If you own a hospitality business, it’s important to understand the dynamics behind SEO marketing for the hotel and restaurant industry. Google has started displaying hotel and restaurant rates for direct bookings using their search portal, which is only a part of the significant development taking place in the search engine landscape. Don’t miss out on these opportunities.
Here are some of the most important tips and tricks that you can use to stay ahead of the competition:
KEYWORD RESEARCH
Keyword research is the most important aspect of increasing the visibility of your hotel. Since there is a lot of competition in local search, it’s better to look for low-competition and long-tail keywords. A low-competition keyword can be found using different variations. If your hotel is in Miami, try investigating competition for a more precise location such as:
- Miami hotel near Airport
- Miami Beach Resorts
- South Florida Motels
Using long-tail keywords can unearth golden nuggets with high traffic and extremely low competition. Usually, long-tail keywords include more than 5 words. Here is an overview of a few long-tail keywords for hotels in Florida:
- Cheap Hotels in Miami Beach
- Discount Hotels near Fort Lauderdale Airport
- How to find the best hotels in North Miami Beach?
- North Miami Beach Discount Hotels
To get maximum results, you can also hire Vice SEO Miami to do the research for you. Vice SEO Miami is a leading SEO & Internet Marketing Agency for Hotels in Florida.
Don’t Prioritize Brand Name
When writing Meta-Title, hotel owners mistakenly write the full name of their hotel without any descriptive text that will distinguish their hotel from others on the list. Meta-Title is the first line on the search engine page, which is also synonymous with a headline.
Instead of writing the hotel name, focus on providing a distinguishing feature of your hotel to attract clients. Let’s say, you have a hotel named “Skylark Miami”, which is located on a pristine beach. To attract visitors to your page, you can write a Meta-Title:
- Skylark: Highly-Rated Oceanfront Hotel
- Skylark: Highly-Rated Coconut Grove Hotel
- Skylark: Coral Gables Premier Resort
- Skylark: Sunny Isles Budget Motel
As indicated, this description focuses on qualities such as oceanfront, budget, premier, and high ratings.
Use H1 Tags for Main Keywords
H1, H2, and H3 tags are used for headings and sub-headings. It’s important to use these on your page because they tell Google what it can find on the page. A well-structured webpage with an H1 and H2 title tag help retain visitors to the site generating a positive impact on your SEO efforts. However, using your main keywords as H1 headings is even more productive as Google often pulls information from these H1 tags to display on the “featured snippet” of a search page.
- Your H1 tags can include:
- Sunny Isles Best Beach Resort
- South Florida’s Best Budget Hotel
- Fort Lauderdale Hostel for Girls
- Best Hostel in Doral Florida
Impressive Link Structure
A website that is easy to navigate enables visitors to find information, quickly. It also ensures that visitors stay on your page for a longer period. As visitor retention is an important part of the Google algorithm, you don’t want your visitors to quickly exit from the hotel website and start looking to another hotel.
If visitors don’t spend time on your page, Google will think that the page lacks pertinent information. As a result, you should have an easy navigational structure, which will also help search engine crawlers to index each page on your website.
Instead of writing details of your hotel and attractions on one page, you can design a separate page to highlight attractions near your hotel based on specific areas such as Doral, Coconut Grove, and Coral Gables. Properly highlighting each area separated by H1, H2 tags will make it easier for website visitors to understand the content.
Search Console and User Analytics
Use the Google search console to ensure that every page of your website is properly indexed in Google. Statistics on Google Analytics and its search console provide useful information to hotel owners regarding the demographics and behavior of website visitors. Sometimes, you may spend a lot of time developing a page only to identify an error on the page. Therefore, it is vital to keep an eye on website statistics to keep abreast of the situation.
Google My Business & Google Places
For hotel owners, using Google My Business is a great method to showcase and control how your business is displayed on the Internet search page. Using tools like Google Places, your business can gain visibility on Google Maps. If you have an onsite restaurant in the hotel, Google Maps can also be used for restaurant SEO.
Similarly, “Google My Business” can refine your hotel and restaurant SEO efforts by helping visitors get accurate information about your hotel. Recently, Google has also started displaying hotel rates and the location of a hotel when such information is updated by the hotel owner using Google My Business. You can get more information regarding these tools by talking to experts at Vice SEO Miami.
Responsive Design
If your hotel website looks good on the laptop, it doesn’t mean that it will look as good on mobile phones. The variety of screen resolutions made it trickier for website owners to align their website for laptops, tablets, and mobiles; however, developers have come out with online tools and responsive platforms to ensure your website looks great, everywhere.
In 2011, only 1% of mobile users used their smartphones to book a hotel. Four years later, the numbers increased to 18%. Now, nearly 45% of individuals use mobile phones to make a booking, which is an indication of the future trend. Interestingly, Google has also started ranking websites separately for desktops and mobile phones based on their responsiveness.
A Hotel Blog
Starting a blog to highlight the features of the hotel is a great way to increase trust and credibility among potential clients. Instead of writing general content for your website, spend some time on writing content for your blog. Sometimes, potential visitors are thrilled to hear from the hotel owner about their experiences and stories. If they feel connected, they will be more willing to book your hotel.
Focus on User Experience
The content on your hotel website should be written from a customer perspective. Accordingly, it should be educational and persuasive to make the customer take action. Avoid filler words, jargon, and sales language because consumers are aware of marketing gimmicks, and they know when you are trying to sell them.
Update Your Website Frequently
Google and other search engines are looking for fresh content that is new and updated. Experts have shown that changes to your website can enhance your ranking even if other factors remain constant. For a hotel owner, it’s not difficult to post updates and change content, whenever necessary. You can update the website by posting new coupons and discount offers. In addition, updates on new promotions, events, and services will definitely work in your favor to boost your position on search engines.
Create Backlinks
Backlinks are external links that other websites use to link to your website. Under normal circumstances, creating backlinks is not as easy as you cannot force anyone to link to your website. However, you can easily hire a professional company such as Vice SEO Miami to generate tons of backlinks for your hotel, which will increase your domain authority.
Backlinks from other websites show search engines that your website is popular among others because they are linking to your page. Many experts think that backlinks are the single most important factor in increasing your rankings in the search engine. Make sure, backlinks are from authoritative websites as any link from a spammy and low-quality website is considered link spam, which always hurts your ranking.
