The online hotel market is different from most others and seo for hotels should be approached with a different goal than the majority of SEO projects. The main difference on search engines when it comes to hotels and hotel bookings is that most of the top positions are dominated by massive websites such as Wotif Booking.com, Hotel.com.au and so on. So this makes it hard.
However SEO is an important tool in search engine marketing for hotels because you encounter the same problem with Google Adwords space. You will be bidding for clicks against large hotel and holiday booking sites along with international hotels of you are located in a bigger city. So the cost per click will be high, making it more difficult to obtain a high return on the money you spend each day.
One of the main objectives when we have worked to improve the natural rankings on Google for different hotel, backpacker or caravan/camping websites is to be very targetted with the phrases we optimise for.
Firstly we look at the style of hotel, whether it is luxury, cheap, serviced apartments, on the beach, eco friendly, romantic or whatever. Next is the location. In big cities bookings can depend on where exactly you are, north, cbd, near a conference centre, somewhere like Southbank or Darling Harbour. Aiming for phrases including these sorts of phrases will ensure that you not only have a more certain chance of fast top rankings, but also that the increased amount of visitors you receive will have a much higher conversion rate from visitor into booking.
It is not too difficult for an experienced SEO to rank a valid website for terms like ‘cheap hotel melbourne cbd’ or ‘serviced apartments Darling Harbour’ even if you are really oonly the fringe of a location like this.
Out of town you have the luxury of less competition. So you can take on the more generic phrases with a higher expectation of fast first page rankings. One thing you should do if you own or manage a hotel in any regional centre or tourist destination is to register your hotel or backpackers or whatever on Google maps. It will often get your hotel a mention at the top of Google response pages all by yourself. It is free and you cme up every time. So go and do it now. If you can not work it out, write to ask how.
When your hotel website begins to rank well for longer tail keyphrases, your traffic volume and the average time the visitor spends on your page should then go up. If it doesn’t then you should improve your website to engage your visitor more and encourage them to click through to more pages. By these Google visitors spending more time on your site your trust rank from Google will improve, making easier to rank for the bigger phrases in the future.
As with all SEO campaigns, don’t be scared off by the big guys at the top of Google (okay, or Yahoo) already. You just need to use your head and get good advice and then there is no reason dedicated seo for your hotel can not be a smashing success.
Many moons ago I used to manage a backpacker hostel and I didn’t like too much paying sites like VIP and Hostel World for being on their website. And they used to try and enforce their rules on us. I remember how happy I was when our website took the top place off them. You can do this too with you hotel, hostel or campground website.
If you have anything to add to this post please feel free to leave your comments.