2 Birds, 1 Stone: Coaxing Existing Hotel Search Terms to the Tipping Point
By Kent Campbell
Is your property ranking in key search results just below the positions you really need to be in? Are you in position five for that key search term your prospective guests use often? If so, you know you're missing more than half the revenues you could be earning from that search phrase. But how do you identify which search phrase to pursue, and how to do you get it to rank two to three positions higher?
Your hotel's SERP rankings matter. [Per Moz][1], a respected SEO authority, the first three results—collectively referred to as “above the fold”—in a typical SERP account for more than 50% of total click-throughs. If you're not ranking above the fold, someone conducting a search relevant to your hotel is more likely than not to click on a competitor's result instead of yours.
**The Game Plan**
Most of our clients try to go for too many search terms at once, and they're often 'blue sky' terms or 'Awareness' stage terms (more on this later). In this article I'll let you know exactly what we advise our hotel clients: Find the low hanging fruit, focus your resources, and win.
The goal is to get your search phrases in the first or second position, not fifth or sixth. In many cases being in position five is like being on page five.
“In many cases being in position five is like being on page five”
Improving your hotel website traffic and visibility isn't daunting as it sounds. Below, we'll explain:
● How to choose the best keyword candidates for optimization
● How to improve your existing site content to get the most out of your keywords
● How to plan your content for a more efficient traffic strategy
**Aim for Prospects in the Sweet Spot**
There are a lot of prospective guest out there, and a lot of search phrases to chase. With limited resources, you can't chase them all. So pick your battles. To do this look at the search phrases your hotel already ranks. Then find the ones that tend to rank in positions 5 to 10 in search results. Next, find the search phrases that are the 'money phrases', those are the ones that reveal the prospective guest is in either the Consideration Stage or the Decision Stage of the Buyers Journey.
The “sweet spot” of the buyer's journey, a three-phase process that prospects travel from the instant they realize they have a need to be filled to the moment they finalize their booking at your hotel. This is what the Buyers Journey looks like.
As you can see in the graphic below, the three phases of the buyer's journey are Awareness, Consideration and Decision. Worry less about Awareness for now: In the first phase of the journey, searches are usually vague. For example, the search “places to visit on Tatooine” has a lower chance of converting a prospect to a guest than “hotels in Mos Eisley” which would be a search phrase in the Consideration Stage. Put another way, the Awareness Stage is a big search phrase with a lot of competition from the likes of TripAdvisor and Expedia. You have to compete with them, but at the Awareness stage they'll likely win. Besides, people searching in the Awareness Stage may not have even decided they want to stay in the same city your hotel is located.
● Awareness stage search terms are expensive to chase
● They don't convert prospects to guests at a high enough frequency
● You are competing with multi-million dollar budgets **Find Low Hanging Fruit** Your property's wheelhouse is the Consideration and Decision phases, when prospects have an itinerary in mind but are still choosing from competing hotels in their destination cities. Start brainstorming hotel search keywords relevant to these phases. In our imaginary example hotel it might be: “hotels in Mos Eisley” “discount hotels Mos Eisley” “full service resorts Mos Eisley” and so on. **Tip:** We've found that a nice bottle of Burgundy really helps get those ideas going With a general list in hand, use your website's analytics (Google Webmaster Tools is a great source) to see which Consideration and Decision keywords result in click-throughs to your site. We use Google Webmaster Tools data to find the search phrases our clients are already ranking for. To do this you'll have to set up [Google Webmaster Tools][3] on your site, or similar analytics software. For Google Webmaster Tools look in Search Traffic / Search Queries. You will be presented with a table you can download (“Download this table”). Then we look for the phrases in which hotel clients are ranking in position five through ten (Avg. position). Once we have identified those, we choose the phrases that are in the Consideration or Decision stage. Ideally these phrases have proven themselves by converting some guests in the past. **Your Short List** At this point you should have your short list of search phrases. Now pare it down further. From the list pick one term that gets the most traffic, is in the sweet spot of the buyers journey, has converted in the past, and where your property is in position five through ten of search results. You'll use this term as your 'archetype'. **Choosing the Right Hotel Search Keywords for You** Pick a single keyword phrase that generates some click-throughs. (You can repeat the process as necessary.) Next, plug it into Google and other popular search engines. Record your hotel's rank on each SERP. If you're ranking between 5 and 10, you may be able to improve your ranking—and eventually land above the fold—by massaging the existing content on your site. **Take a Moment to Learn From the Competition** But first, take a look at the sites outranking you for the chosen keyword. They probably belong to your competitors. Note how they structure their URLs, title tags, keyword placement, anchor text and other important search engine optimization components. We'll explain each of these in more detail below, but it helps to see what works well for the competition—when the time comes to create and improve your own content, it'll feel more natural. **Optimize Your Site Content** Here's where the real fun begins: optimizing your existing content for your chosen keyword. Search-friendly hotel site content demands these SEO basics.
