Every person chooses to park their car at the first spot they see open. There’s no driving further even if the rest of the spaces are empty.
The same thing goes for online searches. Every person searching for hotels, restaurants, or travel agencies clicks on the first result that they see. Which means your market is being eaten up by a competitor just because he was seen before you. You might be better in every way, but it doesn’t matter because your audience never finds you.
The demand in the tourism industry is going exponentially, and a lot quicker than the supply. Your business has amazing growth potential. But to achieve this, you have to be found. Getting lost in the background won’t help.
SEO (Search engine optimization) gets you the recognition you deserve. To break it down, proper SEO enhances your website in the way Google likes it. Google then makes your website show up on the first page.
In this post, we’re going to show you 4 steps to implement top-notch SEO for your website. And no, it’s not just keywords. This will be information you didn’t know before.
6 Steps to the perfect Hospitality SEO
These are some extremely important steps that most hospitality websites sleep upon. This is the perfect way for you to get an edge over your competitors. Do what they haven’t been doing. When you take the road less traveled, you get to the destination quicker.
Focus on your locality
The wider area you target, the more competition you face.
Why look for gold elsewhere when it’s right at your doorstep? Your local market is more profitable than you think. Targeting a local audience also increases your chances of being recognized sooner and more efficiently. Acquiring this market will eventually help you grow wider and faster through referrals. To sum up, focus on your roots!
The best way to do this is by creating a perfect Google My Business (GMB) listing for your website. Here’s how to do it:
- Claim your listing if you do not have access to your GMB.
- Add the correct name, address, and phone number of your business, keeping it in line with any other online presence that you have.
- Use any other relevant details and images to light it up, make sure to keep it interesting.
Using your GMB listing to the fullest will make tourists find you much quicker. They will already have an idea of where you are, what your features are. This is bound to shoot up your conversion rates as well!
Name your images
The graphics and the pictures in your site play an extremely important role in your SEO. These are not just there to make your web design look aesthetically pleasing. Besides attracting your visitors, your images can also attract Google’s algorithm. Every time you upload a graphic to your website, a name is attached to it. This name is randomly generated and is called the ALT text for that image.
Google’s algorithm uses this ALT text to ‘see’ that image. In essence, it uses the ALT text as a description of the image since it cannot see the image itself. Now your goal here is to edit this ALT text to impress the algorithm and make your referenced image show up in relevant searches. You can do this by effectively describing your image using keywords in your ALT text. When done correctly, your image will begin ranking higher in image results of Google.
Use URLs effectively
Expertly designed URLs are an overlooked feature common to all successful hospitality websites. Your URL is much more important than you’d think. These help the Google algorithm understand what the page is about and accordingly separate it under the relevant head. An organized URL structure assists the users and the algorithm in navigating through different pages of your website. Creating them using keywords and precise descriptions of your page is a crucial step for optimization. A rule of thumb is to place your keywords to as far left as possible in the URL.
The optimal URL describes the purpose of the page in a crisp manner using the optimal keywords in the beginning of the structure. To avoid clutter, hyphenating between different words is a smart move. This makes your URL easier to interpret. Management systems usually randomly generate words and characters for your URL that make no sense. Which makes it extremely important to freshen up and edit the URL structure in the most optimal way.
Don’t forget the speed
The hospitality industry is no stranger to using attractive images and graphics to attract audience. With this, it’s usual for the loading speed of their websites to take a hit. While you might not think much of this, where your website ranks in the Google results depends considerably on the loading speed of your website.
Giving higher weightage to fancy designs and features, neglecting the slow loading speed is a common mistake amongst failed hospitality websites. Google’s algorithm measures your site’s and specific pages’ loading speeds and ranks it higher or lower accordingly. On top of this, 80% of surveyed web surfers agreed to leave a website if it was loading slowly. This fact obviously affects your website’s chances to rank higher. A tourist surfing through the net is clearly someone who’s planning something exciting. And a slow loading page is not something he has time for.
Get linked!
When you earn Google’s trust and prove your credibility, your website is bound to rank significantly higher. An amazingly effective way to do this is through building backlinks to your site. A backlink for your site would mean a link to your site in a different website or web page. Using this, Google determines that your heavily backlinked site is providing information that is relevant and has high weightage. Consequently, it starts showing your content in the top where most of its users can see it first. You can also consider backlinks to be upvotes or reviews of your website. Every backlink points towards the credibility of your website and helps it rank higher. In fact, Google has claimed that backlinks are one of its top 3 ranking factors.
But this doesn’t mean you just load up on useless backlinks. 1 quality backlink is actually more effective than a 100 random. To ensure good quality, relevant backlinks, be aware that they need to come from authoritative and credible sites. Also, these sites should be somehow related to yours and not completely off your niche and line of service.
Be relevant
You see, no one cares about keywords. Unless it impacts them. It’s up to you to create content that is relevant. Content that intrigues and interests your target market. You get an opportunity to stir minds and get them to take action using just your content. Don’t make the mistake of going keyword-heavy without focusing on what you’re actually writing. Quality over quantity, always. As a matter of fact, the quality of your content also determines the quality of the backlinks that you’re able to build towards your site. The more informative and unique your content is, the easier it is for you to gain trust and attention.
Of course, there’s no complete list of features when it comes to implementing the perfect SEO. Just like your business is different than your competitors, your SEO plan should be personalized and unique as well. This is what we are here for. Reach out to us and we’ll make your business reach incredible new heights.
