While there was a time when traditional PR campaigns were the most essential element of travel marketing, today SEO reigns supreme. Studies show that 94 per cent of travellers use search engines when looking for accommodation and companies need to focus on increasing their visibility and bringing in targeted traffic. For this, SEO-rich digital marketing for hotels and travel companies is crucial.
When used effectively, SEO helps to improve the ranking of your website in search engines such as Google, Safari, and Bing. This will give you more online exposure, as well as the chance to captivate and inspire future guests, generate inquiries and drive bookings.
That’s not to say that PR doesn’t have its place. Backlinks to your site from well-respected online publishers writing about your brand are key for SEO, but PR becomes another part of your content marketing strategy.
What is on-site SEO and why is it important for your hotel website?
Research from BrightEdge shows that an estimated 51 per cent of website traffic is due to organic search. On-site SEO is the process of optimising all your content across every page of your website to ensure it ranks highly in search engines and is relevant to your core audience. On-site SEO optimisation can be done through implementing keywords throughout the landing page, building a set of linked hotel marketing blog posts that are informative and relevant to the reader - also known as a content hub - and improving the overall structure and content of the website.
Optimising SEO for your hotel website increases organic traffic flow, drives up your guest conversion rates, targets every step of the sales funnel and lays the foundation for everlasting promotional content, all the while cementing a trust and confidence that resonates with your audience.
Hotel digital marketing for long-term success
Organic traffic is like SEO gold. It’s the number of visitors who are finding your website through natural selection – no paid ads, only good, relevant content that the search engine has deemed valuable to your audience.
But attracting organic visitors isn’t easy. It takes time, effort and know-how. You need a well-thought out SEO strategy to drive organic traffic.
Unlike paid traffic, which drops off as soon as you stop paying for adverts, organic traffic is like a long-term investment. It’s about creating the foundation to showcase your hotel or travel brand to your relevant audience, and building lasting, sustainable results.
Once you’ve implemented your SEO strategy, organic traffic flows freely and it has a cumulative effect, building up to grow your visibility online. This makes investing in organic traffic highly cost-effective. It’s far more affordable and effective digital marketing for hotels and saves money on paid advertisements
Ranking well through organic SEO is also a badge of trustworthiness. With paid advertising, you get a ‘sponsored’ tag at the top of the rankings. With organic traffic, you get a loyal customer base who know you’re the best in the business. It’s this kind of relationship building that helps your brand to build meaningful connections with your audience.
A guide to keyword strategy to build organic traffic
With the right keyword strategy, you can get your travel or hotel website front and centre, capturing the attention of your core audience. A good keyword strategy is like a roadmap, giving you a clear idea of the journey ahead.
In order to build an effective keyword strategy, you’ll start by gaining a deep understanding of what your audience is looking for and what kind of content impacts them. You can use free tools such as SEMrush and Google Keyword Planner to gather primary and secondary keywords, prioritising those that have that magic blend of high search volume and low competition – these are the best keywords to optimise your content for.
You can also incorporate many other tactics such as link building, guest post writing and more to help drive your website to the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) and enable you to reach more potential customers.
How blog content hubs can attract more organic visitors
Frequently-published, well-written content connects with your audience, conveying your brand’s values and unique selling points. When you write a hotel marketing blog with SEO in mind, you showcase your hotel to a wider audience and demonstrate Google’s quality guidelines, EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness), which boosts your search engine results page (SERP) ranking.
A quality blog also contributes to the overall effective structure of your travel website. By constructing effective blog hubs for your travel website, you help the search engine to find relevant content for your audience, understand the pillar page and the information it conveys, and recognise how the supporting content fits together.
It’s also necessary to optimise on-page elements. This includes using relevant keywords in meta tags, titles, and descriptions, which is the short description you see on the search engine results page. Add at least one internal and external link per page to help users navigate your website, and to make sure your site offers a good user experience and loads quickly, as Google prioritises websites that perform well.
How to increase visibility with hotel press release campaigns
Well-crafted SEO-rich press releases, distributed online, can help boost your brand’s exposure and open you up to a wider audience than ever before. A press release is your chance to hook journalists and major players in the press, creating a shortcut to success and helping you stand out in a crowded market.
Not only do good hotel press releases create a valuable source of backlinks to your website, they also offer you a chance to build a deeper relationship with your audience, cementing trust by conveying your brand voice. From an SEO point of view, as well as a purely customer/brand relationship perspective, press release campaigns are hugely valuable.
Hotel press releases can boost your hotel’s visibility, establish your brand as a leading authority, create a channel of communication with your audience and enable you to get your brand voice across.
Utilising blogger outreach and link building
A blogger outreach strategy is a great way to boost your brand’s off-site SEO. It involves content written about your brand on another website. This helps to convey a sense of authority and credibility, as other people are mentioning your brand, which the search engine looks for. And as your content will be posted on other well-ranked sites, you’ll see a boost to referral traffic, increasing your brand exposure and capturing new audiences and potential customers.
By teaming up with websites and news sites that fit your brand, you can get more eyes on your hotel and give your SEO a long-term boost. Your SERP ranking will increase and you’ll drive organic traffic to your website. Another off-page SEO tactic is link building, which works to create high-quality backlinks that boost your website's authority and SERP rankings.
Why is SEO the smart marketing play?
SEO has a seismic influence on how visible your page is to your key audience. While it’s hugely important for any business, SEO for hotels and travel brands is particularly key – it gives your brand the edge in a highly competitive market. Also, digital marketing for hotels is perfectly aligned with the purchasing habits of travellers. In this digital age, travellers use search engines throughout every step of the travel process, from researching destinations and planning each part of their journey to finding flights and accommodation.
Unlike traditional PR, SEO catches your audience as they’re at that crucial moment of initial interest. They’re active researchers with a problem that you have the solution to. If your SEO is right, the search engine brings them right to your doorstep, ready to make a purchase. It’s in the combination of the two, traditional PR and modern SEO techniques, where the magic lies.
In this data driven era, everything is measurable and SEO is no exception. You can track a clear ROI, with precise analytics on website traffic, conversion rates, and see exactly what you get for the amount you pay.
Having an effective SEO-driven hotel digital marketing campaign gives you complete control over your brand message. With captivating, SEO-optimised content, you can reach as wide an audience as possible, conveying your brand’s unique selling points and creating a message that resonates with guests.
If you’d like to know more about how you can harness the power of digital marketing for your hotel, the Peregryn team works with some of the world’s leading hotel brands. We’d love to help you stand out and attract the bookings you deserve.
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