The Importance of SEO in the Hospitality Industry - Keyword Research

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The Importance of Search Engine Optimisation for your Hotel

As noted in my first blog on Google Analytics, all hotels have an online presence through their website and driving traffic to the hotel's website should be one of the main objectives in the marketing strategy. The best method to increase traffic to your hotel’s website is to have a good position in organic search engine results, this is called search engine optimization or SEO. The harsh truth in today’s digital age is if you are not ranking high in a search engine's top 10 results, your website might as well be invisible because search engines are one of the main ways people discover content online today.

To be highly ranked on a search engine such as Google or Yahoo your website needs to look at both on-page and off-page strategies. On-page happen on your hotel's website and off-page happen off your website. Off-page tactics include brand building, link building, citation building, content marketing, social media, and more. Both on-page and off-page SEO aim to make your website more friendly and trustworthy to search engine crawlers. 

How Does SEO Work?

All search engines such as Google or Yahoo use an algorithm to determine what websites show up in the search results when someone searches a specific word or phrase. Big data which we mentioned in our last blog series has helped the development of search engines to make them smarter and understand what we are looking for when we search. 

How can your Hotel rank higher?

All search engines use algorithms to determine your ranking and there are thousands of factors it considers when looking at your website to determine how trustworthy your site is and where it should place. There are things you can do though to help your site rank higher.

Google Search Engine Results 

1. Make your site mobile-friendly as a search engine will exclude your site from a search on a mobile device if it is not mobile-friendly. According to Chaffey (2022), mobile searches now account for 54.86% while desktop accounts for 42.65%. The other 2.49% come from tablet devices. 
2. Ensure you have the best content that’s relevant to your product or service as the search engines will analyse your content to determine if it is relevant to the word or phrase been searched. When creating content, it is so important to carry out keyword research as keywords are the word or phrases in the search query. You want the keywords on your page to be relevant, so people have a better chance of finding you. I will delve further into Keywords later in the blog.
3. Engage the visitors to your site by having a comment section, perhaps it could be on a wedding page where you get past brides and grooms to comment or it could be on the accommodation page where you let past guests comment, ensuring to screen them of course or you could add a blog to your site. Allowing people to engage with your site means there is constant fresh content on your website and search engines love this. 
4. Ensure to use backlinks from other sites that point to your site as this will raise your ranking. Put a link in your social posts on Facebook, LinkedIn or Instagram back to your site, put them on your blog if you have one. If you post a job online ensure to have a link back to your site. You can also link build with other companies or organisations in your town. 
5. Finally, make sure to use internal links on your website to help the search engine crawlers crawl through your site with ease finding every page as they will only rank the pages they can find. 

Watch the following video to learn how your hotel can rank higher in Google - 

Keywords Research and its Importance

When creating content, your keywords will define what your content is about, so it is important to carry out keyword research as part of your hotel SEO strategy before you begin optimizing for different search engines. There are many different search engines but Chaffey (2022) in his research notes that the Google search engine has an 86.19% market share of desktop searches as of December 2021 and mobile has a 94.88% market share so it is vital to concentrate on optimizing your SEO for Google. How do you know what keywords to use? There are many tools to help you find what keywords are been searched every day in relation to your site and your competitors, here are a few tools – 

• Google trends - Free 
• Moz keyword explorer  - Paid
• Ahrefs Keyword explorer – Paid 
• Semrush  - Paid 

When someone enters a search term into Google, the search engine will crawl through all websites looking for those search terms and then index the websites based on trust and many other factors. This is why hotel website SEO is important to ensure you rank high. Here are some of the things the search engines are looking for to be able to include you in the ranking based on keywords:

• If your website has the exact phrase the customer used as their search term.
• If your website has all the keywords the customer used as their search term in close proximity to each other.
• If your website has all the keywords the customer used as their search term not close together but on one page
• If your website has similar words to the keywords the customer used as their search term, for example, hotel instead of hotels or reservation instead of booking.
• If your website has external links pointing back to your website with the keywords the customer used as their search term in the link.
• If your hotel website has other hospitality sites pointing back to your website and they have the keywords the customer used as their search term on their site.
• If your website has the keywords the customer used as their search term in bold, italics with heading tag or any special formatting.
• Do images, videos and other elements on your site have meta tags using the keywords.

Keyword research and search engine marketing is a minefield and there is no one correct answer as Google is changing its algorithm constantly, but we need to remember that the main goal of the search engine is to give the users the most relevant results based on their search term. If a search engine is not able to connect a user to keywords on your hotel’s website, then your hotel will not be included in the search results at all.  

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 Philip Kelly

References: 

Chaffey, D., 2022. Search engine marketing statistics 2022 | Smart Insights. [online] Smart Insights. Available at: <https://www.smartinsights.com/search-engine-marketing/search-engine-statistics/> [Accessed 6 February 2022].