Hotel SEO 2019 : Tips you need for your Hotel Website

SEO is the most important practice you must keep in mind while creating your hotel website.

In the era of digital marketing, Search Engines brings a large portion of traffic to your website. So your ranking on the result page of a search engine holds a great significance.

So if you are looking to work on your SEO then we have gathered some SEO tips for you to help you to take the steps forward.

But before that, I would like to recommend you to go through this Google SEO starter guide

And now, let’s start with SEO tips to improve your rankings in the Search Engine results.

First thing first, keyword research is the most basic and most important step in SEO. Search Engine results revolve around keywords.

You need to learn how to find relevant keyword for your hotel and how to implement it in SEO strategy.

As per MOZ

Keywords are ideas and topics that define what your content is about. In terms of SEO, they’re the words and phrases that searchers enter into search engines, also called “search queries.” If you boil everything on your page — all the images, video, copy, etc. — down to simple words and phrases, those are your primary keywords.

It is not necessary that there should be only one keyword per page. Your webpage can be ranked on more than one keyword but overstuffing the keywords is also not a good idea.

Be very careful in selecting a keyword to be ranked high for a particular keyword is a battle in itself.

On a hotel website, two keywords are obviously must be present, one is the term hotel itself and the second can be the location of the hotel but the other terms related to the industry can come handy as well.

One of the best strategy for keyword research I got from the best in the SEO business, Brian Dean. In his guide to SEO Techniques, he recommended to “Steal Your Competitors Best Keywords”

Let me explain this.

If you have a hotel in London then find a competitor hotel in London who is already ranked high in SEO results.
For example, I searched “hotel in London” then I copied the URL of the hotel at the first rank. Then I pasted the URL into the tool like SEMRush or Spyfu.

Now, these tools will give you the list of keywords your opponent is already ranked for.

Yippie! now I have keywords to build my content around.

Another thing you can use for your keyword research is  Google’s Adwords Planner 

It is also one of the best tools for your keyword research.

And yet again I turned to MOZ to get some info on long-tailed keywords. In Chapter 5 of MOZ guide for beginners in SEO, MOZ quoted

Popular search terms actually make up less than 30% of the searches performed on the web. The remaining 70% lie in what’s called the “long tail” of search.

Now the question arises what a long-tailed keyword is. 

A long-tailed keyword is the most specific keyword giving information on your hotel.

For instance, you have a hotel in London and your USP is that you have the most affordable Hotel in the town.

So you can use the keyword ” most affordable hotel in London”.

Most of the people make very specific search queries on search engines and you can take advantage of that.

Content is the soul of your SEO campaign. You should invest your time in your content as it makes your online facade.

If you do not have an engaging content then your bounce rate will increase. And Google is very stringent about bounce rate and it will rank you lower in the SERPs.

As I mentioned above also that you built your content around your selected keywords. Hence, your content should have an optimum keyword density.

Keyword density around 1 to 3 % is considered good but more than that can be treated as search spam.

For a hotel website, the content should be informative about your hotel.

For example, if you are creating content for the keyword ‘hotel in London’ then your content should have 500 or more words informing about your hotel which is in London.

Okay common, you cannot just right all your content by yourself. If you are taking some stats or definitions from a website, do mention the source in your content.

Providing the external links increase the authenticity of your content and also indicate the search engine about the information your content is expressing.

The other links you can give in your content are Internal Links.

Internal links connect different pages on your website. They help to build your website’s architecture.

An internal linked structure is one of the most important practices in SEO.

For example, if you offer two types of rooms General Rooms and Delux Rooms. If a customer comes on your General Rooms page and he does not like the room, then if you have provided the link to the Delux Rooms page then he can look into another option without leaving your website.

Otherwise, he would have fleed to another website.

Backlinks aka inbound links aka inward links are your website’s links on other websites.

The backlinks are important because they show the trust of other websites on your website. In an overview, the inbound links give a signal to the search engine that people are linking your webpage to their so your content must be good and you should have a better ranking.

The process of earning such backlinks is called Link Building.

To earn backlinks to look for the websites who have relevant content to your website. You cannot just link to any of the pages as it can be considered as spam and sometimes you can also be penalized.

You should focus on the quality of the backlinks and not the quantity.

UI/UX of your hotel website is going to play a major role in your Hotel SEO in 2019.

As we all know that Google is working very hard in providing the best results to the users. And that is why “dwell time” and “bounce rate” has become a crucial factor in deciding your ranking.

Dwell time is the time a user spends on your webpage. So if your website has a good dwell time this will mean that users are liking your website and it should be ranked better.

Same goes with bounce rate, bounce rate how many users get to your website and then bounce back. Higher bounce rate means users do not like your website ergo your website should not be ranked.

To improve your bounce rate and dwell time UI and UX is very important. A website which is user-friendly and interactive will obviously a better dwell time and lower bounce rate.

We all know that today more searches are made through mobile phone devices than desktop devices. And that is why  Google mentioned in one of its publications

Google will predominantly use the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking. Historically, the index primarily used the desktop version of a page’s content when evaluating the relevance of a page to a user’s query. Since the majority of users now access Google via a mobile device, the index will primarily use the mobile version of a page’s content going forward. We aren’t creating a separate mobile-first index. We continue to use only one index.

If we focus on the last line they said that they are going to use only one index. This means if we do not optimize our website to be mobile friendly then the results will be detrimental.

The list is non-exhaustive. But these were the most elementary tips for the SEO campaign for your hotel.

If you have something and you think it is worth sharing then please share them in the comment box below.

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