Building a successful SEO strategy for your hotel is essential to stand out. Here’s Propeller’s guide to help you craft an effective SEO plan for your hotel:
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Define your target audience
Understanding your target audience is an exercise any SEO Manager should take on before developing an SEO strategy. You need to identify who is most likely to stay at your hotel.
Once you have created a few target audience profiles you can tailor content, keywords and marketing efforts towards their specific needs and preferences. Knowing your audience also helps in choosing keywords and topics for your content strategy, leading to better user engagement and higher conversion rates.
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Conduct keyword research
To work out which keywords to target, you should begin your research by finding out what your target audience are searching and what your direct competitors are using. Make use of tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, or Ahrefs to find high-volume, relevant keywords related to your hotel.
- Focus on both short-tail keywords (e.g. “hotels in London”) and long-tail keywords (e.g. “luxury riverfront hotels in London”) to capture different search intents.
- Target local keywords like “best hotels near the Thames” or “boutique hotels in central London.”
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Optimise page titles, meta descriptions, and URLs
Search engines pay close attention to the structure of your page. Optimising the titles, meta descriptions, and URLs across pages ensures your content is indexed correctly, as a result, it should appear higher in search results.
- Page Titles: Your page title should include the primary keyword and accurately reflect the content of the page.
- Meta Descriptions: Write compelling meta descriptions that entice users to click through. These should include secondary keywords and have a call-to-action.
- URLs: Keep URLs clean and concise, using hyphens to separate words. Include your target keyword in the URL and avoid using connector words such as ‘and’, ‘to’, ‘the’…
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Improve your content structure with headings and subheadings
Structured content is essential for both user experience and search engines. Headings and subheadings break down content into manageable chunks and improve readability. Here is our recommendation on how to make the most of H-tags:
- H1 Tag: Should be used for the main title of the page and include your primary keyword (e.g., “Luxury Hotel in London”).
- H2 and H3 Tags: These subheadings should organise the content into sections and also include related keywords. This enhances user engagement by making it easier for visitors to skim and find relevant information.
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Enhance mobile optimisation and website speed
With the majority of searches and subsequent bookings now happening on mobile, mobile optimisation is a critical component of any hotel SEO strategy. Google uses mobile-first indexing, meaning it primarily evaluates the mobile version of your site when determining rankings.
With this in mind, consider the following:
- Ensure your website is responsive, adapting to different screen sizes and devices without glitching.
- Optimise images and other media for faster loading times. Compress files where possible and use modern formats like WebP for images.
- Remove unnecessary code and use lazy loading to improve site speed. A fast website not only provides a better user experience but is also rewarded by Google with higher rankings.
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Implement ALT text for images
Images are a vital part of your hotel website, they showcase the rooms, amenities, and surroundings on offer. However, search engines can’t understand and process images unless you provide a descriptive ALT text.
To implement this successfully, include relevant keywords in your ALT text while describing the image accurately. Proper ALT text improves your image SEO and can drive traffic through Google Image Search.
How to measure your hotel SEO efforts
Understanding your successes and shortcomings in SEO is essential to making progress and improving on your strategy. Starting with the essentials, have you set up your Google Analytics account?
To combine your search data with analytics, link your Google Analytics 4 property to Google Search Console. Need help with this? Contact us to learn more.
What metrics we recommend tracking
- Organic traffic
- Google Search Console Query Performance
- Landing page performance
- Conversion tracking
- User behaviour
In Summary…
We hope you have taken enough from this article to implement an effective hotel SEO strategy for your hotel. If you need help getting started, or want to see unhesitating progress from your efforts, get in touch today to discuss your project.