Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a crucial role in a hotel’s online visibility and booking rates. To stay competitive and maximize your hotel’s presence on search engines, here are some best practices for hotel SEO in 2024:
What most people find surprising is good UI/UX experiences are synonymous with good SEO. Ensure your hotel’s website is fast, mobile-friendly, and easy to navigate. Think of page hierarchies before you start the design phase and map your navigation levels.
Example: you have three room types, and a repeat visitor would like to view your deluxe room page. If she must click first to your accommodation main page and then scroll this page to click on her room of choice, you’ve introduced two clicks and 7 – 15 seconds of user time before she can get to the desired content.
The number of clicks required is included in Page Rank calculations (a metric of Page Authority). The more clicks required, the less important a page is considered. Including a drop-down menu for single click access, makes it easier for the user and improves your SEO.
Tag hierarchies, content separation with appropriate headers, rich information, inline links for connected content are all UX best practices that are also rewarded from a SEO perspective.
Schema.org offers markup specifically for hotels to display their location, ratings, prices, check-in and check-out plus many more such variables.
Schema helps better indexing as well as offer richer SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) with some of the above information directly shown to users on SERP. This can result in higher CTRs.
If you have decently ranking pages with poor CTR on SERPs, prior to changing your keywords, you might want to look at your meta descriptions again. Meta descriptions are the two short sentences usually shown in a search results page. This is literally what users read prior to clicking on your link. We’ve bumped up CTR by 200% to 300% which is i.e. – more traffic for our customers, purely through revisions and testing of meta descriptions.
You’ll have relatively static pages on your website such as a room description page. The keywords used on these pages need to be reviewed periodically to ensure you are making the best use of these high-value pages. If a keyword ranks well and the page is generating traffic, it’s time to review if the keyword itself is performing for you. From your GA4 landing page reports, if you notice a higher bounce rate for organic traffic or if you realize these visitors don’t take actions on your site, it might be time for a keyword refresh.
Pro-Tip – before you throw out a keyword that’s ranking, try these first:
For an independent hotel or smaller chain, a long tail strategy is a must. Given the prominence of OTAs and other travel platforms, some high-value keywords might just be out of reach. Remember, Google uses the EAT principles; Expertise, Authority and Trust when ranking a site. When a user searches for Hotels in Stowe, Vermont, Google understands they would like to see an aggregator showing multiple listings and not a single independent hotel website. This is why long tail SEO strategies are so important for smaller hotels. Research questions and provide answers, write detailed blogs on local events and attractions, describe a specific type of amenity you offer. When you go long-tail, the opportunities are endless.
Google indexes and shows YouTube shorts on Search Results pages. Creating shorts for ‘People Also Ask’ questions on Google Search is a great way to get started. We also recommend looking at introducing YouTube shorts for some of your more competitive keywords.
Site speed is a ranking factor. Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to analyze and improve your website’s loading times. Compress images, leverage browser caching, and minimize JavaScript and CSS. Site speed is not an absolute metric of ranking, meaning, if you don’t get 100/100 you won’t rank. How site speed matters are if you score 50/100 and other sites in your category on SERPs rank 60/100, then it will matter in that comparative segment.
Pro-tip: Some Google PageSpeed optimization techniques, such as loading images progressively on scroll, might make your site seem slower for a user. Benchmark scores aside, the website must feel fast for the user as well.
Social signals are not a direct ranking factor, however social activity levels convey a level of freshness. It’s good to keep this in mind and introduce links back to your website every month on your Socials. Facebook is still the best for creating deep links.
With the rise of smart speakers and voice-activated devices, optimize voice search by including long-tail keywords and questions in your content that potential guests might ask.
Other best practices to continue in 2024