Terri Scriven is the Head of Hospitality for Google UK, which means working with hotels and accommodation providers in Europe and beyond to help them to optimise their digital distribution and online marketing strategies.
An online marketing strategy and e-commerce expert with more than 17 years of experience, Terri is at the forefront of the digital revolution for hotels. A leader in her field, she delivers regular seminars and keynotes, and was a panellist at the Revenue Strategy Forum in London in 2016.
We caught up with Terri to find out more about what hotels should be doing to heighten their online presence in a bid to compete.
What are the main Google search tools the hotels should be taking advantage of?
Now it’s very much about audience targeting and making sure that the hotels are making the most of the content on their website. That includes providing content on everything that’s around their hotels. It’s about offering niche keywords on what the hotel has to offer, as well as to highlight unique things to do around the hotel.
Other Google tools that hotels should be using centre on the user experience, especially for mobile.
We have a site that offers free UX and speed testing: testmysite.withgoogle.com. For example, 3 seconds is a typical good load time, hotels average 11 seconds while online travel agents average 2-3 seconds.
We are encouraging more hotels to go down the AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) route. There are a lot of tricks that can be done on AMP that you can do to improve your mobile site and it’s easy to do.
We also encourage hotels to subscribe to “ThinkwithGoogle”. This can provide a destination demand dashboard showing destinations which countries demand is coming from. There’s a lot more there about micro moments and hotels can learn a lot on the specific types of travel moments.
