SEO for Hotels: A Complete Guide for 2020

In this digital age, having a website is a necessity for any business. (Especially for hotels)
I believe you’d have it too (If you don’t, then I’d really suggest getting it right away.)
You already know that you can acquire bookings from your website. Right?
But, if you want to drive bookings from your website, you need an AUDIENCE (visitors) on it.
Now the question is how to bring visitors to your website?
Let me tell you, most of your audience gets landed on your website from the search engines. So you need to appear on the top of the search engine results.
And to do that, you have to perform search engine optimization (SEO) of your hotel website.

What is SEO for hotels?

Hotel search engine optimization (SEO) is the process to optimize a hotel’s website to improve its ranking on search engines (like Google, Yahoo, and Bing)result pages (SERP). It helps you drive maximum traffic and visitors to your hotel website.
Additionally, it strengthens your website’s online presence and gets you more bookings through your hotel website. Thereby, SEO has become an inseparable part of hotel digital marketing.
In the hotel industry, cut-throat competition prevails among businesses. And SEO is one of the assured ways to make headway among your competitors.

How important is hotel SEO?

Whenever your audience searches for anything, they get a list of results from search engines. Their immediate action is to click the webpage that is ranked first. Most searchers will get answers to their queries from the results that are ranked first. A very few of them will click on second, third, fourth results.

As per survey, The #1 Result In Google Gets 31.7% of All Clicks

This percentage decreases to 2.2% for the last result of the first page. So you can gauge, there is hardly any chance that they’ll go to the second page. (Even you won’t!)

If you are not visible to your audience on the first page, then your guests won’t discover you. PERIOD.

And you will lose potential direct bookings through your website. On that note, it is important for you to be visible to your audience on the very first page.
So, let’s start the SEO for hotels on the right foot with these 13 actionable steps.

1. Define Your Target Audience

This is step zero of performing SEO of your hotel website. You need to first define your target audience, who they are, what they like, and their booking patterns.

Let me explain to you through some examples:

Once you have known your audience, you have to think of what your ideal audience will search for whenever they are looking for accommodations options.
For example: If you are a resort, your ideal audience might search for the terms like

• Resort in “your city”
• Best/Top resort in “your city” and so on…

These are called search terms. Find out some of them and then define one primary term that your audience commonly searches for.
By the way, these search terms are nothing but KEYWORDS. Let’s dig deeper and explore the what, how, and why of keywords.

2. Start with Keyword Research

The keyword is one of the crucial components of SEO. They are the words and phrases that people are actually using to find websites like yours.
As I said, list down all possible search terms that your audience will type in the search bar. Some of them can be:

• Hotels in Male, Maldives
• Cheap hotels in Male
• Best hotels in Male
• Hotels near Meeru island
• Hotels near Maldives airport

This is about how you can get the common keywords. But to rank your website higher on Google, having just these keywords is not enough! You need to gather more keywords.

There are many keyword research tools available like Google Keyword Planner and Ubersuggest. These tools are easy to get started with. All you have to do is search by typing a keyword (or list of keywords). Let’s see how you can do it with Ubersuggest:

How to find keywords?

• Head over to Ubersuggest
• Type in your term that you decided in the earlier step. Let’s type: Hotels in Male, Maldives.
• You will see the search volume, SEO difficulty, CPC. As you scroll down you will see other related keywords.
• Next, check the keywords that have more search volume and higher CPC value.

Consider Search Volume

Search volume is the amount or quantity of searches for a particular keyword or term. Keywords that have more search volume and higher CPC value. Those are your ideal hospitality keywords to target.

Example: The search volume of ‘Hotels in Male’ is 1000/month. This means, 1000 searchers are searching on Google for this keyword per month.

How to find keywords on Google?

Another way to find related keywords for your targeted audience is from the search engine itself. Let’s take the example of Google,

Go to Google > Search for your targeted keywords.

When you start typing, Google will suggest some related terms in the search bar (refer to the following image)
It will also show related keywords at the end of the search results. You should consider having these hotel SEO keywords on your list. It is one of the surefire strategies that will really help you in ranking your website.

