What has changed for hotel brands and how can you use this information for your SEO strategy in 2022?
The travel and tourism industry has been extremely competitive in recent years. Hotels and chains are competing with online travel agencies and booking sites in increasingly comprehensive search results. The industry has now also been severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and is still feeling the effects.
There are signs of life as people are starting to travel again and the pandemic is easing in some states and countries. However, user behavior has changed dramatically, so hotel brands need to change their SEO strategies to drive additional bookings, traffic and revenue if they hope to attract travelers now and in the near future.
Below is a list of strategies, tactics and tools to help you achieve this goal with best SEO practices for the hospitality industry in 2022 and beyond.
Prioritization of destinations through data
For prioritizing locations and making sure your hotel appears at the top of the list, Destination Insights with Google is just the thing. In the travel industry, where people travel to is particularly important. Let the data tell you, so you can compare trends and focus on making sure you have good visibility for these destinations. If I was working with a hotel, I would make sure to rank on the first page for hotels, for brand and geo keywords, for restaurants, for COVID prevention measures and for other related keywords.
Another great tool that gives you insights into your SEO strategy is Hotel Insights from Google. It provides you with data on who is searching for a hotel stay in your region, as well as tools and tips to help your business stand out from the competition.
Another great feature of this tool is that you can see whether users are searching for this information in the region or overseas. This can help you plan your content strategy and PPC campaigns to target international travelers and reach even more potential guests.
Satisfy the needs of travelers with a branded hotelier strategy
You should also always have content that matches the traveler’s intent and fulfills your own desire to demonstrate competence, authority and trustworthiness(E-A-T). Booking a hotel room is not a linear process. Before a traveler books a trip and arrives at a hotel site, there are many considerations that come into play:
– Is the destination attractive to me?
– What is there to do there?
– What’s nearby?
– What are the restaurants like?
– Is there vegan food there?
Of course, these are just examples. There are potentially thousands of combinations of preferences.
Travelers sometimes do their research months in advance. Ninety-one percent of travelers use search engines when looking for accommodation, and the majority (81%) prefer to use Google as a source of inspiration for their trip. That’s why hotels need an SEO brand hotelier strategy to engage with travelers throughout the entire user journey.
This includes a holistic content strategy and a deep understanding of guest profiles, which should include generational segments such as millennials and boomers as well as interest-based segments such as adventurers and foodies. Each of these segments requires content that appeals to the individual traveler, and this content needs to be placed both above and within the specific hotel destination.
For a hotel brand’s website to rank well for “foodie destinations” or “dining experiences around the world,” for example, it needs content that conveys the types of experiences that exemplify a hotelier’s purpose. These experiences cannot just be about what the hotel brand offers. Think about it: How would you rate your experience with a hotelier if they only recommended the restaurant in the lobby?
Brand hotelier strategy requires a rethink of hotel brand websites and the role they play in engaging with travelers through persona identification, journey mapping and content. This type of strategy requires an understanding of search, the connections between topics and the intent levels of queries made during the traveler’s journey.
Optimize your GMB and your local entries
By optimizing your Google business profile, your hotel listings can also appear in the map pack in addition to the regular organic listings on the geo-modified keywords page. This can lead to additional revenue, bookings and organic traffic.
Fully optimized listings help prioritize your business to ensure your hotel listings appear at the top of local searches and provide a consistent customer experience that drives bookings and customer loyalty.
Here are my best tips for achieving just that:
– Optimize your entriesin the most important search engine directories. Create Google Posts and optimize photos so travelers can see the hotel.
– Manage and respond to reviews . Local reviews are considered to be the most useful content that potential guests use when making their decisions. Respond to reviews to show that you value your customers and the feedback they leave about your business. This is crucial as Google rewards businesses that respond to their reviews with higher rankings.
– Answer questions and answers and create a FAQ section so your hotel brand is able to drive the conversation about your business.
– Make sure that your Google Maps pin is in the right place so that users can find your hotel.
– Show beautiful photos and videos of the hotel, rooms and amenities such as the restaurant(s).
– Use attributes to highlight your location and provide additional information about health and safety precautions, Wi-Fi, accessibility, etc. that are relevant to travelers.
– Always keep the opening hours of hotels, restaurants, spas and other facilities up to date so that users know when they are open and closed.
Work together with your social media team
Share content about the most popular destinations, travel tips, hotel deals, events and attractions nearby. This can help maximize visibility, increase brand exposure and generate more links and attention for your hotel, which can have a positive impact on your visibility, traffic and revenue.
Optimize for the most important Core Web Vitals
In a highly competitive industry like travel and tourism, it’s important to optimize your website for Core Web Vitals. These three combined metrics are used to measure a website against a number of key performance indicators, which became a ranking signal in May 2021. These include:
– How long it takes for the main part of a web page to load (LCP).
– How long it takes for the website to become interactive (FID).
– How much the layout of the website moves when loading (CLS).
To improve CWV, hotel sites should have clean code, use a CDN for large images, outsource JS and CSS, mobile-friendly and be safe, etc. There is no penalty for not optimizing for CWVs, but it could be the factor that gives you the boost that pushes you past strong competitors.
Use FAQs and be ready for Voice
Your potential guests are asking questions, and your hotel brand should have the answers. Put FAQs on your website to help current and future guests find the information they need, which can also help minimize calls to the hotel. FAQs should be provided with structured data so that they appear in search results and maximize the potential of organic search. Since customers use voice search, your content must also be optimized for voice search.
If your brand appears in response to a voice search query, it can help encourage a user to make a booking at your hotel.
Monitoring the visibility and performance of competitors
The way customers search for hotels has changed. This is why it is important to constantly monitor and see the rankings of your competitors:
– What content they create.
– What market share they have.
– What new SEO strategies they are trying out.
– How to get links.
– And how quickly their pages load, etc.
Find out which tactics and strategies are worth trying out. Sometimes brands are reluctant to add content to their websites because they don’t want to compromise the user experience. But the chances are pretty good that your competitors are adding content.
And if you find that one of your biggest competitors has added content to a key landing page, complete with FAQs and structured data, and they now rank on the first page for a key target term, they may get additional bookings, improve their brand awareness, etc.
For this reason, it can be worth creating and promoting content to keep up with or even outperform the competition.
Summary
The pandemic has impacted all areas of life, including the travel and tourism industry. It is to be hoped that the situation will improve soon and that travel activity will return to pre-pandemic levels. Until then, hotel brands need to be flexible and try out new content ideas and SEO strategies, observe the competition and understand their guests.
Knowing who travelers are, what they want and how to target them with content that meets their information needs can help travel brands drive additional bookings, traffic and revenue.
