Travel and tourism have recently become tremendously competitive industries, with hotels and chains facing off against online travel agencies (OTAs) and booking websites in increasingly rich search results.
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a substantial impact on and continues to influence the industry.
There are indications of life as people start to travel again as the pandemic eases in various regions and nations.
To attract customers both now and in the future, hotel businesses must modify their SEO tactics to drive incremental bookings, traffic, and income. This is because user behavior has changed significantly.
To assist you in achieving that objective in 2022 and beyond, the following list of SEO best practices for the hospitality industry strategies, methods, and tools.
Prioritize destinations using data
If you want to prioritize locations and make sure that your hotel appears near the top of the list, go no further than Google Destination Insights.
In the travel industry, it’s particularly crucial to know where people are going. So that you may compare trends and concentrate on providing high visibility for those destinations, let the data tell you this.
Las Vegas, for instance, was the most popular travel destination in the US from 09/03 to 11/19.
If I worked for the Bellagio, I’d make sure I was ranked number one for keywords linked to Las Vegas hotels, brands, brand + geo keywords, restaurants, COVID precautions, and other relevant terms.
Another great tool for offering insights for your SEO campaign is Google Hotel Insights. It offers data on residents who want to stay as well as tools and advice to make your company stand out from the competition.
According to data from the New York region, the number of people wanting to book trips has increased by 50% to 75% since last year (YOY).
This information will be helpful if you own a local travel agency and want to concentrate on destination pages. Look for opportunities to grow or repurpose content with nearby activities and local events by reviewing current content and your striking distance keywords.
The ability to determine if users are looking for this information in the United States or elsewhere is another helpful feature of this tool. This could help you plan your content strategy and PPC ads to target travel travelers and attract even more prospective visitors.
This information will be helpful if you own a local travel agency and want to concentrate on destination pages. Look for opportunities to grow or repurpose content with nearby activities and local events by reviewing current content and your striking distance keywords.
Provide For The Needs Of Travelers Using A Brand Concierge Strategy
The ability to determine if users are looking for this information in the United States or elsewhere is another helpful feature of this tool. This could help you plan your content strategy and PPC ads to target travel travelers and attract even more prospective visitors.
Hotel room reservations are not made in a straight line. Before a tourist books visit a hotel website, there are a number of things to take into account:
- Do I find the place appealing?
- What is attainable?
- What can I find nearby?
- How are the restaurants doing?
- Is food that is vegan available?
These are obviously but a few examples. There could be a huge variety of preferences together.
Sometimes months in advance, travellers will do their research. 91 percent of tourists use search engines to find lodging, and the vast majority (81 percent) turn to Google for travel ideas.
As a result, in order to stay in touch with customers throughout the user journey, hotels need an SEO brand concierge approach.
This comprises a detailed grasp of guest profiles, which should include generational groups like Millennials and Boomers as well as interest-based segments like Adventurers and Foodies. It also includes a comprehensive content plan.
The material for each of these pieces must be displayed both above and inside the particular hotel destination and must speak to distinct travelers.
For instance, a hotel brand website needs content that carefully selects the kinds of experiences that best represent the role of a concierge in order to rank well for “Foodie Destinations” or “Dining Experiences Around the World.”
These opportunities must go beyond what the hotel chain has to offer. Think about it: if a concierge only gave you advice on a restaurant in the lobby, how would you rate your interaction with them?
The brand concierge strategy forces a reevaluation of hotel brand websites and their function in interacting with travellers. This is accomplished through persona identification, journey mapping, and content.
A grasp of search, subject linkages, and the many intent phases of queries made along the traveler’s journey is necessary for this type of strategy.
Improve Your Local Listings and Google My Business
Your hotel listings can show up in the Map Pack in addition to the standard organic listings for geo-modified keywords on the page by optimizing your Google Business Profile.
This may lead to increased earnings, reservations, and organic traffic.
In order to prioritize your company, make sure that your hotel listings show up at the top of local searches, and deliver a consistent customer experience to encourage bookings and retention, fully optimized listings are essential.
My best advice is as follows:
- Boost your entries in the main directories of search engines. Create Google Posts and enhance images to allow guests to see the hotel.
- Organize and react to customer comments. Local reviews are thought to be the most insightful information that prospective visitors rely on when making decisions about lodging. Respond to reviews to show that you appreciate what people have to say about your business. This is crucial since Google rewards companies that reply to customer feedback with higher rankings.
- In order for your hotel brand to have influence over the dialogue about your business, respond to questions and make a FAQ section.
- In order for users to find your hotel, make sure the location of your Google Maps pin is accurate.
- Show stunning images and videos of the hotel’s rooms and facilities, including the restaurant (s).
- Utilize qualities to identify your location and offer additional details that are pertinent to passengers, such as accessibility, Wi-Fi, and health and safety advice.
- Keep hotel, restaurant, spa, and other hours up to date at all times so that customers are aware of their opening and closing times.
Engage Your Social Media Team in Collaboration
Share details about the top vacation locations, travel advice, hotel features, upcoming events, and local attractions.
This can help you raise brand awareness, maximize visibility, and create more links and conversation about your hotel, all of which can boost visibility, traffic, and revenue.
In Content Repurposing for Travel Brands: A Complete Guide, you can find further advice on how to make the most of your content across platforms.
Improve for the most crucial web components.
In a cutthroat business like travel and tourism, it is essential to optimize your website for Core Web Vitals.
These three metrics are combined to evaluate a website’s performance across a number of key performance indicators, and starting in May 2021, they will be utilized as a ranking signal. These are what they are:
- How long does it take for a website’s main page to load (LCP).
- How soon will the website start to be interactive? (FID).
- When a webpage loads, how much it moves (CLS).
Hotel websites should, among other things, employ clean code, a CDN for large pictures, externalize JS and CSS, and be mobile-friendly and secure in order to outperform CWV.
Although there is no penalty for not optimising to CWVs, it can be what separates you from your fierce opponents.
Utilize the FAQs and be ready for voice
Your hotel brand ought to be ready to respond to the inquiries your potential customers have. In order to help current and potential guests get the information they need and to cut down on phone calls to the hotel, provide FAQs on your website.
The FAQs should be organized and data-marked to optimize the possibilities of organic search and appear in rich results.
Your content needs to be voice search optimized because more people are utilizing voice search:
Google, good day. Is there a pool at the Boston Hilton?
If your brand comes up in response to a voice search like this, it might persuade a consumer to make a reservation with your hotel.
Analyzing the Presence and Results of Competitors
People now hunt for hotels in different ways. Therefore, it’s crucial to continuously check the ranks of your rivals to:
- What sort of stuff do they produce?
- how much of the market they have control over.
- What novel SEO techniques are they trying.
- How do they acquire links?
- Additionally, how quickly their pages load, etc.
Find whatever techniques and approaches you can that would be worth testing.
Because they don’t want to ruin the user experience, brands may be reluctant to add content to their websites. But it’s almost certain that your rivals are making new stuff.
And if you find that one of your main rivals has updated a major destination website with FAQs and structured data, and they now appear on page one for a key destination term, they might be receiving additional bookings, raising their brand recognition, and so on.
To stay up with, if not outperform, the competition, it may therefore be advantageous to produce and market content.
Final Reflections
Every element of life has been impacted by the pandemic, including the travel and tourist sector. Ideally, conditions will swiftly improve and travel will return to its pre-pandemic levels.
For the time being, hotel companies need to be flexible, try out new SEO tactics and content ideas, keep an eye on their competition, and get to know their customers.
By knowing who their customers are, what they want, and how to engage them with content that satisfies their information needs, travel brands can increase bookings, traffic, and income.