Next is,

Consider long-tail variations of keywords

The benefit of using long-tail keywords is, they’re easy to include and convert the audience better.
For example, a person searching for “hotels in New York” is probably just browsing. On the other hand, someone searching in the following way is very much specific:

• beach resort in Maldives
• hotel in Maldives near Meeru Island

This reminds me of a joke:
Why do SEOs love monkeys? Because they have longtails.

Also, list the keywords used by your competitors

You can even search for the keywords your competitors are targeting.

Again go to Ubersuggest > Type in your competitor URL.

Let’s say: maldivespalmbeach.com is your competitor.

• You will see all the details of your competitor viz. Domain overview, domain scores, number of organic keywords and so on.
• As you scroll down, you can check top pages from their website and estimated traffic they are getting on those pages.
• Above all, you can even find the SEO keywords as well. Look for what is relevant to your audience and add it to your list.

Basically, you can find the keywords relevant to your hotel website through these many ways.
Now, make a final list of all the keywords that you want to target. The keyword selection is one of the key practices in hotel SEO strategies. Out of all the keywords, select one keyword as a focus keyword (targeted keyword).
Make sure that you add the keywords naturally. Search engines (especially Google) do not like content with stuffed keywords.

3. Work on the page title (meta-title), meta description, and URL

The webpage title, meta description, and URL play an important role in the SEO of your hotel website. Moreover, on the search engine result pages, these 3 elements of your website will be displayed.

So, to make your website SEO friendly, you have to optimize them. Let us first go through the page title.

Page title

The page title (also known as meta title) is displayed on your browser tab that tells your audience what your webpage/website is about. They are also read by search engine robots and your users.
The text that is highlighted in the below image is the title of your website home page.

An example of how title appears in search engines.
Where to find the meta-title?

Step 1: Open your website. Press the F12 key or Ctrl + U to open the source code of your website, or right-click your webpage and select “view source” or “inspect element.”
Step 2: Find the <title> tag. The content that you find there is the title of your webpage.

• Write a title that describes your property in the best way.
• It should include your keyword. I’d recommend to start the title tag with your focus keyword.
• It should be easy to understand for both users and machines.
• Its length should be between 50-60 characters.

So, this was all about how to optimize the meta title of your webpage. Now let us explore about meta description:

Meta description

A meta description is an HTML tag that summarizes a page’s content. Search engines show the meta description immediately after the meta title.
This is the second important factor that can make or break your ranking..
An example of how title appears in search engines.

How to know the current meta description of your website?

Step 1:It is similar to how we found the page title. Open your website, press the F12 key or Ctrl + U to open the source code of your website, or right-click your webpage and select “view source” or “inspect element.”
Step 2:Under the <head> tag, you will find the <meta> tag. The meta description of your webpage is mentioned there.

While writing meta-title, you should consider the following things:

• Your meta description should describe your hotel thoroughly.
• It should contain a keyword.
• The real intention of the meta description is to present information to the searcher that will push him to click and land on your website.

A well-written meta description that is loved by Google as well as searchers.
A good meta description is an essential part of hotel SEO strategy, as it makes visitors click on the search result. Now, let me walk you through the last yet very important part – webpage URL.

Webpage URL

A URL is the address of each page on your hotel’s website. You may think, how come a webpage URL is a part of your SEO strategy? Believe me, it has a great impact on your hotel SEO. A proper URL helps you go a long way in the SEO journey.

• Your URL should be clear and easily understood.
  1. Clear URL: https://yourhotel.com/queen-rooms
  2. Confusing URL: https://yourhotel.com/rooms.php?pageid=9
• Include your targeted keyword, but don’t stuff the extra keywords.
• Separate words with hyphens (dashes) instead of underscores.
• Don’t use connecting or stop words. (stop words like: is, of, for, with…)

