Modern hotel marketers face many challenges in the digital space, like uncovering new keywords by looking at competitors, finding sound backlinks, and measuring the gap between their website performance and those of competitors. SEO is one of the critical elements that a digital marketer just can’t miss. Ensuring that consumers can find your website – across all devices and channels – and concert is a must for hotel marketers. This article covers the importance of benchmarking so business owners can measure their website’s SEO health and use the insights to improve performance.
1. Good Technical SEO is Foundational and Essential
A robust technical SEO strategy allows search engine spiders to crawl, index and rank the pages of your website accurately with the key goal of improving organic rankings. It’s important to audit your website health for errors and crawlability elements, including checking for broken pages, missing or not updated robot.txt files, XML site maps, and image site map updates to leverage the opportunities presented by image search.
2. Fast Page Speed, Mobile Friendliness and Responsiveness Drive Conversions
Page speed and on-page performance matter more than ever. But many online businesses face speed challenges. A fast loading website can maximize user retention and lead to higher conversions. According to Google, a page load time increasing from 1 to 5 seconds also increases the probability of a visitor bounce by 90%, and slow sites are inherently harder to find since speed is a critical ranking factor for search engines.
3. On-page SEO – Content is at the Heart of Search Rankings
The way your website and pages are optimized has a direct impact on your search engine rankings. The biggest element of on-page SEO is how well your content is crafted and whether it solves user needs. Content and relevance eventually drive the search result position and is the core reason consumers seek out your website in the first place. And then there are other factors such as URL, alt image tags, and more. Moz offers a simple framework to understand on page SEO:
- Subject in title tag, image alt text and in URL
- Content quality and relevance to a specific topic
- Linking back to home, category or subcategory pages
Other things to watch out for, includes missing h1 and h2 tags, duplicate content, image alt text, length of titles.
4. Keyword Optimization
Always stay relevant and own who you are. A customer who is ready to purchase knows what they are looking for, so targeting the right keywords is critical to attract the right customers. If you have something unique to offer your customers, own it. If you are a pet friendly hotel or offer free parking or Wi-Fi, make sure you highlight that in your promotion and marketing.
You can use the same brand keywords and create two totally different experiences; If the user is on a desktop, you can direct them to a more media-rich experience – letting them live the offline experience digitally. On the other hand, if the user is on a mobile device, the user experience can be optimized towards more action-oriented activities like “find” or “search” with specific calls to action and tools aimed at making the process quick and simple on a mobile device.
Additionally, a business can make keywords synonymous with their brand. Not surprisingly, these types of campaigns can drive a dramatic boost in traffic and offer unaided brand awareness. Getting visibility on the search engine results pages (SERPs) is still one of the most critical elements of any digital marketing strategy.
Keyword performance against your competitive landscape helps you spot relevant opportunities. Milestone insights can:
- Help you find keyword and content opportunities, research ideas, and uncover competitor strategies
- Analyze and position your business among your competition
- Develop keyword and topical strategy
