Keyword research is the backbone of any SEO strategy. Getting a hotel to rank for the right keywords can greatly impact its success, but choosing the right keywords to target can get tricky. Here are some tips to help you research the keywords to use on your hotel website.
Identifying Keyword Opportunities
There are plenty of tools out there to help with keyword research. Here at Fuel we like to use multiple keyword research tools when we begin the research phase. Some of the tools we use are:
To begin your keyword research it helps to start with some broad terms like “[city name] hotels” or “hotels in [city name]”. Then find major venues, attractions and events that happen near your hotel, such as “hotels near [venue]” or “hotels near [event name]”.
You also want to determine what your hotel’s differentiators are. For example, if your hotel offers 2 bedroom suites, or pet friendly accommodations you can choose “2 bedroom suites in [city name]”, or “pet friendly hotels in [city name].”
That will give you a pretty solid list to begin.
Start plugging those variations into the tools mentioned above to determine the keyword competition, as well as keyword variants you may not have thought about.
Now that you have a full list of potential keywords to target, it is time to segment those keywords by searcher intent as well as competition.
Searcher Intent
Looking at your list of keywords, try to envision what type of content you would create to rank for that keyword. If you can’t fulfill searcher intent you probably shouldn’t target that keyword.
Someone typing “[city name] Hotels” into a Google search is likely in the beginning stages of the conversion funnel. They are comparing prices, reading reviews, seeing what’s nearby etc, and may not ready book their room.
Those broad type of terms make more sense for an OTA or Portal site that create content to compare multiple properties.
Someone typing in “2 bedroom suite in [city name]” is closer to the end of their funnel. They have identified a differentiator and would like more information about hotels that have 2 bedroom suites.
This is where hotels can create killer content (text, images & video) around your 2 bedroom suites to draw that traffic to your site.
Keyword Competition
Understanding the competition for a certain keyword will also help you make a decision on whether you have a chance to rank. Typically, broad terms like “hotels in New York” are going to have much more competition.
Just doing a Google search shows the sites competing for that keyword are huge, authoritative websites with lots of links pointing to them.
An independent hotel will not really be able to compete since they don’t have the reputation, authority, links, etc. Also, as mentioned above, the independent hotel doesn’t have the price comparison and options that these metasearch and OTAs have that fulfill searcher intent.
Read rest of the article at Fuel Travel