4. Optimize your website content

Content is the KING and a sure shot strategy in the SEO of your hotel website. Let’s start with the content of your home page. Firstly, I want you to add the targeted keyword in the h1 tag
Then, add the same targeted keyword into your page’s first paragraph within the first 100 words. I’d also suggest you write at least 800 to 1000 words on your homepage that includes the keywords and their synonyms.
When you have more content (of course relevant and meaningful) there are high chances of ranking better on the search engines. Because, with such content, searchers will get all the required information and your target audience can engage with you.
You can develop content in the form of blogs, articles, and newsletters that attracts your audience.
You can target a significant number of keywords with the content. For example, if you want to rank high for a keyword like – best boutique hotel in Maldives. You can write a blog post under the topics- 10 things to do in Maldives or 10 unique accommodations in Maldives, and you can include this phrase in that blog. Now, let me tell you how this will get you traffic. Some travelers might search directly for topics like- 10 things to do in Maldives, and they come across your blog. While reading your content, there are chances that they may end up booking with your hotel (if your content is appealing!)
Other than that, you can write about the city, the tourist spots of your city, the famous food and cuisine of your city and many other related topics.
Your hotel website’s SEO is incomplete without amazing content. You should put effort to produce content that your audience wants to explore before they book your hotel.

5. Add alt text to Images

Image alt text is an alternate text that appears, if an image cannot be displayed. Here’s why writing relevant alt-text for each image is important:

• The search engines don’t understand images. Adding alt text to the images will give a context to the search engines so that they can index your images accordingly.
• The alt text helps screen-reading tools to describe images to visually impaired readers.
• There’s a thing called- Image search engine, which is of utmost importance in hotel SEO. You have to rank on that as well (as shown in the image.)

6. Arrange headings and subheadings

The headings help users and search engines to read and understand the text content of your website. They define which parts of your content are important, and show how they’re interconnected.Structured content is easy for users to read, which is better for your hotel SEO. Besides, headings give you a great chance to use your focus keyword.

How to find heading tags?

H tags are used to define headings and subheadings. The different heading tags are H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6.

Step 1: Press the F12 key or Ctrl + U to open the source code of your website or, right-click your webpage and select “View Source” or “Inspect Element.”
Step 2: Look for H1, H2, etc. They must be contained in brackets...
Step 3: Include the focus keyword in the H1 tag.
Step 4: Maintain the right hierarchy.
Example:

• Welcome to Meraki Boutique Hotel, Manhattan (H1)
• Our services (H2),
• Rooms (H2)

While adjusting the heading tags, don’t forget that your content is for your website searchers/readers (not only for SEO purposes). Ensure that your content becomes readable after adding these tags.

7. Optimize your website’s loading speed

Another factor that is of utmost importance is your website’s loading speed. You have to acknowledge the fact that your audience is IMPATIENT..
I know it’s a bit technical but this will be helpful to understand what you should ask your website designer or developer.

Here’s how you can check your website speed.
1. Go to Google Page Speed Insight.
2. Enter your website URL and hit analyze.

With this website score you can easily know your website’s loading speed. It will show you your website score for mobile and desktop. Additionally, it will highlight the problem areas of your website. Moreover, it will guide you on how you can solve it.

With this website score you can easily know your website’s loading speed. It will show you your website score for mobile and desktop. Additionally, it will highlight the problem areas of your website. Moreover, it will guide you on how you can solve it.

You don’t really have to look into the technical details. Just focus on the insights as a hotelier. You can ask your website provider to optimize your website and improve the score.

What can you do to reduce your website load time?

• Use caching plugins (WordPress website only).
• Prefer building your website with light frameworks.
• You can use some of the available plugins to reduce the load time.
• Minify and combine files.
• Reduce the number of redirects on your website.

8. Make your website mobile-friendly

As per research, 58% of Google searches are from mobile. Having said that, it is important for you to make your hotel website responsive as a part of SEO for hotels.

How to check if your website is mobile friendly?

1. Head over to “Mobile Friendly Test” Website
2. Enter your website URL and hit the enter key or “Test URL” button.

It will show you whether your page is mobile-friendly or not. If it’s not mobile-friendly, it will show the issues to fix on your website. So, you can simply follow those or ask your website designer to fix it. Once it is fixed, test it again.
Consider the following things to make your website responsive:

• Ensure your website’s loading speed on other devices too.
• Include the ‘Viewport Meta Tag’.
• Make your button sizes large enough to work on mobile.
• Use large font sizes.
• Compress your images and CSS.
• Perform mobile testing.

9. Build and submit the sitemap

As the name suggests, a sitemap is a map for your website. It shows what all of the pages are on your website.
A sitemap is a file where you can list the web pages of your site to tell the search engines about the organization of your site content. Search engines read this file to crawl your site. That is why it is important to create a sitemap as a part of SEO for hotels.

