The Local SEO landscape has seen significant changes over the past decade and in 2018, the old school tactics are no longer moving the needle. This article provides detailed actions for hotels and other businesses in the hospitality industry to optimize for local search.
What is Local Search?
When discussing search engine optimization (SEO) it is easy to forget how much of a hodgepodge of different services and techniques SEO actually is. SEO is seen as a monolith service when it is actually a latticed framework of different processes coming together to achieve specific results relating to a search engine functions and features.
In 2004 Google added a new feature to the search engine results page (SERP) that included a map of the local area and relevant business listings. The local search features appeared on the SERP when certain keywords were used. Keywords mentioning specific cities or locations triggered the local features. Keywords associated with businesses that are necessarily tied to a location also triggered the local feature.
This new SERP feature required new optimization techniques. To perform SEO on a website now required getting businesses that could benefit from location based searches into the local pack.
Local SEO Ranking Factors
In previous years, the key ranking factors related to building citations for your business. This meant finding every local directory and service and getting your exact business name, address, and phone number listed there. Citation building became a drain on time since many of these sources would pull in data from other websites which could alter the correct information. This extra data would also sometimes create duplicate entries with different variations of the business name.
I’m not going to sugarcoat it — local citations are still a mess and a headache. Even if you use a tool like Moz Local, duplicate entries, other businesses claiming your address, mix ups with phone numbers, all create extra work.
In 2017 Moz released a study on what it considered the most important factors in ranking for local search. This study divided the ranking factors into 2 categories: Local Pack/Finder Ranking Factors and Localized Organic Ranking Factors.
