3 SEO tips to tackle OTAs and improve search ranking

When travelers start searching for a destination for their stay, they first research for the location and later research for hotels. A traveler will research for a location to confirm which exact area they would like to visit. After reading guides, articles and reviews the guest would narrow down the research to a particular area.

Once the guests confirms the exact location, they start searching for hotels in that area. This is where the OTAs dominate in the online market, as most of the starting results will advertisements filled with their offers.

During the location research phase when guests are searching for a particular place, you can get the traffic to your website. You can have content related to your location. The content should provide information about the area and address questions which you believe are commonly searched or asked by guests.

If you write about ‘Best places to visit in (your location)’, you will draw in traffic of users who are searching for information related to your area.

With such content, you can keep them on your website by providing links to the main website. You can also include special offers or deals in your articles to entice them.

Keywords help Google to bring relevant results in front of the users. So it is beneficial to include the key phrases of amenities in the meta description and room information.

For example, if you have rooms with free wi-fi, so you can keep the meta title or meta description of your rooms as ‘Rooms with free wi-fi in (in your location)’. Therefore, if a guest searches for a room with free wi-fi, Google will show your website in the search results. Thus, giving your website a higher preference.

So include as many room details and amenities as keywords in your headings, sub headings, image alt tag and in the content so that the search engines are able to find your website and increase visitor count.

On special occasions like wedding or business conferences, people often look for hotels that provide special packages. Hence, it a good idea to create your own package page including the special package keywords.

Let us suppose a guest searches for ‘Hotel honeymoon packages in (your location)’, then the Google will begin searching for relevant information. If you have used the targeted special packages keyword then Google will display your web page as the most relevant result.

Using these special keywords on your website and content will give a boost to hotel website’s ranking in the search results.