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Hospitality SEO Best Practices For 2023 & Beyond

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Hospitality SEO Best Practices For 2023 & Beyond

While most Americans say they are comfortable traveling again, cost and inflation have now replaced COVID-19 concerns as top barriers to travel.

But the travel and tourism industry still continues to be highly competitive, with people starting to travel again, and hotels and chains vying for business against online travel agencies (OTAs) and booking sites.

Although the pandemic has eased up and travel is on the rise, consumer behavior has undergone a dramatic change.

Therefore, hotel brands must evolve their SEO strategies to drive incremental bookings, traffic, and revenue to attract travelers in the present and future by following the latest strategies, trends, and tactics – and employing the right tools in 2023 and beyond.

Prioritize Destinations Through Data

If you want to ensure you’re focusing your optimization efforts on locations that people are looking to travel to, look no further than Destination Insights with Google.

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This handy tool gives you insights into the latest travel trends across the U.S. or internationally. You can also compare trends and focus on increasing your visibility for specific destinations.

Screenshot from Hotel Insights By Google, March 2023

For example, Las Vegas was the top destination in the U.S. from 12/23/22 to 03/12/23.

If I were working with a hotel like the Bellagio, I would make sure I am ranking on the first page for Las Vegas hotels, the brand, brand + geo keywords, restaurants, precautions, and other associated keywords.

Another great tool to provide insights for your SEO strategy is Hotel Insights by Google. It gives you data on who is searching to stay in your area, in addition to tools and tips to make your business stand out from the competition.

The data below is from Nevada, where consumers looking to book travel are up 10% to 25%, year over year (YOY).

Nevada insightsScreenshot from Hotel Insights By Google, March 2023

 

If you are a travel brand with locations in the Nevada area, this is a good insight to help you focus on destination pages.

Review existing content and your striking distance keywords for opportunities to build out or repurpose content with things to do nearby and events in the area. Also, make sure your local search is optimized.

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Another excellent feature of this tool is that you can see if users are searching for this information from the U.S. or overseas. This could help you plan out your content strategy and PPC campaigns to target international travelers and reach even more potential guests.

Visitors from home and away insightsScreenshot from Hotel Insights By Google, March 2023

 

Satisfy Travelers’ Needs With A Brand Concierge Strategy

To satisfy travelers’ information needs and demonstrate Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E.E.A.T), brands should always provide high-quality, useful content.

When travelers consider booking a trip, they have various considerations, such as whether the destination appeals to them, nearby attractions, restaurant options, and dietary restrictions.

Many travelers conduct research months in advance, often relying on search engines for travel inspiration.

Hotels need to have an SEO brand concierge strategy to engage travelers throughout their user journey, as 95% of users from a Google/Bain survey continue to visit travel-related sites after booking.

Such a strategy should include a holistic content approach and a deep understanding of guest profiles, such as generational segments like Millennials and Boomers, and interest-based segments like adventurers and foodies.

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For effective communication with individual travelers, hotels must provide content that is relevant to their interests and placed above the specific hotel destination – as well as within.

To rank well for search queries such as “foodie destinations” or “dining experiences around the world,” for example, a hotel brand’s website should have content that showcases the types of experiences that exemplify the purpose of a concierge.

This content should not only be about what the hotel offers but also cater to the specific needs of individual travelers.

For instance, recommending only the restaurant in the lobby may not be sufficient to satisfy a traveler’s needs. Brands must provide recommendations for external restaurants, what time the restaurants close, things to do in the hotel’s surrounding area, tourist attractions, the best travel routes, etc.

A brand concierge strategy requires completely rethinking hotel brand websites and their role in connecting with travelers through persona identification, journey mapping, and content.

It involves a comprehensive understanding of search, the connections between topics, and the intent stages of the queries made throughout the traveler’s journey.

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Optimize Your GBP And Local Listings

By optimizing your Google Business Profile (GBP), your hotel listings can show up in the Map Pack in addition to being listed in the regular organic listings on the page for geo-modified keywords.

This can drive incremental revenue, bookings, and organic traffic.

Fully optimized listings help prioritize your business to ensure your hotel listings are at the top of local searches and provide a consistent customer experience to drive bookings and retention.

Here are my top tips to do just that:

  • Optimize your listings across key search engine directories. Create Google Posts and optimize photos, so travelers can see the hotel.
  • Manage and respond to reviews. Local reviews are considered the most useful content potential guests leverage when making their decisions. Respond to reviews to show you value your customers and the feedback they leave about your business. This is crucial because Google rewards businesses that respond to their reviews with higher rankings.
  • Respond to Q&A and create an FAQ section so your hotel brand will be able to control the conversation about your business.
  • Ensure your Google Maps pin is in the correct location so users can find your hotel.
  • Show nice photos and videos of the hotel, rooms, and amenities like the restaurant(s).
  • Use attributes to differentiate your location and provide additional details relevant to travelers about health and safety precautions, Wi-Fi, accessibility, etc.
  • Always keep the hotel, restaurant, spa, and other hours updated so the user knows when they will open and close.

Also, Google updated the new search view, and it is important to become familiarized with the new dashboard.  

Google will show you what you still need to do to complete your profile, whether that’s filling out details such as attributes, business description, website, phone number, address, etc.

Google Business Profile Screenshot from Google Business Profile, March 2023

 

Work With Your Social Media Team

Share content about the most popular destinations, travel tips, hotel offerings, events, and nearby attractions.

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This can help maximize visibility, build more brand exposure, and generate more links and buzz about your hotel, which can have a positive impact on your visibility, traffic, and revenue.

