What does a search engine look for when answering a user’s query? It tries to provide the most relevant answers such that the user feels satisfied with the response provided. If you are the webmaster/marketing manager/owner of a property looking to work on your hotel SEO, this article will provide you with a comprehensive guide that can be used to achieve your desired results.

What is Hotel SEO?

Hotel SEO is the umbrella term that is used to describe all the activities that can be undertaken to help rank the hotel website on search engines. It can include website optimizations like title & meta descriptions. It can also include optimizing the local listing sites to ensure all the relevant information provided is accurate & up to date. Not only these there are multiple other activities that can be undertaken so that your hotel website starts ranking on the first page of search engines.

How fast does Hotel SEO work?

The correct answer to this question would be – “It depends”. Hotels can start seeing results of SEO activities in as little as 2 months if done right. If a knowledgeable SEO team is supported with a reasonable budget, it would be safe to assume in 2-6 months’ time one can start seeing the results of the SEO activities. The key to measuring the success of any SEO activity is setting up realistic goals. Setting up realistic goals followed by the actual work aligned with best practices ensures any hotel can see the benefits of search engine optimization.

Can I do SEO for my hotel on my own?

Yes. You can do your own Hotel’s SEO subject to a few conditions being met. Firstly, you need to have a knack of learning. SEO & the world of digital marketing is an ever-evolving space. What works today, may not work tomorrow. You need to learn SEO best practices constantly. Secondly, you’d have to be a person who has the time to put in the work to achieve the desired outcomes. Lastly, since hotel SEO can involve multiple activities, prioritizing tasks in accordance with the outcome desired can help in making the job more manageable.

Needless to say, there are multiple tools that you’d need to familiarize yourself with before starting the journey of optimizing your hotel website for SEO.

Why is SEO important for hotels?

What happens when a prospective guest searches for your hotel on Google & ends up going to a booking(dot)com or any other OTAs? You lose revenue. If SEO best practices are not followed then you’d lose money on both ends. On one end maintaining the website which is not driving direct bookings. On the other hand, paying commissions to OTA channels. Because, when a guest books your hotel for a couple of nights through an OTA, you would need to pay commissions as high as 20%-30%. To avoid this situation, hotels make their own website from which guests can book directly.

To avoid this situation it is extremely important to perform best practices for hotel SEO so that guests can come directly to your website & book direct. Here’s a link to an article that I had written previously showcasing 5 strategies to generate direct bookings for your hotel.

What are SEO and SEM for hotels?

When a user searches on a search engine it shows 2 types of results. 1 is organic results. The 2nd is inorganic or sponsored results. The picture below depicts the differences between the 2 kinds of results.

As shown by the picture above, the property “Holiday Inn & Suites” is running paid SEM(Search Engine Marketing) campaigns for the keyword “best hotel in Cape Cod”. While Trivago is shown in the search result as an organic result. That is because of the SEO activities done on the Trivago website.

While SEO is the set of activities performed to rank as high as possible in the organic results, SEM is a paid service provided by Search Engines to rank on the results pages.

P.S. There’s no guarantee that every search query would need to have sponsored results showing up on the search pages. It depends on the type of search query being used by the user. If the search query has a transactional intent associated, there’s a high chance of a sponsored result being shown.

How does Google rank websites on Search?

With the onset of Artificial intelligence & conversational search which Google and other search engines are looking to bring in, it is extremely crucial to understand the search intent of users. Search engines try to answer questions that the user is looking for in the most precise & concise way. If your website is providing the answers then there’s a high chance that Google would surface your website on the first page as Google may feel that your website may have the most authentic answers. This is in line with Google E-E-A-T. (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness)

Let’s consider that you run a hotel based out of a hill station like Himachal Pradesh. A user searches for “The best way to spend a weekend in Kasol with a family of 4 & a dog”. If your website is having an article describing the exact same question with detailed real-life answers then there would be a high chance of your website ranking on the first page of the search.

1 way of looking at how Google ranks a website on search is thinking that humans are searching for answers. Google wants to scrape the internet & provide the user with the best results providing the most accurate information. If you as the webmaster of your hotel can provide relevant answers that a probable guest may have then it becomes easy for Google to choose your website & show it in the search results.

Essentially that is what Hotel SEO does for you. Activities that make sure your website comes up in search rankings when probable guests are searching for answers.

How does your SEO strategy fall in line with your Digital Marketing Strategy?