1. The page title in the browser
2. The biggest headline at the top of the page (in HTML speak an H1 tag)
3. The search phrase embedded once in a while in the body text They also pay attention if the search term is in your meta Description and in the URL of your page too. **Eating Our Own Food** It is worth mentioning that off-page factors like incoming links from other websites to the page that have the anchor text are also important. While its not as easy to do, its worth it. For example, we wrote this article to both help you, and to get this link right here: [online reputation management services][5] that links to an inner page on our website. That page has everything we discuss in this article. It has the search term in the Title of the page (in the browser). It's also in the headline and in the text. The meta description also has the term in it. The website HotelExecutive.com has good page strength. This link will pass a little bit of Google 'juice' known as Page Rank (named after Google founder Larry Page) to our site. Is this a blatant plug? Why yes - it is. After all, fortune favors the bold. How did we decide that the term online reputation management services would be the right one? You can probably guess. We're an aggressive technical PR company. We know from our analytics that that search term is a good one for traffic. According to Google Webmaster Tools, our Google rank for the term is about ten, right under Wikipedia, so we don't get a lot of the traffic we could. It's a good term for us because it's a Consideration Stage search term. If it has been just 'online reputation management' it would be too broad. By adding 'services' we know from our Google Analytics that people have a higher likelihood for conversion for that very specific term because they are at the point in the buyers journey where they are looking for services like ours. This is called a 'long-tail search term'. This works for hotels too. Use the tips above on one search phrase. Then, when you feel you have it right, expand to more search phrases. Institutionalize the best-performing strategies and live it. **Expanding Your System** Speaking of blogs, according to Hubspot (disclaimer: we are a Hubspot Partner) “Marketers who have prioritized blogging are 13x more likely to enjoy positive ROI.” So, if you aren't blogging, think about the money you're leaving on the table. Here's the worst-kept secret in the content marketing business: Search engines hate stale content. When search spiders crawl over the same sites again and again, they get 'bored'. They want fresh material to read and map, and who can blame them? So they do what any tired human reader would do: push older, overdone content further down the SERPs and pull up newer, more exciting content. That is the real reason you blog, to become seen as a thought-leader in your niche. The issue with blogging is that it is time consuming. You must be creative, and we both know you probably don't have the resources on hand. Still, you need to do it. Those terms you are ranking for in position five through ten? More content on your site specifically about that content is an important piece of the puzzle. You can optimize the page search engines already bring up using the actions mentioned above, but more pages exploring different angles on the theme will really help. For that you'll need to brainstorm, and then put the ideas into a content plan. **Brainstorm Keyword-Related Content** New content is the linchpin of your content plan. So start by brainstorming topics that fit in with your target keyword(s). They don't have to be “about” the search phrase, but they do have to be relevant to the topic the search phrase represents. I will use the Tatooine example here because, well, I can. ● Mos Eisley Hotel
● Hotels in Mos Eisley
● Things to do in Mos Eisley
● Cleanest Hotel in Mos Eisley
● Best Breakfast in Mos Eisley Tatooine All of the search terms above are semantically linked to the core term our example hotel is trying to rank better for. Its less about what the words say, as what they mean. All of these terms deserve their own blog post structured in the way discussed above (title tag, headline, description, body text, etc.). All of the pages should link to each other, forming a logical web of content on your site. This is the art and science of long-tail search phrases for hotels and resorts. It's content marketing, sometimes referred to as inbound marketing. Though brainstorming is an ongoing process, you can make the process more efficient by asking followers and fans, both on social media and through your site's blog, for topic ideas. What hotel- or travel-related topics do they want to know more about? **The Long Tail** Also, don't shy shy away from obscure topics—for every “Top 10 Reasons to Visit Mos Eisley” throw in a more challenging, in-depth post about the tourism industry. There is less competition for many long-tail search terms. Think about terms that require about four words to describe, maybe even five. You may unexpectedly drive traffic for less common variations on your search phrase (“challenges facing hotels in Mos Eisley” for instance). **Individual Pages** For each target keyword, create a dedicated landing page on your website. You'll point all keyword-related inbound links to this page just like we did in our own example above, which will in turn link to a conversion page (the booking platform, for instance) on your hotel's website. In addition to providing a reinforcing contact point along the buyer journey, landing pages are great for organizing and analyzing your inbound traffic for each keyword. **A Nod to Social Media** Not a Twitter person? You really need to get over that. Include social sharing icons in all site content. These make it quick and easy for readers to share appealing posts through their social media accounts, boosting the likelihood that a post will go viral and send your hotel website traffic through the roof. Remember, to really get the benefit from social media, add [hashtags][6]. Hashtags to your Twitter posts should vary. **Quick Recap** ● Identify the best search phrases, then pare them down to just a few to start with
● Identify the page that is coming up in search results, then optimize the Title tag, Description and page content to be all about that search phrase.
