Hospitality is an industry that’s constantly changing, and there are a number of factors that influence these dynamics. The most significant of these are dictated by guests of course. Guest trends are changing all the time, driven by their evolving needs, new technology and modern platforms.

Being aware of the latest trends is absolutely imperative for hoteliers to stay competitive today. With millennials becoming the major target audience for hospitality businesses today, hotels are forced to adapt their marketing strategies to fit their modern lifestyles. That’s why SEO is now a critical part of hotel marketing.

Your hotel’s search engine ranking can make all the difference to your annual occupancy rates. With the overwhelming majority of bookings being made on the web through computers and mobile devices, hotels cannot afford to ignore SEO.

Fortunately for you though, we’ve drafted out an SEO strategy here that any independent hotel can go out and implement!

Keyword Research

Choosing the right keywords is an integral part of the optimization process. There are a number of powerful keyword tools available that allow you to monitor keyword trends for different words and phrases – they even provide filters to assess their popularity in specific locations. This allows you to pick out the best keywords for your target market.

Make sure the keywords along with the meta-titles are all filled in on every landing page.

High Quality Content

While focusing all the effort on keyword optimization, it’s easy to forget about content – this can turn out to be a grave mistake! Keyword density is an important aspect of content optimization but overdoing this can be extremely detrimental to your site. Engines like Google tend to look for semantic keywords while crawling over web pages, and words that are similar to the intended keywords. The best way to achieve this is by actually spinning out high quality content! Google’s algorithms are constantly being updated and the company is getting quite adept at finding and rewarding content that helps address an issue.

Links and Backlinks

Web links play a massive role in your site’s online authority. The internet is structured in a manner similar to the human brain – where every site is capable of reaching out and ‘connecting’ to another site through links and backlinks. Google gauges a site’s authority partly through the backlinks it has. If your property is listed on a site that Google classifies as ‘high authority’, your own website’s credibility goes up and your online ranking is also positively influenced. Building backlinks takes time – it can take months to years of link building to establish yourself as a serious authority site – but it’s a process that can’t be ignored, especially considering the importance of online ranking in running a successful hospitality business today.

Once you’ve gone through all the trouble of diverting traffic to your website with solid SEO strategies, it only makes sense to ensure that they keep coming back there when they want to make a booking. Come up with creative strategies for this. A simple reservation process, clearly visible booking button, complimentary upgrades for mutually beneficial actions and innovative loyalty programs are all great ways to keep guests engaged and c