your ranking in the search engine. I thought your blog is well laid out, easy to read and informative about the subject. I like that you gave company suggestions for us to go and look us which can help us see what our competitors are at.
ReplyDeleteDaire this is a great read with an easy to understand structure and flow into backlinks ( for those of us who may not have had much expertise on this topic). You have highlighted easy key points to utilise backlinks and gain a competitive advantage. Thanks you for mentioning the tools available to audit backlinks like Moz Pro which i hope to be putting into practice in a hospitality context.
ReplyDeleteHi Daire, thanks for this blog, it is so important in 2022 to optimise hotel websites and keep on top of good SEO practices to be able to get good traffic. Backlinks is one of many parameters that search engines take into consideration when ranking websites so it is great you get to explain that in this blog. - F, Pinate
ReplyDeleteDaire this is a very informative blog on SEO and I really like your introduction as you explain what SEO is in simple terms. Backlinks certainly are important and should be part of the overall SEO strategy but this is an area often overlooked or ignored by hotels. There are many options available to the hospitality industry for backlinks which you have outlined and it is a useful tip that you gave on checking the backlinks of your competitors. Also with the availability of the tools to help you analyse your competitors the opportunity of using backlinks to improve your SEO should not be missed!
ReplyDelete