SEO for Hotels

Why SEO is Critical for Hotels

According to Ibis World, the market size for the hotel and resort industry in Australia is an astonishing $14.8 billion.

Overall, there are between 5000 and 6000 such establishments nationwide and around 305,000 overnight accommodation rooms trying to get a slice of this pie. This means there is a hell of a lot of competition for the tourist and traveller dollar, which is why having a good Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy is very important.

To attract guests and boost bookings, your hotel needs a strong online presence because, without it, plenty of potential customers may never find you.

But what exactly is search engine optimisation, and how can you make it work best to your advantage?

In this guide, we’ll cover what you need to know about hotel SEO by exploring everything from the importance of relevant keyword strategies and link building to technical tips and search engine marketing that will significantly boost your online visibility.

What is Hotel SEO?

Hotel SEO is the process of optimising your hotel’s website and online presence to rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs) on Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

In simple terms, it involves doing things that make your website more visible to potential guests who are looking to book overnight or holiday accommodation in your geographical location.

This comprehensive practice involves various activities, including keyword research, local SEO, content creation, and technical improvements to ensure your website is more user-friendly and visible and attracts higher levels of organic traffic, which ultimately leads to an increase in bookings.

Why is Hotel SEO Important?

Every day, thousands of people across Australia and worldwide type in terms like ‘Hotel Sydney,’ ‘Gold Coast Resorts,’ or ‘Melbourne Holiday Accommodation’ into search engines like Google. These queries generate hundreds and often thousands of pages of results, which hopefully will include your website.

However, not everyone has the time and inclination to search through every listing on every page. So, it is vital to get yours featured as high up in these search results as possible.

That is why hotel website SEO is so important because it significantly increases your online visibility in an extremely crowded and competitive space.

Focusing on it allows potential guests to more easily find and book rooms directly through your hotel’s website, therefore reducing its reliance on third-party online travel agencies (OTAs) or hotel booking sites like booking.com or hotels.com, to whom you would have to pay a commission.

The great thing about implementing a robust hotel SEO strategy is that it helps you to compete with big, more established players and also goes a long way towards building your credibility and establishing trust among potential customers.

How to Do SEO for Hotels

The process of performing search engine optimisation for your hotel website is not a quick fix and is most effectively carried out by an accomplished Gold Coast SEO agency like Paperstack, which specialises in hotel local SEO management across Australia.

However, if you want to give it a go yourself, here is an overview of what you should do.

1. Start with Keyword Research

One of the best starting points is to identify precisely what SEO keywords potential customers are using to search for hotels and holiday accommodations in your area.

You can use keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner, Semrush, or Ahrefs to do this, and although your focus should be on finding high-volume, low-competition keywords, you should also collate a list of LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords that are related to it.

For instance, if ‘Brisbane Hotels’ is your keyword, examples of associated LSI keywords might be ‘Hotels in Brisbane CBD’, ‘Brisbane airport accommodation’, or ‘Cheap hotels Brisbane’.

Whatever terms your keyword research comes up with, make sure to include them within your content.

2. Optimise On-Page Elements

Finding relevant keywords is just one aspect of SEO for hotels to concentrate on. Another is on-page optimisation.

This involves ensuring your page titles, meta descriptions, and URLs are clear and concise and include target keywords that explain exactly what your page is about.

Doing this will help them index it much better and, therefore, list it on more relevant searches.

An example of an optimised page title might be:

• “Luxury Hotels in Sydney – Book Your Stay Today”

Similarly, an optimised meta description might be

• “Experience luxury at [Hotel Name] with world-class amenities and breathtaking views.”

Ahref has a free tool you can use to generate descriptions for your page title and meta descriptions.

When tackling on-page optimisation, don’t forget to include hotel SEO keywords in your images, alt tags, and meta descriptions. This is something many people who do their own search engine optimisation for their hotel website often overlook.

3. Focus on Local SEO

All hotels and holiday accommodation providers are local businesses, even if they are part of a national or international chain.

Or at least they should be seen as so when conducting SEO for hotels.

Implementing local SEO practices is essential for accommodation providers who are targeting tourists or travellers that perform location-based searches for hotels.

You can use Google Search Console to improve your listing in local search rankings by identifying your highest and lowest-ranking pages, establishing whether Google has actually crawled and indexed your website, and seeing how often your site appears in a search query for any given keyword.

Best practice for local SEO involves optimising your Google Business Profile to ensure all information is accurate and up-to-date and uploading lots of photos to build credibility.

You should also encourage customers to leave positive online reviews, strengthen your presence on Google Maps, and optimise your website’s performance on voice search.

Being active on social media can also help improve your organic search rankings on a local and national level.

4. Create Engaging Content

Above and beyond everything else, the best strategy for SEO for hotels is to create engaging content that people want to read and share.

At the very core of search engines like Google is the desire to provide internet users with the most relevant information that answers their queries. So therefore, they will naturally prioritise web pages that do this most effectively.

Using a content management system like WordPress, Magento, or Shopify to regularly produce content based on their search terms and intent is an excellent way to increase exposure to your hotel and supercharge your position on search engine rankings.

Some of the content you can produce could include features on local attractions and activities, seasonal travel tips, and guides for a specific type of guest, i.e. families, couples, business travellers, or the LGBTQI+ community.

