Whether you are a small boutique hideaway or a grand luxury hotel, on-site SEO is the key component of digital marketing for hotels.
When utilised correctly, it can boost the organic traffic to your website, improve both credibility and user experience and help you improve brand awareness by listing you higher in search engine rankings.
In essence, on-site SEO is about optimising the pages of your website, so that search engine algorithms can assess how useful your information is and how relevant to a user’s search. You need fresh, well-crafted content that focus on user experience, liberally sprinkling in targeted keywords and optimising your meta tags, descriptions and images, as well as internal and external links.
By taking all these elements into account, you can build a robust website that can begin to rank well online and bring you more high-quality traffic.
Well-crafted content
Well-written quality content increases your hotel brand’s visibility by helping you position yourself higher up in search engine results page (SERP) rankings and connecting with your audience on an emotional level.
Google’s quality guidelines indicate that search engines prioritise content that conveys key principles. These are Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, summarised as EEAT. Focus on creating content that embodies these qualities.
You need to know what your audience is looking for. By identifying specific keywords that users type into a search engine, then analysing them using a combination of search volume and competition rate, you can zero in on the relevant topics you should be targeting. Free tools such as Semrush and Google Keyword Planner are useful for this.
Then it’s a case of making your content relevant to these searches, answering customers’ questions and providing a good user experience. Be clear and concise, use headings and subheadings to structure your content and integrate those keywords you’ve researched. Remember, it’s not just your website pages, but any blogs you create as well that can help. Search engines like websites that post fresh, relevant content regularly and it’s also a great way to connect with future guests.
Great meta tags
A meta tag is the title and brief summary that appears on the SERP. When done correctly, they can encourage a greater flow of organic traffic to your hotel website.
The trick here is to write for both human and machine. You want to integrate keywords so that search engines can index your pages, but you also need to attract people to click on your link when you appear in searches, so you want something clear and snappy as well.
Both the title and description should include a primary keyword. The title should be under 60 characters and the descriptions should be no more than 155 characters. This is because Google and other search engines will cut down text that’s too long, especially on a mobile phone, so your text will drop out of sight.
Meta tags should be geared towards potential guests searching for your services, with short enticing text that makes them want to explore more.
Don’t forget image alt tags
Using keyword-rich alt tags helps with hotel search engine optimisation. Alt tags describe the appearance or function of the images used throughout your content, which in turn makes it easy for search engines to understand the relevance of your images and rank your content accordingly.
These alt tag texts are read out to users who cannot see the screen so should describe the image, but it also offers an opportunity to include a relevant keyword to help your content rank higher and reach your core audience.
Links make all the difference
Relevant internal links help to build an interconnected architecture for your site, building bridges between useful pieces of content. This improves the user experience, making it easy to navigate between various content elements. For example, as someone reads about the area where your hotel is located, you link out to your local guide so they can explore further.
The added bonus is that this interconnected content helps search engines understand your content and follow the links to discover new pages. It also shows that you are providing useful, relevant content, which is considered valuable.
When linking, try using a keyword as your anchor text, for example is ‘Boston city guide’ is a keyword, make sure that is the phrase you link out from as it can further enhance your hotel search engine optimisation.
The backend element of your hotel’s website
Good on-site SEO goes beyond just the content. An optimised backend is crucial to creating a good user experience and is the reason why many people contract hotel SEO services to ensure they get it right. If your hotel website’s performance is poor, with slow loading times, your audience won’t wait and you’ll have a high bounce rate. Be sure to choose a performance-optimised hosting provider, and prioritise a simple, coherent website structure.
And don’t forget to design with mobile in mind. Over 55 percent of website traffic comes from mobile devices, so make sure your website is optimised for mobile use, with short, snappy texts and a design that adapts to mobile automatically.
You can invest in dedicated hotel SEO services with Peregryn Agency. Our team of experienced SEO experts and creative content writers can optimise your website and help you reach your target market. We’ve been working in the travel industry for almost two decades, and we are proud to work with some of the world’s leading travel brands.
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