At the time when digital advancements provide benefits for businesses, investing highly in digital presence is recommended. From creating websites to posting social media campaigns and implementing Search Engine Optimization (SEO), organizations can tap the younger generation who uses the Internet to look for products and services.
While traditional marketing and advertising still work, exploring innovation and other areas of customer interest can help businesses grow and expand further. The younger generations are nurturing older generations in using gadgets like smartphones and tablets, therefore, the chances of acquiring customers online are higher.
This is already happening and a lot of brands are already competing in digital platforms. Several gimmicks and promotions are implemented to get the attention of online users, especially those who are utilizing search engines to find what they are looking for.
In this sense, SEO is highly important; allowing businesses to be seen in a myriad of Google results. By entering significant keywords related to a business’ product or service, web users can go from searching to buying or considering the service.
In the hospitality industry, where people utilize the Internet to book hotels and accommodation, having a robust and functional website is key. Hotels trying to explore the online market can consult SEO experts to reap the benefits and get improved branding long-term.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization is not new these days. Marketers and social media analysts take SEO in high regard because it provides good results. The process will take a while before the result picks up, however, when it does, businesses can witness an impressive increase in web visitors and even sales.
Take SEO as a system that helps your website land on the top page of search engines. If a web user types keywords into the search engine, the top results show your business’ website or social media accounts. This is possible with a number of elements, including increasing the authority of your website and providing reliable, factual, and relevant information.
Search Engines like Google have algorithms developed to easily crawl millions of web content and show results that will help web users in their queries. For hotels, people probably look for accommodation in key areas, especially tourist locations. If your business is servicing in these key areas, you can appear on the top result, hence, acquiring more customers.
Of course, being on the top result will not guarantee success in the booking. The website plays an important role in keeping web user interested. To push through the booking, the user experience must be excellent, and the journey to browsing rooms to booking one should be seamless and hassle-free. No matter how aesthetically pleasing your website is, if loading time takes a while, web users will definitely lose patience and move to other websites.
This is where the process of SEO comes in, helping hotel owners to retain the interest of web users, and to encourage booking. Online presence is a good thing, however, improving the website and its functions are more important. Even if your website appears on the top position if it is untidy and with confusing navigation, web users will close the website entirely.
Understanding the Elements of SEO
As mentioned, search engine optimization involves a number of moving parts that need to work together to deliver results. Generally, there are only five major elements that you need to look into keyword research, technical SEO, content, links, and website development.
However, because Google is improving the experience for web users, algorithms change, and more factors are introduced so search engines can easily crawl website contents and its relevancy. Now, there are more factors, including web design, website authority, use of tags, geographical locations, metadata, and others.
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Keyword Research
Under keyword research, hotel owners can nail down the top keywords searched in the industry. For instance, focusing on main keywords like hotels, accommodation, cabin, or resort is important. There are tools to use in order to determine the profitable niche, related markets, and those keywords that rank well for specific topics like tourism.
Technically, there are two major types of keywords to use, and these are short or long-tail keywords. Short tail keywords are those that contain head terms and consist of two words. On the other hand, long-tail keywords consist of three to four words that are more specific. The example of long-tail keywords can be cheap hotels in Sydney Australia, or Paris luxury boutique apartments.
Optimizing short and long-tail keywords are recommended to target what the web users are looking for. Using tools like Google AdWords and Soovle helps to find popular keywords and trends per industry. For hotels, the trends can shift to popular cities and landmarks, with emphasis on adjectives like cheap, pet-friendly, family, big groups, or romantic hotels.
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Technical SEO
Indexing and optimizing the website is part of the technical SEO. This element is integral because the aspects of the websites that need improvement are addressed, especially making websites faster and easier to crawl.
Technically, keyword research is part of technical SEO in order to improve search visibility. However, more important parts are covered in this section including JavaScript indexing, meta tags, and on-site SEO.
Analyzing the content and making it readable for humans isn’t the end of SEO because search engines must read the content too. With the help of web developers, search engine optimization can be improved.
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Content
Content is still King because, without it, websites are all images and animations. Structuring the website and publishing relevant content is recommended because this is where links are planted. Aside from ensuring a grammatically correct copy and publishing content in high-authority websites to indicate authority, credibility, and trust.
Google considers the CTR as a determining factor to rank the website. The more users to click on the links, the greater chances of ranking in search engines. This means, people are interested to know about the link and get to the source page.
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Links
Link building is important to SEO because search engines use these links to crawl the web. For SEO specialists, link building is considered one of the building blocks of a successful SEO campaign. Because Google and other search engines change rules to link building, building a high-quality link has never been easier.
To thrive online, websites need to use high-quality links for Google to discover new web pages and to determine how a page should rank in results. Once search engines have crawled the pages, these can extract the pages and add them to the indexes. In this process, search engines can decide whether a page provides relevant keywords to match what users are looking for.
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Website Development
Websites need to look aesthetically pleasing to rank in search engines and to retain web users. Aside from the navigation and website design, the loading speed and function of the websites should provide an excellent user experience.
Web developers take care of these aspects, designing and ensuring that websites are in optimum quality. This way, when web users visit the hotel website, they can easily navigate through the pages, wait less when going to a different page, and comfortably book rooms in less than a minute. E-commerce functions like online payment facilities and carts also help to improve the experience of web users.
In technical SEO, web developers also take care of the HTML tags to describe the page content, provide page information, and to tell search engines how pages are related. Hence, making sure that search engines can easily crawl and understand the website.
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Analytics and Reports
Analytics is not only for SEO clients but for the strategist as well, in monitoring the success and the performance of the SEO strategies. In search engine optimization, measurement is critical because it provides the information on which keywords are driving traffic to the website.
Tracking and reporting tools are used to analyze the channels and metrics, understand the characteristics of visits, revenue, and cost per conversion. With this information, marketers can easily make informed and intelligent decisions to alter strategies.
Hotel owners can also see the success of the SEO campaigns provided by the reports. If there is an increase in visits, this can justify the increase in booking and sales of the hotels.
Bring Back Customers to Hotel
Through SEO, an online presence is modified and more people can easily visit the hotel website. This is key to acquiring more visits, loyalty, and sales. There is more to explore in the market and web users are making decisions in a span of minutes. To not be left behind, invest in SEO services and be visible to your target audience.
Bottom Line
Search engine optimization provides meaningful results to hotel owners. By investing heavily in online presence and ranking on search engines, websites can be easily seen by customers. With an improved site and relevant content, hotel companies acquire customer trust and loyalty.