Hotel SEO: How To Grow Your Website Traffic Quickly In 2022?

Nowadays, the first thing people do to search for their hotel is going online. They put a few keywords and start searching on Google.

So, if you own a hotel, you would want to appear on the Google search page.

And for that, you need to fine-tune your SEO game.

Just showing up on the search engine page is not enough. Your website should appear for the right keywords and rank as number one.

Do you know the average CTR on the first ranking website on Google is 31.7%?

So, it would be profitable to rank on the top of the Google search engine for every relevant search.

Therefore, you have to understand the basics of SEO and utilize it correctly.

Hotel SEO is not that difficult if you know how to do it right. However, if you are not that confident, you can always go for a digital marketing agency.

In this article, I will tell you all the things you should know about hotel SEO. If you follow the tricks step-by-step, you’ll start seeing impressive results within a short time.

But before we get into the SEO tactics, let’s understand SEO and its importance. 

What is SEO for Hotels?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing a hotel website so that it ranks on the search engine pages. 

When you use hotel SEO, you can establish a good online presence and drive traffic to your website. When you get good traffic, you will get a high number of bookings. 

So, you should consider SEO as a part of your digital marketing strategy. 

If you can get that right, you can easily win over all your competitors. 

Why is Hotel SEO Important?

Whenever your potential customers search on Google, they get a long list of options. With SEO tricks, you can make your website appear in those lists. 

But here is the thing. People prefer clicking on a webpage that ranks first. So, it’s important that you get your website on top. 

Hotel SEO tactics will help you get that position. 

If your website doesn’t appear on the first page of Google, it will not get the required exposure and it will impact your business. 

In simple words, no SEO, no website traffic, and no bookings!

That’s the reason, you have to do optimization to stay in business. 

How to Perform Hotel SEO?

I have been working on hotel SEO for years now. I have found that only a few hotel SEO tricks work. So, I am mentioning them below.

Try to incorporate these into your SEO strategy to get the best results.

1. Understand Your Target Audience

Defining your target audience is the first step of hotel SEO. If you are in business for years now, you will have a good idea of the audience. But if you are starting new, you need to do a little research.

Through the audience research, you’ll understand the characteristics of people who are most likely to book a room at your place. While online, you should target using these characteristics.

These characteristics will be the backbone of your whole SEO strategy. You have to mold your content and targeting based on these.

For example, if you own a budget hotel, your audience will comprise solo travelers, backpackers, and more. So, when you do SEO for these people, you must use keywords that would attract them.

2. Do Proper Keyword Research

Your whole hotel SEO strategy works on keyword research. So, you need to use the audience information to determine the keywords for your website.

Now there are mainly two types of keywords – short tail keywords and long-tail keywords.

You need to focus on both these types.

Let’s say your hotel is in Cairo. So, here are a few possible keywords you can go for.

Source: Ubersuggest

When you start working on your website content, you should try to incorporate these keywords into it.

It will help your website to show up when people search for these keywords. However, you also need to use some keywords which are specific to your hotel.

For example, if your hotel is located near the Nile river (which is a tourist spot), you might want to add “Nile” in your keyword. So, your keyword will be “budget hotel in Cairo near the Nile.”

3. Work on the Page Title, Meta Description, and URL

When you are working on your hotel SEO, you should try to make things easier for the Google crawler.

You can do that by optimizing your website. Your website should give clear signals to the crawler about what it is about.

So, you need to tweak your webpage titles, meta description, and URL.

When Google shows up the results on the search engine page, it comes with the web title, meta description, and URL.

So, if all these things align with your keywords, it’ll help Google and your audience understand your website better.

Here is how a result is shown on the Google search engine page.

The webpage URL is mainly for the Google crawler. While your webpage title and meta description are for your audience.

Web Page URL

The URL is the address of your website’s page. You can use it to move to a specific page of your website. 

Here are some of the ways you can optimize URLs for SEO. 

• Separate the words in your URL using hyphens (dashes). 
• Avoid using any stop or connecting words (like is, with..)

Page Title

Page titles are the first thing your audience will see about your website. So you need to make them perfect. 

