We are all aware that ranking poorly on Google searches is a major drawback in the hotel industry. OTAs such Booking clearly have a predominance across search engines, mainly due to their extensive budgets allocated to their SEO (Search Engine Optimazation) strategy, such as Google AdWords. However, whereas it is extremely difficult to rank as high as OTAs, it is possible to greatly increase your ranking with a few simple practices.
1 – The content of your hotel website
Google uses hundreds of different criteria in their algorithm to determine the raking of different pages, but what it gives the most weight to is the content on your website.
How should you go about creating your content? The most effective way is to think about it in terms of keywords�. Are you a business hotel in the center of Paris? Think about all the terms that can influence Google to categorize you as such. Which specific words would a business traveler going to Paris type on his/her search engine?
Let’s stick to the example above. On your homepage, describe your hotel, its location, its history � And take advantage of this description to plug in as many keywords related to a business hotel as possible. Here’s a few examples: �your business stay, work�, �business trips etc.
Take the time to write relevant texts for each of your pages: home page, room page, booking page, contact page, etc.
Very few independent hotels do this, and this makes the real difference in terms of SEO.
2 – Modify the architecture of your website to better rank on google
An extremely simple but highly effective way to boost your ranking is to change the ending of you URLs according to the content of your pages.
We have found a really good example of a luxury hotel in France who has clearly mastered this little trick. Let’s see how they did it:
Instead of having a basic url http://www.fermesdemarie.com, their home page returns the following: http://www.fermesdemarie.com/#!hotel-megeve/sejour-montagne.
Here you can see a clear example of possible keywords (hotel, location, type of stay) directly implemented in their home page URL. This is ideal to rank higher on the Google searches conducted by their potential clients.
Considering that each page on a website has its own URL, the combinations and possibilities of keywords are countless. For instance, the same hotel could use room-hotel-mountiain� for their rooms page on the website.
We took the example of a mountain hotel, but this is important for any type of hotel. It’s up to you to adapt your URL to your location, your category, etc. Once again, take into consideration your target market and use the same keywords they would use. It is also not recommended to use more than 3 key words within your URL.
At Amenitiz we built a system which will easily allow you to modify your URL terminations as you please and as often as you want.
