The hospitality industry is a highly competitive market, with hotels fighting to attract guests and expand their customer base.
NB: This is an article from Up Hotel Agency
Optimising your hotel digital marketing plays a vital role in gaining visibility and driving more customers to your website and, most importantly, completing a booking.
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What is image alt text?
In technical terms, alt text (alternative text) is an attribute that is used in HTML when embedding an image in a website using the <img> tag.
Example: <img src=”ImageName.jpg” alt=”Alt text goes here”>
For example, this image from our How Using Hotel Experts Can Boost Your Digital Marketing Efforts article uses the alt text “hotel digital marketing agency team in a strategy meeting.”
Why is image alt text important for hotel website SEO?
There are several reasons why it’s important to ensure you’ve filled in an image’s alt text. Alt text will appear on the page when the image cannot be displayed if the user has a slow internet connection, or when the image file may be missing or broken.
Secondly, alt text is used by accessibility software to help users understand what is displayed on the web page. Many screen readers read out the image alt tags to enable visually impaired website users to build a mental image of what is appearing on your page.
Utilising great visuals on your hotel website is an important element in enticing guests to book, so it’s clearly necessary to optimise your images as much as possible and provide descriptive alt text.
Should I tailor my alt text to humans or search engines?
Since Google has introduced a wave of new algorithm changes in recent months, the answer to this question changes frequently.
However, Google has recently implemented a more people-first approach when analysing and ranking your website’s content. This means that any content on your hotel website needs to be “original, helpful, relevant and written for people, by people” – in Google’s words.
As a side note, if you think your website’s overall content could do with sprucing up to help you conquer Google’s new algorithm, you’ll want to partner up with an expert digital marketing agency for hotels… like us!
We offer various digital marketing services for hotels to help you boost your website SEO, reach more converting customers and increase those all-important direct bookings.
To kick things off though, here are the top five alt-text SEO best practices and tips to boost your visibility in the digital marketing space for hotels.
