3 best SEO practices to increase your property’s visibility
In order for your property’s website to be at the top of Google search results and also to increase its online visibility, you need to have a strong and long-term SEO strategy. By definition, SEO means Search Engine Optimization, also known as natural referencing. This marketing strategy is about positioning your website in the first results of search engines, but it requires a lot of work, consistency and patience.
Moreover, keep in mind that your website’s position takes into consideration several criterias, defined by the algorithm and filters of the search engine. It also varies depending on the context and the nature of the search. For example, search engines will rate the accessibility of your site, if your website’s map is simple and clear and if the navigation is fast and logical. Furthermore, it will take into consideration the relevance of the information by measuring the user’s experience, especially if your website’s pages provide answers to searches made by Internet users. Finally, the loading speed of your website’s pages and its responsiveness are two elements to consider to improve your user experience.
Optimize your website
The first good SEO practice is to optimize your property’s website in order to make it more responsive. In other words, its design must support different mobile devices such as computers, phones and tablets, whether it’s an Apple or Android, as well as different web browsers. Being web responsive means ensuring that texts and images resize and adapt to the device used and that call to actions buttons are easily clickable. Thus, the more responsive your website is, the more it will facilitate the booking experience for travelers and will encourage them to finalize their online reservation.
Moreover, make sure your website pages load quickly to avoid Internet users leaving your website and that your bounce rate becomes too high. Bounce rate is an important marketing metric to analyze as it represents the percentage of visitors who arrive on your website and immediately leave it, without visiting another page. On average, the bounce rate is about 50%, but it depends on the analyzed sector.
We also advise you to keep URLs and HTML elements short and straight to the point to increase your website traffic. Thus, be sure to give a descriptive name to images and a description similar to the text alternative. In addition, keep in mind that updating titles, descriptions and meta descriptions of your pages, while integrating keywords, will increase the click rate of your results on Google and improve your SEO. These are elements that Googlebots read first and it helps them to better understand your website’s content.
It would be relevant to add internal links that would redirect visitors to other pages as well as external links that would take them to other websites. This will help increase your presence on search engines. Therefore, make sure not to redirect users to a 404 error page or to broken links as it could impact your user experience, cause you to lose potential bookings and affect your ranking on various search engines.
Improve your content
To improve your SEO and increase your visibility on search engines, you must offer attractive and unique content that meets Internet users’ expectations. Your content should be kept simple, clear and understandable if you want to catch the attention of visitors and keep them on your website as long as possible. For example, you can use good quality photos and videos that might answer travelers’ expectations. You can also write relevant and informative blog posts about what’s new at your hotel, current hospitality trends, travel tips and events related to your property. You can even write about your industry and your geographic area. Furthermore, it could be beneficial to optimize your content but remember that over-optimization can be penalized by Google.
Thus, it’s inevitable to focus on keywords. Try to put yourself in your potential customers’ shoes who search on Google. Target keywords or sentences associated and produce content related to those keywords. Moreover, take into account the search volume of your geographic area. This could help you know how many times a sentence is searched per month.
Using social media to share your website or blog’s content and promote your customer reviews will also be useful to improve your SEO. Google will evaluate your presence on these social platforms. Highlighting your customers’ opinions is an excellent way for you to gain Internet users’ trust, but also guarantee the quality of your services. Therefore, keep in mind that your average rating is not enough to appear at the top of organic results. You should also take into consideration several criteria such as the quantity of reviews, their publication date as well as the quality of your answers.
Use Google My Business
Having a Google My Business profile is essential if you want to increase your visibility on Google, boost your property’s SEO and work on your brand image. This is why it’s important to check the consistency of the information provided on Google My Business account. Make sure of the accuracy of your property’s name, its geographical location area, prices, contacts, the link to your website, services offered (free wifi, access for people with reduced mobility, vegetarian menu, valet service, pets friendly. ) make sure to include your property’s photos, which have to be classified by specific albums. Moreover, don’t forget to add your property’s description with the maximum number of relevant keywords in order to encourage potential customers to click on the call-to-action button “Visit the website”, “Call” or “Book now”. To increase your visibility, you can also create posts on Google My Business to inform travelers about various events, promotions, packages and activities related to your property and of course, respond to reviews left by customers whether they are positive or negative.
In conclusion, having a strong SEO or natural referencing strategy is beneficial for any property wishing to improve its visibility on search engines. Furthermore, having good SEO practices will also increase traffic to your website and will sometimes convert it into direct bookings.