SEO Process or Purpose Driven Website Content Marketing

Competition identification and analysis is a must for hotel website content marketing plan. If you want your hotels website to appear in front of buyers looking for a hotel in your market, then you must do a thorough analysis of your competition and the online environment. In the hotel search engine marketing arena, your competition may not be the same group of hotels you list in your competitive set of hotels for your STR report. More often than not, your competitors are going to be the large well funded hotel marketing campaign strategies of the OTA’s like hotels.com, Expedia, Priceline and others. It is impossible for even a well funded hotel to spend resources both in man hours and cash to match these big players for hotel guests dollars. That is why to be successful you must consider the changes in SEO over the years. It is not longer just about title tags, descriptions and other programming tactics that get your hotels website in front of consumers, but well optimized content that answers consumers questions about hotels in your market and location. (Of course Google even tells you to do the basics very well using HTML and responsive design.) So you must do your research to be competitive and to get any kind of meaningful return on your Hotels online marketing strategy.

Hotel Internet Marketing Competitive Analysis

Hotel internet marketing made simple. If you have your mind made up and want to start your on competitive analysis of your hotel online presence, go to Google and type in the name of your city and the word hotel. You will see for yourself who is taking business from you and who, I mean which hotel has a competitive advantage over your hotel.

Keyword Research for your Hotels Website

Not to far in the past identifying the correct keyword/keyword phrases for a site is critical to the success of a site. Wow! things have changed. Google is limiting the keywords that are available in Google Analytics by not identifying keywords that searchers use. Users that are logged in searches are not displayed any longer. You can still do keyword research by using Google Adwords keyword tool.

Ultimately, keywords/keyword phrase must be chosen by it’s relevance to the hotel, its demand generators and competitors. Historically and quite amazingly there are quite a lot of theories about how to choose keywords. Here is one that we have used in the past. This combined with choosing keywords/keywords phrases that have a high KEI (keyword effectiveness index) were industry best practices. KEI is determined by taking the number of search queries in the past thirty days squaring that number and then dividing the results by the number of pages competing for that keyword/keyword phrase. For example a keyword with 300 searches per month with over 1,000,000 pages indexed in a search engine would have a low KEI and not be a good keyword to target according to the theory. But if you generate thousands of dollars in online revenue from a keyword with a low KEI, would it not make sense to target the low KEI keyword? You will never really know until you test it. Right?

Hotel Website SEO and Relevant Content 

Effective Hotel SEO today all about relevant content. The most effective tactic for developing your hotels website traffic and driving your hotels online revenue through an independent hotel website is to develop great content. Done correctly Google and the other search engines will reward your hotels website with a favorable placement in the SERPs. Develop pages around the demand generators in your market. Crafted quality and SEO optimized content and you will not go wrong.

Hotel SEO and Link Building

Links pointing to your hotels website is a strong if not the strongest ranking factor in Googles algorithm. Developing links on a national and local level is critical to your hotels website online success. That is if they are relevant! A link from a local site in the Travel/Hospitality industry is an effective link that will contribute to your hotels website online success.