So, how to create XML Sitemap?

These days, modern content management systems generate XML sitemaps automatically. You simply have to enable it.
However, only creating XML is not enough.
Once your sitemap has been created, the next step is to submit to Google Search Console.
I know, you may find this technical. Don’t worry!
Simply ask your website designer to help you with this. Or if you have hired an agency or freelancer for SEO, they can also help you with this. In fact, they might have already done this.
So, creating a sitemap and submitting it to Google is an important part of SEO for hotels.

10. Structure your content

Schema, or structured data, is a code that helps search engines understand specific pieces of data from your website. Schema is one of the best ways to optimize a hotel website and an important part of your SEO strategies. It gives users more relevant information in an organized manner.
There are a lot of things that you can add to your website’s schema markup.

• Street address
• Phone number
• Description
• Star rating
• Hotel’s surrounding temperature
• A photo of your hotel
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
• Typical room rates/price range
• Reception opening hours/check-in hours
• Map URL
• Features and services, such as a gym or pool
• A parent company, if you are part of a chain
• Languages that are spoken by your team

For example: This is how star rating and FAQs added in Schema are displayed in Google search results as “rich snippet”.
This is how a well-structured content and optimized schema appears as a rich snippet.
You can find out more details on Schema.org or ask your website designer to implement this.
Adding structured data increases your chance to rank better in search engines like Google and is one of the key SEO tips for hotels.

11. Build links

Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites of your website. A hyperlink (usually just called a link) is a way for users to navigate between pages on the internet.

Why is it important in SEO for hotels?

Links are the core element of hotel SEO. There are two types of links:
1. Internal Links
2. External Links

Search engines use links to:
• Discover new web pages.
• Determine how well a page should rank in their results.

What are the internal links?

Internal links allow you to show the structure of your website to search engines.
By linking from one page to another on your website, search engines get a better understanding of the important pages and interconnection among them.

What are external links or backlinks?

It is the process of getting links from other websites. You need top-quality inbound links from credible websites.
The backlinks or external links give your reader a sense of confidence and are of great importance in SEO for hotel websites.

To get the backlinks or external links, you have to build online and offline relationships with companies that provide complementary services, such as nearby event organizers and tourist attractions.
Make sure you reach out to get links from websites that are relevant and have higher domain authority. Another most effective way of link building is through guest posting. Remember, you have to focus on quality, not quantity.

How to build external links or backlinks?

• Get listed on sites directly related to the hotel and hospitality industry such as TripAdvisor.
• Submit your website on online hotel directories.
• Register in your city’s hotel association or chamber of commerce and try to get links from their website.
• Create high-quality content in the form of blogs, infographics or videos. Give the external links of the websites that have higher domain authority in your content.
• Ask people to link back to your content.
• Offer your content to travel websites or third-party sites and get a link back.

12. Begin with Local SEO for your hotel

Local SEO for hotels is an effective way to promote your hotel regionally.
As a part of local SEO, you can simply use some of the below keywords on your website.
(NAP – Name, Address, and Phone number)
Your focus keyword + city name in the

• title tag
• meta description
• URL
• or Header tag

Hence, this will be helpful when the searchers will search like: Best hotels in Male. Secondly, start with citation. A citation is an online reference of your name, address and phone number (NAP). Search engines use them while evaluating the online authority of your hotel. It is a proven strategy in SEO for hotels.
Furthermore, along with NAP, citations also include other details such as hours of operation, driving directions, business description, images, videos, payment forms, and reviews.

13. Make the most of Google My Business

With the advanced hotel search option, Google is opening wide doors to bring traffic to your hotel website. It is very important and a strong step in your hotel SEO. You have to make the most of this opportunity by getting listed to Google My Business (GMB).

• First things first, check whether you have access or not. If you don’t, then claim your listing. Once you get access, optimize it smartly.
• List your hotel’s name, address, and phone number (a.k.a., NAP).
• Ensure your Google Maps marker is on the correct location, so searchers can find your hotel.
• Provide additional details that are relevant to travelers looking for you. Such as Wi-Fi, disabled access, smoking area and so on.
• If you are a hotel chain or hospitality group, then have a verified Google My Business listing for each one – maintained through a single account