11 Local SEO Tips for Better Hotel Rankings
There are a lot of tips you can follow in order to increase the success and popularity of your hotel. You must pay pay close attention to the customer experience, the food you serve, and its presentation. Another good advice is to increase your hotel's website visibility in the search engines. Learn more about the main SEO tips and practices in order to provide a quality online experience for your customers.
1. Review your website and make sure it is keyword rich
The first and most important step is to review the website of your hotel. Start with keyword research in order to to have a clearer notion of what would be the most beneficial hotel-related words, terms, and phrases to include in your content. This will help you rank higher position in the search engine. Make sure every page provides a high quality, well-written, relevant content. Use simple, readable, easy to understand, hyphenated URLs.
2. Pay attention to your titles, descriptions, and headings
Consider carefully your meta titles and meta descriptions. Instead of using your hotel name first, it is better to include target keywords first, and the name second. Get rid of duplicate titles and descriptions.
Keywords can also be used in the context of the website. Do not forget to add heading tags, especially the heading 1 tag to target your main keywords.
3. Link logically
Link logically between your pages. People are looking for easily accessible and understandable content, and links which will guide them through your website. This is also important for the Google crawler - when Google follows and tracks the links in your website, and later puts the results onto Google's index. A good internal link structure is one in which there are a couple of categories listed on your homepage, and each category leads to different posts, relevant to it.
4. Build Quality Links
Contact trustworthy, non-competitive sites to share links towards content on your website. This will 'point' readers towards your place, service, and offered experience. The sites you should look for should be relevant for your service, e.g. guest posting for travel websites, online directories, local press. Try to create unique content for every one and remember to focus on quality, not quantity.
5. Improve your website speed
Speed up your website. A few basic tips to do so are to:
Optimize your images and scale them appropriately, so that they are still high quality but resized to be smaller.
Use a simple design, meaning you should reduce the number of elements on your website. This will reduce the number of HTTP requests and improve the speed.
Fix your broken links, if you have any - if you send a no longer existing page, it causes your server to deliver a 404 page. Those server calls can slow the speed of your website down.
Use plain HTML code as it is interpreted directly by the browser.
These are just a few of the most common practises.
6. Incorporate a blog
Create a blog to keep visitors of the website up to date with what's going on at your hotel and in the area around. This is a suggestion in case there are regular events and will include a social element. However, if you evaluate that you'd be unable to update the blog, reconsider, because a stale blog is worse than no blog at all.
7. Emphasise on the benefits of your hotel location
Make sure your website or blog includes and emphasizes the advantages, features, landmarks of your location. Thus, the search engine will deliver more relevant results. Include a map on your website and think about what's interesting near your particular location and further than the location of the competitor hotels around. Customers are interested in what they can do, visit and experience.
8. Use professional copywriting
Take time and resources to find and hire a professional copywriter with writing and SEO experience. A person like that can help you create unique, quality content, and also come up with ideas for relevant, lasting content which will best represent and popularize your hotel online.
9. Implement mobile SEO
A website is responsive if, ideally, its design, images, text, and navigation is the same on mobile and on desktop. If you already have a running website with a lot of good content on it, consider hiring a website designer. This is a good investment because it will provide the best viewing experience and will meet your client's needs.
10. Promote special offers in other media outlets
Incorporate social media outlets - update content, blog articles, special offers, pictures, etc. - on social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
