HOTEL SEO: GENERATE MORE DIRECT BOOKINGS WITH OUR SEO FOR HOTELS

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

• How do Hotels Generate Bookings?

  We have lost count of the number of times a hotelier asked us how they could secure more bookings. It's such a challenging industry, especially during the global pandemic, but the ability to generate bookings and have a higher room occupancy rate will mark the difference between success and failure, so it's essential to invest in strategies that will deliver strong results.
  
  The good news is that there are myriad ways a targeted digital strategy, including a bespoke SEO campaign, can help hotel businesses to survive and thrive, even in the most competitive parts of the industry. These include:
  
  Solidifying Guest Personas: The process of understanding who your hotel guests are, why they are choosing to stay with you, and whether they are travelling for business or leisure is made much easier by creating guest personas. This will generate valuable insights that you can use to inform your traditional and digital marketing strategies and drive even more beneficial outcomes.
  Ensuring your Value Proposition Appeals to your Ideal Audience: Let's say that a potential guest has narrowed their search down to two hotels. To ensure they choose your hotel, you need to have a strong value proposition that immediately tells them why you are the best option. Your value proposition should sit at the heart of your digital strategy and inform your marketing in very deliberate ways.
  Conducting Effective On-Site Optimisation: Optimised websites deliver a seamless user experience that allows your potential guests to obtain the information they're looking for with ease. One of the most important things here is to ensure that your website loads quickly. As many as three-quarters of people will opt to leave your site and turn to one of your competitors if your site fails to load quickly. On average, you have only 7 seconds to grab the attention of your ideal guest when they visit your website.
  Optimising for Mobile: With more people choosing to browse on their smartphone or tablet, your site needs to function seamlessly on smaller devices. It is not enough to present your mobile visitors with a tiny version of your desktop site because it simply won't deliver an intuitive experience. Instead, your mobile site should guide visitors through a carefully considered user journey.
  Creating High-Quality Content: In addition to showcasing individual rooms, the imagery and content on your site should also reflect your brand's personality. Potential guests should be able to quickly get an idea of the look and feel of your hotel. But avoid presenting too much choice, which can be overwhelming and lead to decision-making fatigue.
  Leveraging Analytics Data: Your website can tell you so much about your audience's wants, needs, and behaviours. Analysing the information within the likes of Google Analytics and Google Search Conole and then transforming it into actionable insights can help you maintain an edge over your closest competitors.
  There's a lot of information here, but it's really only the tip of the iceberg for the number of strategies and tactics available to you as a hotel owner, including hotel SEO.

• How do Hotels Get More Direct Bookings?

  As a hotelier, you already know that you simply can't ignore the value of OTAs when it comes to generating bookings. But it's essential also to have a direct booking strategy to ensure that:
  
  1. You aren't paying as much in commission
  2. You can connect with your guests before they arrive to deliver a personalised service
  So, how exactly should you approach the creation of a dedicated direct booking strategy? Here are just a few ways:
  
  Leveraging the Strength of a Fully Search Engine Optimised Website: Your website needs to have an immediately recognisable and memorable brand identity that your ideal audience can connect with when they are searching for your type of accommodation. It must be mobile-friendly and fully search engine optimised to ensure that search engines can easily crawl, interpret, and index all on-page content and deliver maximum usability to visitors.
  A well-optimised site is more likely to drive more bookings across desktop and mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, and experience a markedly reduced transaction abandonment rate.
  Simplifying the Booking Process: By providing your potential guests with the opportunity to see the real-time availability of your rooms on your website and facilitating a seamless booking process is one of the most effective ways to boost your direct bookings. This strategy will also allow you to provide instant booking confirmation, which will increase their confidence in your brand.
  Boosting your Brand Online: Modern consumers look for reviews on almost every product and service they are interested in investing in. This is particularly true for hotels, so you need to encourage and make it as simple as possible for satisfied guests to leave a positive review that you can share online. Take care to position positive feedback across your site, particularly at critical points in the decision-making and booking journey, as this will increase your potential guest's confidence in concluding their booking.
  Crucially, a robust hotel SEO strategy can help you cover all these steps and much more.

• What is Hotel SEO?

  Without good SEO, you will struggle to attract enough high-quality and prequalified traffic to your website, which is easily your most valuable digital asset. You can attract visitors from various channels, but traffic from search engines is among the most valuable. SEO allows you to target customers at each stage of the buying cycle.
  
  You need a specialist Hotel SEO strategy that entices your potential guests to click through to your site over those belonging to your competitors in order to dazzle them with your engaging brand, immaculate rooms, and quality service.
  
  With a powerful hotel SEO strategy designed specifically to meet the needs and objectives of your hotel business, you will find it easier to secure and maintain a prominent ranking position for keywords that are highly relevant to your business. The higher you can rank, the easier it will be to entice your audience to browse your website.
  
  The concept of SEO can quickly feel very overwhelming. But, the right SEO agency can simplify the process for you and work to put together an organic search strategy that will help push your business further towards your core goals and objectives.
  
  Securing organic search traffic is hugely beneficial for hotel businesses. High-quality SEO strategies will consistently channel qualified traffic to your website by effectively matching your content to the intent that lies behind every search a user conducts. Additionally, organic search traffic often drives more conversions than almost every other source of traffic. So, getting your approach right here is critical.

• How Important is SEO to a Hotel?

  A bespoke hotel SEO campaign can markedly improve the online visibility of your hotel’s website. The importance of investing in an innovative, strong approach to SEO cannot be overstated. To recap, some of these benefits include:
  
  1. Staying one step ahead of your competitors
  2. Driving more organic traffic to a key business asset
  3. Establishing your hotel as a credible and trustworthy choice
  4. Boosting awareness of your brand
  5. Increasing bookings and profitability
  6. Nurturing guest loyalty
  Your bespoke hotel SEO strategy will include many different facets, such as maximising the value of rich snippets. This optimisation tactic uses HTML to help search engines better understand your site's content and context. In addition to ensuring your listing in SERPs is more immediately engaging, websites that have been optimised for rich snippets also typically benefit from an increased click-through rate (CTR).
  
  Another facet of your bespoke hotel SEO strategy will include ensuring your hotel is present and visible on key online listings such as Yelp, Trip Advisor and Google My Business. In addition to connecting with millions of potential guests, your messaging will be visible to your target audience at precisely the right moment in their booking journey.

• What are the Costs of Hotel SEO Campaigns?

  If you want to drive more qualified traffic to your website to increase bookings and boost revenue, a bespoke hotel SEO campaign will help. One of your first questions is likely to be, "how much will it cost?" and although this information can be tricky to uncover, we want to be fully transparent concerning what you can expect from your investment. Our tailored campaigns start from only £600 plus VAT per month, and our contracts are all undertaken on a monthly rolling basis.
  
  This approach means that we can guarantee consistent quality and maximum flexibility for your hotel. We will start by understanding your goals and analysing your current digital presence to highlight additional opportunities and areas for improvement. The tailored hotel SEO campaign we create for your hotel will be fully aligned with your objectives, which may be to increase enquiries, boost your visibility amongst your potential guests, and generate more direct bookings through your website.
  
  When we deliver our proposal, it will include a comprehensive guide to the deliverable aspects you can expect to receive for your investment. We will maintain this level of transparency throughout our working relationship to ensure that you are getting the most ROI from your hotel SEO spend every month.