The hotel industry is booming! More than 800 hotels opened up in 2020 alone. By the end of 2020, America had more than 5.2 million hotel rooms available to the public.
These statistics indicate that you can make money from running a hotel. However, they also suggest that you have stiff competition, regardless of where your hotel is.
You must implement SEO for hotels to make money and beat your competitors. SEO lets you grow your online presence, convert passive users into customers, and develop your brand. Yet you must focus on using the best SEO strategies for hotels. Here are a few marketing strategies your hotel can start implementing now.
Related: What Is SEO? A Beginner’s Guide
Select a Target Audience
Picking a target audience is essential to any marketing campaign. It lets you develop your brand and decide what marketing materials to produce.
You can perform market research to find the right audience. You don’t have to be specific, targeting people from a particular location or demographic. But selecting a group like budget travelers or millennials is important.
If you’re a resort, your best target audience is leisure travelers with a high income. You can target singles, couples, and families. If you’re a low-budget hotel or hostel, you can focus on budget travelers and backpackers.
Research Essential Keywords
Keyword research is the heart of SEO. Use tools like Ahrefs to see what keywords people are using to search for hotels, activities, and locations to travel to. You aim to incorporate as many of these keywords as possible in natural sentences throughout your content.
Each page on your hotel’s website should have a target keyword and other keywords related to the target. If your target keyword is “Miami hotels,” related keywords include “hotels in Miami,” “affordable Miami hotels,” and “Miami places to stay.”
You also want to add LSI words that are conceptually related to your keywords. These terms make your content more natural and credible to crawlers and algorithms. LSI terms for “Miami hotels” include “rooms,” “lodging,” and “resorts.”
Most of your keywords will be short, but you can add long-tail keywords like “beach resort in Miami.” These search terms are more specific and can help you create ideas for long-form content.
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Think About What Your Audience Wants
Once you have a target audience, you should start thinking about what they are searching for and need from your content. Use keywords to determine what the search intent of your audience is.
Someone typing “Miami hotels” has probably already decided to go to Miami. They want information about an affordable, comfortable place to stay in the city. Therefore, your page targeting “Miami hotels” should give clear details about your hotel and convince the viewer to stay there.
Look at messages and comments from your customers. If you notice a frequently asked question, you should create a webpage that answers it. If you receive many frequently asked questions, you can start an FAQ page to address all of them.
Look Beyond the Content
Your page title, meta description, and URL are as important as your webpage content. Viewers will see these three elements as they look at search engine results and use them to decide whether they should visit your page.
Your page title must be an accurate and concise description of the page. Include your target keyword and keep the title between 50 and 60 characters.
Your meta description should be two sentences long, summarizing the page content while including at least one keyword. The first sentence can ask a question, and the second can answer it: “Are you looking for great Miami hotels? XYZ Hotel is the best hotel in Miami for couples and leisure travelers!”
Each page should have a unique URL that describes the content: https://xyzhotel.com/king-rooms. Do not use connecting words like “for” or “with,” and separate the words using hyphens.
Alt text is the words that pop up on the screen if an image does not load properly. It also appears in screen-reading tools that assist readers with vision impairment. Search engine crawlers do not look at the images on your pages, but they can read the alt text and rank your website higher. Include keywords in your alt text and concisely describe what is in the images.
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Structure Your Pages
Headers make your content easier to skim and allow you to weave in keywords. H2 headers break up your content into major sections. If you’re describing a step-by-step process, you can write each step in an H2 header and then detail what your user should do in the text below.
H3 headers break up content in H2 sections, allowing you to get more specific. You don’t need to include H3 headers in most content, but they can be useful when explaining options.
You should build a sitemap that shows where your pages are and how they are structured. Your content management system may create an automatic sitemap, but you should review it for accuracy. If it seems correct, submit it to Google Search Console so crawlers can view it.
On-page SEO means keeping your content relevant, clear, and thorough over time. You must update your posts to keep the information fresh and the structure easy to use. Visit each page every few months and tweak terms and headers so users can find them valuable.
Related: On-Page SEO Ranking Factors You Need to Use
Make Your Pages Easy to Load
82% of customers say slow page speeds affect their purchasing decisions. The faster your pages load, the longer people stay on your website and the more encouraged they will be to hire your hotel.
You should have images on your pages, but they shouldn’t be too big or complicated. You can minify or compress your files to make them easier to load. Embedded videos can explain complicated processes but also slow your loading speed down. If your content is straightforward, do not embed a video on your page.
Do not use complicated frameworks, plugins, or templates. Test your pages before you make them public, and see if any features in the template are slowing them down. You may need to swap templates so your pages load smoothly.
Related: How to Create SEO Content That Ranks
Last Updated on May 15, 2023 by Hilda Wong