Search Engine Optimization (SEO), at its core, is anything you do to your website to make it as easy to find organically online. It’s a little bit art, a little bit science, and always evolving.
As the value of organic traffic continues to become more apparent, more and more hotels and resorts are investing in SEO. Growing and leveraging the organic traffic coming to your site can provide great ROI, but here at Screen Pilot we still see many hospitality websites leaving organic revenue on the table.
After more than a decade in hospitality specific digital marketing, here are the six most common SEO mistakes from the hospitality industry we see – and how to fix them:
#1: Slow Site Speeds
Google has confirmed that exactly how fast the pages on your site load is a ranking signal, meaning that if your site is too slow to load, it will be more difficult for you to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) than faster sites.
There are a variety of reasons for a site to load slowly, but un-optimized images are definitely the biggest culprit on hotel and resort websites. All of those vibrant images, showing off the property’s beautiful accommodations and views, could really be hurting your SEO.
Make sure that all of the image files on your site are no bigger than they have to be – and that they’re optimized for the web. Optimizing the images on your website will increase page load times, send a positive ranking signal to Google, and help improve SEO mistake no. 2.
#2: Non-Mobile Friendly Sites
Mobile traffic across the Internet surpassed desktop traffic for the first time in 2016. Google is rumored to be introducing a mobile-first index in 2018, meaning Google’s store of all the information it can find on the web and how it ranks websites in SERPs will prioritize mobile over desktop for the first time. Mobile is already proving to be a huge force in the hospitality industry, dominating last minute bookings and continuously growing its share of total bookings.
