Perhaps more than any other industry, hospitality is tied to its location. While retail and office work have moved to the internet, hotels remain offline to a certain extent.
The way people find and book hotels, though, has changed significantly in recent years. Consider this timeline:
- 2015: Google announces that more searches take place on mobile than desktop.
- 2016: Google announces that that nearly a third of searches performed on mobile are local (think “hotel near the Louvre”).
- 2017: A study by my company, seoClarity, discovers that about 80 percent of searches are indirect, meaning people are searching “Paris hotel with pool” more than “Acme Hotel.”
This means it’s more important than ever to show up in local search. The easiest way to do that is to optimize your local listings. Optimizing your hotel local listings serves a vital purpose to your Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and more specifically, what’s known as “local SEO.” Keeping your hotel’s basic information up to date for search engines enhances your local search performance.
I’ll outline four local SEO basics you can execute to maximize your chances of showing up in local search – whether you’re focused on the success of one location or thousands.
#1: Compare Performance at Multiple Locations
There are plenty of reasons one location might be performing better than another. But have you considered that local SEO could be one of them?
If you’re responsible for performance at more than one location, consider starting your optimization efforts by seeing which ones need a boost. Tackling local SEO on those locations first could help improve numbers more easily than you realized was possible. Why? Because local SEO deals with these main components…
- Updated contact information;
- Hours and location information;
- Reviews; and
- Maps.
For those seeking hotels, having these basics in place and easily available can tip the balance toward securing a reservation (or ignoring a listing entirely).
#2: Claim & Update Your Google My Business Listing
When you optimize for local searches (e.g., “Paris Hotel 5th arrondisement”), Google My Business (GMB) is the service offered by Google that lets you appear in that “local pack” – three businesses with contact information, operating hours, and images (recently, an additional paid placement was included in the local three pack). There is a schema markup you can add to your local web pages that let local businesses highlight contact information, operating hours, and images from your website.