Before moving on to SEO strategy, it is important to understand where the Hotel SEO strategy falls within the overall gamut of the Digital Marketing Strategy for your hotel. For e.g. I had worked with JW Marriott Kolkata & their social media plan included a lot of video content to be generated. Utilizing the video content for SEO boost was done through digital PR campaigns. Thus it is extremely important to set a Digital Marketing strategy plan first before setting up the SEO strategy for the hotel. This article outlines what is digital marketing & how to create a digital marketing plan. By setting up the goals for the Digital Marketing Strategy, determining SEO goals would become much more natural & intuitive.

Best Hotel SEO Strategy

Hotel SEO is an ongoing activity & not a one-time fix. With this information in mind, it is extremely important to understand what steps need to be followed when creating your hotel SEO plan. Before moving forward let’s look at the main areas of SEO.

What are the 3 main areas of SEO?

• On-page – Optimization which can be performed on the website of your hotel encompasses on-page SEO. For e.g. making sure your title & meta descriptions of your pages contain the keywords which are relevant to your webpage. Another example can be using Alt Text in the images that appear on your website. One more example of On-Page SEO is using structured data or schema to contextualize the information that is present on the webpage.
• Off-Page – Optimization which has to be done beyond your website is termed off-page SEO. It can include activities like local listing data accuracy, replying to reviews on various portals, or link building. This & the next point is perhaps the most neglected portions of SEO. A proper SEO strategy takes all three points & gives importance to each one of them.
• Technical SEO – This includes the technical part of your website & is it following the best practices as outlined by Google? For e.g. are all the web pages of your website mobile friendly in nature? If not then it is worth fixing these technical aspects of your website to give users an enhanced mobile experience. Similarly, is a sitemap associated with your website that Google can access & crawl various pages which are there on your website? Likewise, there is a list of technical SEO best practices that one has to follow so that Google finds it easy to crawl your website & surface it on search results.

You can go through this resource provided by Google to get started with your hotel SEO by following the best practices.

Hotel Website Optimization

As described in the point of On-Page & Technical SEO optimization, hotel website optimization is crucial for achieving favorable SEO results. As an example let’s look at http://hillsidekasol.com/index.php & try to understand where Hotel SEO can be done better.

The above example shows the website not having an SSL certificate which is why a user is shown the error “Not Secure”.

Another example of how the website can be optimized for better SEO is to find out pages that are not opening properly & throwing an error when a user is trying to navigate to a particular page. The below image shows when someone tries to see the Large Attic room the page is not opening.

Search engine optimization for hotels as demonstrated above entails a lot of details which has to be taken care of. The above example is just showing 2 parameters that can be improved. Once they are worked upon, they should be resubmitted for indexing so that Google starts crawling the new pages which are “HTTPs” along with the fixed large attic room page.

Search Intent & its Relationship with Hotel SEO

“Room with a hill view from Kasol”. If this is what a user is searching for, what do you think the user is looking at? Rooms at hotels which has a window overlooking the hills.

If your property has a room that has a majestic view of the hills have a detailed page with the right title, and meta description along with relevant images. That can ensure that your property webpage may show up on the first page of Google for such a search term. While performing your hotel SEO make sure you think of all the search queries that a probable guest may have & their search intent. This is why keyword research is an extremely important aspect of the hotel SEO strategy.

Keyword Research

Keyword Research is the process of finding out the keywords/search terms that a user may use to find your hotel. Although intuitively it may seem that keyword research is an extremely easy job, it is actually pretty time-consuming & difficult. You have to wear your potential guests’ shoes to understand what sort of queries they may have. Depending upon that you select a set of keywords. Once the keywords are selected, content has to be built around them to give your hotel website a good enough chance to rank on the first page of Google when a user is searching for those queries.

I had written an article on the difference between branded & non-branded keywords along with describing short tail & long-tail keywords. It outlines why your hotel website is not ranking for non-branded keywords & what can be done to rank for them.

Using keyword research tools like Ahrefs, and Semrush can help you navigate the difficult process of choosing the right set of keywords to start the hotel SEO journey. Although the tools mentioned above are paid tools, you can also look at free tools like Google Trends and Google Keyword Planner as alternatives. More on tools in the subsequent sections.

Unique Content for Hotel SEO

Hotel websites ideally should list down as many unique attractions it has to offer to their users. Over here I’m not talking about the general things to do or things to see around the property. But detailed information that is not necessarily available on the internet. This requires immense knowledge about your perfect customer & what kind of experiences he/she may like while they are staying at your property.

For e.g., if we take the same hotel from our previous example we can see in the ‘Things to see’ section it has listed a total of 5 places. These 5 places are the most common ones.

But what about the unique experiences one can have while they are staying at Kasol? Information about various treks one can do based out of Kasol. Or if your property caters to a family crowd why not list down the most authentic Israeli cafes in Kasol? The more unique content your website can provide, the better your chances of signaling to Google that your website is a source of authority that it can trust. That inherently enhances your chance of getting ranked on Google for various search queries related to your hotel or destination.