● Brainstorm similar search phrases
● Build content around those similar phrases on your site, and place the content on optimized pages especially built for that term.
● Link the pages to each other within your site
● Get third-party travel sites to link to each of the pages. The more important the better.
● When you have completed a page, tweet it. Use hashtags that are close to the terms you have optimized the page for. **Going Further** **Inbound Links** Once your site pages, or blog pages, are ready, it's time to get links from other websites. Authoritative links to your offsite content can really boost its search visibility—and its own authority. For each article published on a third-party website or blog, ask the site owner to link to the content from their home page. Place each piece of content on a different, high-authority site that's relevant to your niche. For your hotel, find blogs and publications about travel. You may have noticed quite a few. If you have a restaurant, food-related sites are great as well. Once you've placed and publish each piece of content, include a link to your landing page—using anchor text optimized with your target keyword, of course—within the first third of the article. **Social Media for Lazy People** That's us, lazy people. We use automation. For every published piece of content, create and schedule a few tweets over the course of the publication day. Each should have up to three different hashtags relevant to the hotel or travel experience. If you're not familiar with hashtags, think of them as markers for topic-based conversations on Twitter and other social platforms. They come and go; as a simplistic example, #hotelchat might curate industry-specific conversations one month, only to be replaced by #hoteltalk the next. That's why it's critical to use a hashtag finder like Topsy to source the moment's most relevant tags. What to use for automation? We use Hubspot, but a cheaper alternative (with a fraction of the features) is HootSuite. **Scheduling** Your publishing schedule will depend on the resources you can devote to content marketing. There's no hard and fast rule of thumb here, but frequent publication is almost always better. Publishing long-form content (blog posts and guest posts) twice per week, per property, is manageable for most hotels and hospitality companies, even those without in-house marketing teams. We publish every weekday, and follow each post with five tweets at different times of the day, each with different hashtags. **Delegate** Hotel managers shouldn't have to write post after post in their spare time. Don't be afraid to delegate this responsibility to a person or firm who can do a great job with it. Just make sure content and quality is up to your standards—a frequent publication schedule makes no difference if your content isn't worth reading. If you have no one on your staff willing to take on the task, outsource it. The trick is finding the best writer. In the short term you can use a service like TextBroker.com. But longer term you will want to find a writer you are comfortable with who you can train. The issue with copy brokers like TextBroker.com is that writers come and go, and with them the familiarity with your brand they had built up. Then you have to start all over again. **Take Your Reward** Optimizing hotel search keywords to boost your site's visibility, traffic and booking rates isn't a one-and-done process. It takes discipline, insight and hard work to create and execute a winning content plan. [1]: http://moz.com/blog/google-organic-click-through-rates-in-2014 [2]: http://www.hotelexecutive.com/images/business_review/arrow.jpg [3]: https://accounts.google.com/ServiceLogin?service=sitemaps&passive=1209600&continue=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fwebmasters%2Ftools%2F&followup=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fwebmasters%2Ftools%2F [4]: http://www.hotelexecutive.com/images/business_review/c8e39_Untitled2_.jpg [5]: http://www.reputationx.com/online-reputation-management-services [6]: http://mashable.com/2013/10/08/what-is-hashtag/
