Hotel search engine marketing is changing… are you ready?
Key Takeaways:
- Voice search and voice assistants are gaining popularity with no signs of slowing down.
- This fundamental shift in search behavior impacts your current SEO strategy and will influence conversions and content discovery.
- People using voice search tend to ask questions using long-tail keyword phrases, driving the need for relevant content addressing those questions.
“Siri, what is the biggest marketing trend that impacts my hotel’s search rankings?”
Just within the past few years, voice-driven search and virtual assistants (also referred to as ‘digital assistants’) have experienced a meteoric rise as more and more people turn to Apple’s Siri, Google Now, Google Home or Amazon’s Echo to research information.
In fact, the Echo and the Echo Dot were Amazon’s best selling products in 2016. Now, with Apple’s recently announced Apple HomePod (to be released December 2017), virtual assistants will be making their way into more homes and into our daily lives, routines and reality.
According to Google, 20% percent of searches are completed by voice. With 11 billion daily searches being conducted on Google, that equates to 2.75 million Google voice searches each day. And, that number is expected to rise exponentially over the next few years.
Virtual assistants and voice searches are actively shaping the future of hotel SEO and changing how hotel marketers view their keywords and content. Plus, they are already poised to play a bigger role in driving conversions.
Voice Search Strategies to Implement Now
This increasingly vocal world and continual evolution of search engine results will present challenges for hotels and will force hotel marketers to rewrite their content and SEO playbook.
Fortunately, changes have been gradual and we’re not seeing a full-blown disruption just yet. This buys hoteliers more time to prepare for changes in hotel search that are on the horizon.
Here’s what hotels can do right now to address this fundamental shift in how consumers are conducting hotel searches:
- Study Your Hotel’s Keyword Trends
The fundamental rules of SEO still apply: hotels must understand how guests are finding them via voice search and the type of phrases they use. The clearest trend driven by voice search is the rise of long-tail keyword phrases. Unlike a typed Google search, people tend to ask virtual assistants questions (“What’s a good business hotel in the Gold Coast in Chicago?” vs “gold coast business hotel”). What are guests asking about hotels in your area and your hotel specifically? What are guests asking about travel to your destination? Optimize for these long-tail keyword phrases.