5. Enhance Technical SEO for Hotels

If your hotel website does not provide browsers with a seamless experience, it can have a negative impact on your rankings and overall levels of user satisfaction. For this reason, there are several technical SEO improvements you can make to improve its performance.

They include:

• Improving its page speed by compressing images, minifying code, and using a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
• Testing your website using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to ensure it is as mobile-friendly as possible.
• Securing your website with ‘https’ to build trust on search engine and with visitors.

Building Links to Boost Authority

A major ranking factor for search engines like Google is the number of backlinks you have from other websites, such as travel blogs, local directories, and tourism websites that are considered reputable.

Backlinks involve another website linking to yours, usually when referencing a specific piece of content you have written. This might involve someone writing a blog post about visiting Cairns and then linking to your website as a recommendation of somewhere to book hotel rooms when you stay there.

As a general rule, websites with lots of backlinks will rank higher than those that don’t have many. However, the key attribute to consider here is the relevance of the backlink. Typically, search engines will look favourably at backlinks from websites that have a domain authority of over 60 when it comes to assessing your rankability.

They won’t look so favourably on them if they come from dodgy websites with low domain authority and no relevance to the hotel or tourism industries or the geographical location you are in.

You can try to partner with local attractions, popular travel bloggers, or event planners to earn high-quality backlinks that can boost your Google Search rankings.

In addition to external links, all your content pages should have helpful internal links that guide users through your website to other pages like booking forms, room details, and amenities they might find useful.

Doing this is a good way to improve the user experience and build further authority on search engines.

How to Measure the Success of Your Hotel SEO Strategy

You can put a lot of time and effort into search engine optimisation for your hotel website, but you won’t know if your SEO efforts have been effective unless you track it.

The key to doing so is to focus on tangible metrics that let you know if you are making the right kind of progress. So, try to establish whether there has been an increase in organic traffic and where you are ranking for specific keywords. Google Analytics can provide you with these insights.

Ideally, you should also establish if there has been an increase in bookings of your hotel rooms from organic search traffic and, in particular, which local SEO strategies they came from.

The more you can track these metrics over time, the more of a benchmark you will have for how your efforts have been.

Common Challenges in Hotel SEO (And How to Overcome Them)

Hotel website SEO is not easy, even for those who know what they are doing!

But it is especially challenging for local businesses who are new to SEO and digital marketing and fancy doing it themselves.

However, if you want to focus your SEO efforts on getting your business listing in front of people who Google hotels, here are a couple of things you should be aware of.

Competing with OTAs

Online travel agencies (OTAs) dominate results on Google and all other search engines due, in part, to them being seen as authoritative websites, employing better link-building strategies, and enjoying more organic traffic.

This doesn’t mean you can’t compete with them for specific search terms. But it does mean you will have to get creative to do so – which is why it is important to research and add relevant keywords to all your content.

Optimising for Voice Search

Many tourists and travellers use voice search for queries like “hotels near me” as a way to find what is available. So, as part of your digital marketing strategy, you should target long-tail keywords and casual phrases in your off and on-page SEO efforts to capture this traffic.

Hotel SEO Tips You Can Implement Today

When performing SEO for hotels, it can take between three to six months to see consistent results across your entire website.

However, there are some things you can do to get some quick wins that will boost your search results for certain pages in a short space of time. They include the following:

1. Optimise images with descriptive alt text and compressed file sizes to reduce page download speeds, particularly on mobile devices. Where possible, use unique images and not stock from websites like Unsplash.
2. Add schema markup, as this will improve your online search visibility.
3. Refer to Google Search Console to identify which pages on your website need to be optimised the most.
4. Update these pages and add new content based on terms you’ve discovered from keyword research tools to keep your website fresh and relevant.
5. Include lots of relevant internal links in all your content.
6. Start a link-building outreach strategy to relevant websites with a high domain authority.
7. Monitor your competitor’s performance in search results to stay ahead of the curve.

Why Choose Paperstack for Hotel SEO?

If you are serious about improving your website’s rankings on search engines, you should enlist the help of SEO experts like Paperstack. We have a proven track record of helping our clients receive more direct bookings as a direct result of them enjoying higher listings in local search results.

Two of the main things that set us apart from other SEO agencies are our:

Expertise in the Hospitality Industry

We have extensive experience in helping clients within the hospitality industry implement SEO strategies that attract more bookings than the traditional advertising methods they were previously employing.

Thanks to our work in hotel SEO, we understand the unique challenges and opportunities that are often present within the hospitality industry and are best placed to navigate them for you.

Transparent and ROI-Focused

At Paperstack, we deliver measurable results that offer an excellent return on your investment. This includes increased bookings and revenue and demonstratable metrics that show how much more organic traffic you are getting to your website.

Additionally, we do not tie you to lock-in contracts. Not that you’ll want to stop engaging our services, because we are that good at hotel SEO!

Ready to Transform Your Hotel’s Online Presence?

If you are not happy about how your website currently ranks on search engines, your best bet is to contact Paperstack now.

You don’t have to operate in the shadows of your competitors anymore – at least when it comes to your hotel search engine optimisation!

Schedule a Free Consultation Today

If you do contact us today, we’ll conduct a free website audit that will enable us to create a custom SEO strategy to help your hotel attract substantially more guests and boost revenue overall.