4 Ways for Hoteliers to Get More Direct Bookings from Google
Here is some great insight from an article we found on netaffinity.com. The article explores some simple ways in which you can improve your hotels website SEO (search engine optimisation) to generate more popularity and direct bookings.
Check it out.
We need to talk about search engine optimisation, or SEO.
It’s an area that can seem pretty murky compared to, say, running a voucher campaign or taking great pictures of your hotel, but it’s a key part of your hotel’s online presence. Good SEO is how you get organic traffic, and it’s how you get visitors on your hotel website who are actually going to book direct.
Why is it so complicated? When you hear statistics like “Google’s search engine algorithm changes between 500-600 times a year,” it’s easy to understand why SEO best practices aren’t a constant.
SEO tactics that were capable of soaring search traffic in the past are redundant today. This happens for a lot of reasons: Google changes their algorithm, travellers change their booking patterns online, and the amount of content on the web is just exponentially bigger than it used to be.
On a happier note, despite SEO’s changing nature, search engine optimisation can still get your hotel more bookings – and it’s necessary for a healthy website. If you don’t have good SEO practices in place, it’s going to be really, really difficult for your potential guests to find you online.
An average of 12 billion web searches are conducted in the U.S. alone each month. That’s a lot of potential guests, don’t you think?
That’s why we want to give hoteliers four strategies to help your SEO today. These strategies will let your hotel rank better on search engine results pages, and attract:
- higher quality traffic
- stronger leads
- more bookings
What will the key takeaways be from this article?
Take advantage of video: Google has started to award more attention to search results that include videos, which means your hotel can boost its rankings on search result pages with a few quality videos.
Use SEO-friendly URLs: all lowercase, dashes between words instead of underscores, and using the keywords you want to rank for in the URL.
Try the WASP method: If your hotel creates content, format it in an SEO friendly way and send it to local travel blogs and online papers to get inbound links, which will boost your rank.
Optimise for the shift to mobile: make your website mobile-friendly, or you’ll be heavily penalised in mobile search results! Also, keep in mind that it’s even more important to rank highly on mobile search pages, since the user has to scroll more to see each result.