Local Optimization for Hotel SEO

There are many local listing websites and or review sites that automatically create your hotel’s profile by taking information from your website & publishing them. Local optimization includes maintaining these listings with accurate information & responding to queries that users may have on these platforms. To give a real-life practical example.

Your hotel has a Google My Business profile. Maybe you have claimed it too. But you forgot to add your hotel rates to your GMB profile. What’s the problem with that? In Google Hotel Finder, your rates will not be displayed. Instead, OTA websites would be displaying their listings of your property along with ads. this inherently makes the user book your property through an OTA channel thus making you lose revenue through commissions.

Another example can be the phone number mentioned in the various listing websites is not updated. That will make users call on the wrong number thus making your hotel lose a potential guest.

Another example of how you can improve hotel SEO while taking care of local optimization is by responding to reviews that users may have left on TripAdvisor or on Google review.

There’s also a set of users who finds hotels while searching on maps. Making sure that the information about your property is accurate on maps of Google, Bing & Apple Maps is critical when optimizing for local searches.

Hotel SEO improvement with Frequently Asked Questions & People Also Ask

Frequently asked questions are a great way to understand the related queries a user may search. If you can identify a search term that a user may use while they are deciding on which property to stay at, take a look at the ‘frequently asked questions’ & ‘people also ask section’ of the search results. If you can incorporate those questions & answers in your website content, there’s always a higher chance that Google starts showing your website for those queries too.

This is also a great way to understand why your hotel website should have a FAQ(frequently asked section) because users may have relevant questions which they may ask. If your website is able to provide users with accurate answers, Google rewards the website by putting it up as an authoritative source of information.

Understanding your ideal customer’s journey can drastically help improve your Hotel’s SEO efforts

For any SEO effort that is to be performed, it is extremely important to identify your ideal customer profile. One of the best ways to do it is to look at the historical CRM data of your hotel. If your hotel caters mostly to family audiences then your SEO efforts take a different approach than if your hotel caters to single men & women looking for a getaway from their boring corporate work. The hotel SEO efforts would be vastly different if, on the other hand, your property is frequented by adventure seekers.

I had written an article which outlines the customer journey while booking a hotel. I believe if you can correctly analyze your ideal customer profile more than 50% of your work is completed. Having worked with several businesses I have understood how many veteran business owners are still unsure about their ideal customer profile & label all audiences as their ideal customers.

Budget for Hotel SEO

There’s no one right answer to setting up a budget for performing SEO activities for your hotel. But a ballpark figure of $1000 – $2000 per month should be a good start. Once you start seeing results from the SEO efforts you should ideally increase the budget by 20% every year to maintain the results & gain more share of the audience.

Tools to use for Hotel SEO

Google Analytics is the FREE software that Google provides to webmasters to analyze the performance of any website. Measuring how website users are coming onto your website, and how much are they interacting with it helps gain valuable insights on how to structure the hotel website for optimal user experience. Not only that, Google Analytics also helps in tracking revenue goals like bookings gained through the website directly which is the ultimate objective of having the hotel website.

Google Search Console can be utilized to see which are the search terms on which your website is getting impressions. Doubling down on getting those impressions to clicks is a good way of using Google’s Search Console. I am not going to dig deep into how Search Console can be utilized to its utmost potential. That’s a topic for a separate article altogether. But I will mention one thing. The Search Console is an extremely powerful tool to produce a content calendar that can be part of your content marketing activities.

Apart from the above-mentioned tools, there are tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, and Screaming Frog to help with your SEO activities.

Tracking the performance of Hotel SEO activities

There’s a popular saying, what can’t be measured can’t get improved. The number 1 rule of working in the digital marketing space is to measure the successes & failures. That inherently dictates the next set of steps that can be taken to gain more search impressions, and traffic ultimately leading to greater revenue growth.

Conclusion

As I have iterated several times in this article hotel SEO is an ongoing activity. Since SEO is part of your larger digital marketing strategy it is worth investing a significant amount of time in figuring out realistic goals that you may want to achieve for your hotel on a quarterly & yearly basis. Having a mix of SEO, SEM, Content Marketing, Social Media & Display advertising can actually help the hotel regain bookings from OTAs. If you need help in understanding where your hotel can improve on the digital front you can connect with me.

I work in a US-based digital marketing firm & would love to help you out in starting your digital journey. Don’t worry, I’m not going to charge you anything. I just want hotels to gain back revenue from the OTAs to their direct channels.