5 Things You Can Do Right Now to Ensure Travellers Find Your Hotel Website

People trying to run their own digital marketing initiatives often get tunnel vision. Perhaps they’re overly focused on trying to create a great keyword profile for SEO purposes, but forget to create effective calls to action to capitalise on their added traffic from said SEO. In other situations, maybe they are overly focused on social media interactions, which is great, but there are many people who may be interested in a hotel, that don’t factor social media at all into their decisions.

Because of these factors, raising your hotel website’s visibility means having a well-rounded digital marketing plan. The stakes are also pretty high in this regard. More and more people, especially millennials, are favouring OTAs over direct booking. In order to make sure you are getting the most profit possible from each guest, you need to put your site—and the benefits of your hotel—front and centre. Here are some things you can do to make that happen.

1. Utilise Google My Business

Having a proper Google My Business profile is a great way to start your hotel visibility efforts because it does a lot of different things for your business at the same time. It will help you rank in Google searches, especially local ones, but it also gives you a chance to control what people see if they search for your hotel directly. This means that all your marketing efforts, digital or otherwise, will benefit from having a full Google My Business profile ready. On top of this, putting together a Google My Business profile will also give you a Google Maps listing, increasing your presence further.

Technically, you could get away with just putting the name of your business and address if you just wanted the Google Maps listing, but there’s so much more you can do with this profile. For example, Google My Business has spaces for you to put business hours, images, links to your website and even curate reviews. A good Google My Business profile isn’t just helpful for your customers, it also shows them you have an active digital presence.

2. Getting an SEO Audit Done

Everyone has their own ideas on what makes for effective SEO, but what is actually effective can change over time based on search trends and Google’s own algorithms. This is why an SEO audit is so important at the start of your digital marketing plans. These are effective for helping find areas of weakness in your current SEO strategies, as well as making sure that your keywords are actually putting your site in front of the customers most likely to directly book with you.

3. Creating a Formal Content Calendar

At this point, it’s well known that content marketing doesn’t really work if you don’t have quality content to show to your audience, whether this is blogs, videos, or whatever medium you choose. What sometimes gets neglected about this is the fact that you also need to keep up a steady pace of content. The reason for this is twofold. First, if you put out content at a certain pace, it creates an expectation with your readers that you now should live up to. Second, this can indirectly impact quality. If you are in charge of creating content and you need to rush here and there to try and create an idea for a blog post, it may show in the work.

As a result, to make sure that you’re putting out the content that’s worthy of shares and backlinks that will increase your visibility, a calendar is an invaluable asset. It can be as simple as getting your team together at the beginning of a month and brainstorming ideas. The key is that you have a pool of topics and a schedule you’re going to use to put them out.

4. Turning Your Social Media Into a Conversion Vehicle

Social media platforms like Instagram and Pinterest, along with the standard Facebook and Twitter, are great for the hospitality industry, as there’s generally a steady stream of great visual content you can put out there to get responses and shares. However, you want to make sure that you’re promoting your website through these channels as well, as these are what will ultimately get you direct bookings. Along with the image post, consider mentioning your loyalty program for direct bookings, or holding a contest of sorts. Many business owners aren’t using social media the way they should.

5. Have Some Form of Data Tracking Ready

This last example may be cheating a bit, as technically, using some form of tracking won’t necessarily make your hotel website more visible, at least, not by itself. Indirectly, though, it’s probably one of the most important things you should do. The reason for this is similar to getting an SEO audit done. A lot of the time, you may implement an idea because you think it will work, not because you know it will work.

Using tracking will fill the gap here, and give you a concrete understanding of exactly what you should be looking for. There are a few ways you can do this. For starters, you may want to use something simple and free like Google Search Console to get a basic idea of how your initiatives are performing. Other paid options, like Ahrefs, can track your SEO presence and even compare it to your competitors.

As you can see, getting traffic to your website, and the all-essential direct bookings that come with that traffic is all about using all the channels at your disposal for both outreach and optimisation. This can be a difficult balancing act for a lot of professionals though, as you’re both running a hotel and trying to do outreach. One of your best options here to both draw more people to your website as well as get more conversions when they get there, is bringing on outside digital marketing help. Blue Beetle is your premier option for those in hospitality industries that need this type of help. We can help you figure out areas of weakness for your current website so more potential customers will be able to find it.