Oct 06 2011

3 Hotel SEO Tips from the Trenches

Promoting a hotel is not an easy task and I have learnt it the hard way. Coming from a small business environment, where I specialized in helping small, local businesses to establish their online presence, 6 months ago I started a new job as an SEO specialist for a hotel chain in the UK. In this post I want to offer you a few tips that I picked up over my time here so far about promoting and copywriting for an accommodation industry.

1. Focus on plural keywords.

It may be quite tempting to use the singular version of the keyword, not to mention that often it even feels more natural. However when it comes to booking accommodation, people almost always use the plural one. I can’t explain why it is like that but no one really searches for hotel in London, it almost always is hotels in London. By using the plural version of the keyword you are ensuring that you target the right audience.

2. Skip any warm ups.

Many of us SEO tend to use at least two paragraphs of the copy to introduce the meat in the text. However, when you are writing a copy that is supposed to convince someone to book a hotel, skip all that crap. Hit them with the main message from the start.

Unlike many other industries, in a hotel industry most people go through a lengthy research stage before they choose their holiday accommodation. Before they buy, they will check reviews on MK or other reviews site, they will check all the options they have and will buy only if they are 100% sure that your place is the right one for them. Therefore you have to give them what they are looking for early in the copy, otherwise they might trail off somewhere else to continue their research.

3. Top keywords do not always sell.

One of the most tempting things when promoting a hotel is to go after only the top keywords in the industry, at least that’s what I did. And to a point, that’s fine. However, many of the top keywords in this industry don’t sell at all. They assist during the research stage, but the sale happens somewhere else, often on the branded keyword level. So, mix your main keywords with smaller, low traffic ones and look after your whole branded presence and you should be fine. Go after only the top keywords and you might loose on a lot of sales.

Hotel industry is quite specific, it’s a fact. At least so it seemed for me, but nonetheless, it is an industry just like any other. There are certain things that are specific to it, and once you get to know them, you are fine.

Pawel is an SEO specialist and web content editor for stay manchester and looks after all aspects of the company’s organic online promotions.

11 Responses to “3 Hotel SEO Tips from the Trenches”

  1. Aaron Bradley says:
    October 6, 2011 at 4:52 pm

    Interesting to see your tip that one should focus on the singular rather than the plural.

    Conventional wisdom – and much keyword analysis – suggests the opposite in many situations (the hotel industry notwithstanding) that the actual metrics do no bear out. That is, when I’ve been similarly ranked for singular and plural terms the plural almost always drives more visitors, at least in the ecommerce realm.

    Though at least the keyword analysis clearly backs up your specific case (local – i.e. UK – numbers):
    [london hotel] – 8,100
    [london hotels] – 74,000

    Yowsers! Though I guess it goes to show the perils of not changing your match type from Broad to [Exact] when doing organic keyword research (as many fail to do):
    london hotel – 1,830,000
    london hotels – 1,500,000

  2. Pawel says:
    October 7, 2011 at 5:49 am

    Hi Aaron, actually, I said to focus on plural not singular (see the opening sentence of your comment and point 1 in my post :)

    And, I was surprised by that too when I discovered it but it’s in fact plural that works in a hotel industry.

    Cheers for commenting

    Pawel

  3. cordoba ukulele says:
    October 7, 2011 at 3:56 pm

    Promoting a hotel is not an easy task and I have learnt it the hard way.Keyword research is the first fundamental step in SEO.

  4. Sal Surra says:
    October 7, 2011 at 4:48 pm

    Hotel websites should certainly focus on the local and geographical keywords, unless they are optimizing for large brand sites like BW or Holiday Inn nationally. With local hotel websites, I think you are right to focus on the brand terms as that will mostly be the converting traffic, but there are some opportunities to gain in semantic terms related to the local area but are not focused around the brand or hotel name. For example, if you have a hotel in Anaheim, you could probably do well focusing on keywords that are associated with the local attractions like Disneyland, convention center, or the beaches. By creating content that helps to enlighten viewers about the benefits of staying at the hotel for the event or attraction that they are coming in for will help produce good ranking pages that will also convert. My tip would be to look at what’s around you, and what typical customers are staying at the hotel for and begin to work on ways to help create content that will convert for these customers.

  5. Andrew says:
    October 7, 2011 at 6:53 pm

    Had a lot of similar experiences also in my hotel experience. We also found a lot of overlap with paid and organic search throughout the buying process. Our attribution allowed paid search to get attributed the conversion if it was a touch point at any part of the purchase cycle, and as you would expect it cannibalized almost 40% of “possible” seo conversions.

  6. Pawel says:
    October 10, 2011 at 7:35 am

    Andrew, yes, my experiences are exactly the same. There is a huge overlap with paid searches and conversions. Makes it horrible to report properly lol :)

  7. Dell says:
    October 10, 2011 at 3:31 pm

    I think you are right to focus on the brand terms as that will mostly be the converting traffic.

  8. Thomas says:
    October 10, 2011 at 5:57 pm

    Yes but when you focus on PLURAL you are competing with all those big travel websites.

    Not to mention are you really going to create a page around a plural keyword. It will look and read weird.

    Instead look for other KW opportunities.

    Best London Hotel
    Top London Hotel
    Cheap London Hotel

    ect ect

  9. Pawel says:
    October 10, 2011 at 9:34 pm

    Thomas, I am competing with big travel websites….. that’s the whole point (and my job at that)

  10. Y8 says:
    October 13, 2011 at 2:56 pm

    I’ve never been acquainted yet with hotel as the keyword on any of my SEO works but if ever it would really be a tough job since hotel is a very saturated keyword to start with…It would take me a long months just for the preparation….

  11. rumah jepara says:
    December 1, 2011 at 1:52 pm

    Your article is very interest for me..I still waiting next article…keep spirit…Thks