Is blogging a part of your hotel marketing strategy? Want to create a blog post that boosts your hotel bookings?
Blogging is more effective than social media and SEO in increasing website traffic. Also, leads attained through inbound marketing methods like blogging cost 60% less than those captured with outbound methods.
Inbound marketing is the art of getting your customers to want to come to you – for advice, for inspiration, and ultimately to buy from you. This has spurred more businesses to blog, one of the top inbound techniques. Of course, this has predictably created an avalanche of blogging competition for all businesses, including hotels. In fact, 2 million blog posts are written every day.
Hotels aren’t only competing with hotel blogs: they’re trying to grab attention among food blogs, travel blogs, design blogs and others in the hospitality niche. If you want your hotel to stand out from the crowd, you’ll need to write quality, eye-catching posts, and publish regularly.
Keep in mind that not every hotel needs a blog, and blogs aren’t magic: they take time and care if you want them to work! However, if you use your blog correctly and have a strong, engaged base, they can certainly drive up your bookings rate.
Today, I am going to show you how to create a blog post that boosts your hotel bookings – learn how to make yourself heard!
Write Long Posts
As aforementioned, many businesses are writing blog posts these days. But most of them are short posts between 350 and 700 words. You can easily standout from the competing blogs by writing longer posts. And I am not talking about posts that are around 1,000 words long. I am talking about ones that are over 2,000 or 3,000 words. Long posts stand out: they attract the most backlinks and rank well on search engines. Moz discovered that the number of backlinks a blog post attracts is directly proportional to the length of the post:
Another study by SerpIQ found that posts that appear in the top 10 search results are over 2,000 words long on average and those present in the top 4 are around 2,500 words.
These 2 studies show that that people like to link to longer blog posts. This boosts search engine performance. Include some good keywords in your blog post to maximise these benefits.
Long posts also perform extremely well on social media as a study by Buzzsumo found that they get shared the most. Posts that are between 3,000 and 10,000 words get shared the highest. They receive an average of 8,859 shares.
To sum it up, long posts give your hotel traffic from both social media and search engines.
Watch out, though! You need to be careful when you’re writing your long blog post. You can’t just string some large paragraphs together and hope for the best. Let’s keep going – I am going to show you the most important steps to follow as you write.
a) Target long tail keywords too:
Since your long blog posts are likely to attract plenty of backlinks, it’s a good idea to include plenty of popular keywords. This will ensure that you get a good amount of traffic.
Along with these main keywords, you should target some popular long tail keywords. Why? The number of long tail keyword searches have risen over the past few years, and competition for these keywords is usually low. How many people are going to google “How to write a blog post for my hotel”? Probably not a ton, but the people that do are going to know exactly what they want to read!
Long tail keywords are a way to rank for the topics you want to rank for without putting effort into too-competitive shorter keywords, and they help your perfect audience find you.
A great tool for finding long tail keywords is Long Tail Pro. Even Google’s Keyword tool can prove helpful.
b) Be very selective of your topics
You cannot write a long blog post on each and every topic. If you want to write posts that are over 2,000 words long, you need to look for meaty topics. If you also want to take advantage of the search engine and social sharing benefits, you need to ensure it is popular too. All the hours spent writing the posts should be worth it.
This is why you should do as much research as you can to find popular topics. You should use the Google Keywords tool and SEM Rush to locate frequently searched keywords and Buzzsumo to find posts that get shared the most on social media. Another option would be to visit your competitors’ blog, check out their most popular posts and begin working on longer versions of the same posts for your hotel blog.
c) Be succinct:
Sometimes I come across blog posts where there’s clearly no quality information to be found. It’s easy to see that the author set out with the aim to create a really long blog post, and in the process stuffed it up with unnecessary words. This is a bad idea!
Read rest of the article at: NetAffinity
