Travellers’ behaviour online has shifted significantly in the past few years. Now, people planning their travels are spending more time researching and locking in their plans well ahead of time.
NB: This is an article from Hotelchamp
And since the pandemic, they are prioritising hotel websites with detailed and relevant information that is easily accessible to them. With this return to travel, there is also a return of online competition from OTAs and booking websites – making SEO optimisation for your hotel website more crucial now than ever before.
Time to Gear Up
One crucial thing you have to do is stay up to date on new SEO techniques and strategies. Utilising standard tools and systems like Core Web Vitals and GA4 can greatly benefit your SEO efforts. They’ll give you more insight as to how your website is running for a typical visitor, as well as data on how to improve this experience. More specific tools, like Destination Insights and Hotel Insights, are location-centred resources for hoteliers who want to know what users are searching for in their area and make sure their hotel ranks high in a specific location.
As with everything else online, running A/B tests can be helpful. Schedule regular audits (at least once a year)—you will get real data about your current online audience and how you can improve your strategies.
Best Practices for Your Hotel’s SEO
Most SEO optimisation practices are evergreen. Here are the factors that will boost your discoverability on Google and other search engines as well:
Site Speed
One of the important indicators that search engines take into consideration is loading times. A fast website is crucial, as slow sites are frustrating for visitors. And frustration will inevitably have a negative impact on your website’s rankings. If you’re not sure how search engines view your site speed, Google’s Page Speed Insights Tool can help determine if speed is one of the issues your team needs to correct. For example, more and larger files mean more load time. This is why it’s so important to make sure the files you’re uploading aren’t larger than they need to be. Also, you can enable compression so they take less time to load.
Pro Tip: Setting up lazy loading ensures that the content your visitor has open will load first and much faster than if all of your page’s content loaded at the same time. Enabling browser caching can also help, which means the page won’t load completely from scratch every time a user visits.
Mobile-Friendliness
Speaking of speed, 53% of mobile users will abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. And since it’s estimated that more than 70% of online users will browse exclusively via mobile devices by 2025, designing for the mobile user is critical. On top of that, Google’s mobile-first indexing feature means that the search engine looks at the mobile version of a site when ranking content. This makes it even more important to optimise for mobile devices. Ensuring that your hotel website is responsive and mobile-friendly is imperative both for SEO rankings and your overall marketing strategy.
Pro Tip: Use Google’s mobile-friendly test tool or manually check your web pages by viewing them on a mobile device. Particularly, look at their responsiveness and how they are rendering. These are both easy ways to see if you need to correct usability issues that can negatively impact your SEO.