Here are a few tips to write an SEO-friendly page title:

• Try to include the primary keyword and make it short and easy.
• The page title length should be within 60 characters.

Meta Description

As it is the summarization of your article, people generally read this. To make it SEO-friendly, you should try to tell exactly what is in the article and use the primary keyword.

4. Optimize Your Web Content

Content plays a major role in SEO. So, you need to include content optimization in your hotel SEO strategy.

The content helps in two things – building authority and getting ranked.

Therefore, even if you have website content for your primary pages, you should try to upload blogs and articles as well.

These contents help in driving more traffic to your website.

For example, you can publish blogs on “10 things to do in Dubai” and add your hotel’s name and link to it. So, when the blog shows up for a search about Dubai, your brand will also get some exposure.

Source: Kerzner International Limited

However, I understand it is not easy to publish blogs and articles daily when running a business. So, what you can do is hire content writers for your website. They will help you deliver SEO content daily.

5. Add Alt Text to All Your Images on Your Website

When you have a hotel website, you will want to add more and more images of your hotel.

So, what if you can use these images to show up in Google searches?

Yes, you can also do SEO with your website images.

Since Google doesn’t understand images, you should add alt text to let Google know what’s in the picture.

When you add alt text to your website’s images, they will appear in the Google images. So, when one clicks on the image, they will open your website.

Therefore, SEO experts generally recommend optimizing all the images on the website. You never know for which photo you can get website traffic.

Source: Google

6. Arrange the Headings and Subheadings

Structured content is easier to read for Google and users. It helps to identify which parts are important and how the whole content is interconnected.

So, instead of writing flat texts, try to emphasize the headings by using the H1 or H2 tags.

There are different headings such as H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6. You have to use these to show Google the hierarchy of importance of the headings in your content.

Overall, using this will help you with your hotel SEO.

Source: National Geographic Society

7. Use Google Hotel Search

Adding Google Hotel Search to your hotel SEO strategy is a must. Google Hotel Search is specifically for hotels around the world. If you can get your hotel to rank on top here, you are bound to get a lot of traffic to your website.

As mentioned earlier, people generally use one way to search hotels online.

“Hotels in (name of the city, town, or vicinity).”

So, you need to ensure that you use these words. However, at the same time, Google Hotel Search emphasizes other characteristics like images, name of the hotel, price, and description.

So, when you use your Google My Business account, ensure that you have these details perfectly.

Getting on top of the hotel listings is not that easy, but if you follow the optimization tactics and get good ratings and reviews, you’ll surely get on top.

Once you are at position one, your hotel will get more visibility. Even if you cannot rank on the first page, ranking on the listing will help you get traffic.

Source: Google

Frequently Asked Questions About Hotel SEO

Q1. How do hotels do SEO for websites?

A. Here are five hotel SEO tactics to use:

• Write unique content with relevant keywords.
• Optimize page title and meta description.
• Ensure the page loads quickly.
• Make the hotel website mobile-friendly.
• Use keywords that will bring good traffic.

Q2. Why do you need to do optimization for hotel websites?

A. Optimization of hotel websites is important because it drives more traffic. Whenever there is huge traffic, hotels get a good number of leads and customers.

Q3. What is SEO in the hospitality industry?

A. SEO in the hospitality industry is all about making the website visible to a large number of people on search engines.

Q4. Is hotel SEO relevant in 2021?

A. Yes, hotel SEO is still relevant in 2021. Leading hotels of the world take the help of digital marketing agencies to do SEO for their website.

Q5. Is SEO legal?

A. Yes, SEO is very much legal. However, the key is to only go for white hat SEO tactics. If you use the black hat ones, Google may penalize your website.

Ready to Work on Your Hotel SEO?

In this digital era, more people are doing their hotel searches online. So, you need your hotel website to start appearing on relevant Google searches. But when there are so many hotel websites, it is not easy to rank high.

So, you should start using hotel SEO tactics.

At the same time, if you use Google My Business properly, you can appear in the right spots on Google.

So, include these tactics in your strategy and comment on how things go for you.