See Content Repurposing for Travel Brands: A Complete Guide for more tips and tricks to get the greatest mileage out of your content across platforms.

User Generated Content

User-generated content (UGC) such as reviews, photos, and videos can help travel brands improve their search engine rankings and attract more customers.

Encouraging customers to leave reviews and share their experiences on social media can help travel brands reach potential customers through the power of word-of-mouth marketing.

Video Marketing

Video marketing should also be an important part of your SEO strategy, as it’s an effective way for hotels to showcase their facilities and services to potential guests.

Videos can highlight amenities such as swimming pools, fitness centers, and restaurants, as well as show the rooms, views, and ambiance.

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By creating a visual experience for the viewer, hotels can capture the attention of potential guests and make them feel more connected to the property.

Video marketing can also help build trust with potential guests.

Videos can feature testimonials from past guests or employees, which can help to build credibility and trust in the brand. They can also showcase the hotel’s commitment to cleanliness and safety, which is especially important in the current environment.

Video marketing is more engaging than other types of content, so it’s no surprise that the format is popular with both brands and consumers. Videos can also be shared on social media, which can help to increase engagement and reach a wider audience.

Promoting videos can give hotel brands a competitive advantage in the market. By creating high-quality video content that showcases their property and services, hotels can differentiate themselves from competitors and attract more bookings.

Optimize For Core Web Vitals

In a competitive industry like travel and tourism, it’s important to optimize your site for Core Web Vitals (CWV).

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These three combined metrics are used to measure a website across a series of key performance indicators that became a ranking signal in May 2021. They include:

  • Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): How long it takes for the main part of a webpage to load.
  • First Input Delay (FID): How long it takes the webpage to become interactive.
  • Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): How much the webpage layout moves around when loading.

In order to improve on CWV, hotel sites should have clean code, use a CDN for heavy images, externalize JS and CSS, and be mobile-friendly and secure, etc.

There’s no penalty for not optimizing to CWVs, but it could be the factor to give you the boost that moves you past tough competitors.

Leverage FAQs And Be Ready For Voice

Your potential guests are asking questions, and your hotel brand should have the answers.

Place FAQs on your site to help current and future guests find the information they need, which can also help minimize calls to the hotel.

The FAQs should be marked up with structured data so they will show up in rich results and maximize organic search potential.

With consumers using voice search, your content must be optimized for voice search as well:

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[Hey Google, does the Hilton in  New York have a swimming pool?]

If your brand comes up as a response to a voice search query like this, it can help influence whether a user decides to book with your hotel.

Monitoring Competitor Visibility And Performance

The way consumers search for hotels has changed. That’s why it’s important to always monitor your competitors’ rankings and see:

  • What content they are building.
  • What market share they own.
  • What new SEO strategies they are trying.
  • How they are getting links.
  • And how fast their pages load, etc.

From there, figure out what tactics and strategies you can glean that may be worth testing out.

Sometimes brands do not like to add content to their sites because they don’t want to interfere with the user experience. But the odds are pretty good that your competitors are adding content.

And if you find one of your biggest competitors has added content to a key destination page, the content has FAQs, it is marked up with structured data, and they now rank on the first page for a key destination term – they’re potentially getting incremental bookings, improving brand awareness, etc.

That’s why it may be worth building out and promoting content to keep up with, and even outperform, the competition.

In Conclusion

With the pandemic easing up, people are starting to travel again, and the travel and tourism industry is once again on the upswing.

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For hotel brands, it’s crucial to have optimized Google Local listings, a concierge strategy, FAQs, and a website that’s optimized for Core Web Vitals. Beyond this, you must create useful and helpful content which – in conjunction with a sound SEO and PPC strategy – will put you in front of customers who are looking to book a trip.

If not, your competitors and OTAs will take away valuable search engine real estate and drive more incremental visibility and sales than your brand.

More resources:


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Content Pruning: Why It Works, and How to Do It

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Content Pruning: Why It Works, and How to Do It

Content pruning sounds pretty appealing: delete a ton of content and see your organic traffic improve. But pruning has risks (like deleting useful pages and useful backlinks), and benefits are not guaranteed: So how does pruning actually work? And when

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8 Free SEO Reporting Tools

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8 Free SEO Reporting Tools

There’s no shortage of SEO reporting tools to choose from—but what are the core tools you need to put together an SEO report?

In this article, I’ll share eight of my favorite SEO reporting tools to help you create a comprehensive SEO report for free.

Price: Free

Google Search Console, often called GSC, is one of the most widely used tools to track important SEO metrics from Google Search.

Most common reporting use case

GSC has a ton of data to dive into, but the main performance indicator SEOs look at first in GSC is Clicks on the main Overview dashboard.

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As the data is from Google, SEOs consider it to be a good barometer for tracking organic search performance. As well as clicks data, you can also track the following from the Performance report:

  • Total Impressions
  • Average CTR
  • Average Position
gsc-performance-overviewgsc-performance-overview

Tip

If you’ve signed up for AWT using Google Search Console, you can view your GSC performance data in Ahrefs by clicking “GSC Performance” from the main dashboard.

But for most SEO reporting, GSC clicks data is exported into a spreadsheet and turned into a chart to visualize year-over-year performance.

organic-traffic-graph-showing-clicks-year-over-yearorganic-traffic-graph-showing-clicks-year-over-year

Favorite feature

One of my favorite reports in GSC is the Indexing report. It’s useful for SEO reporting because you can share the indexed to non-indexed pages ratio in your SEO report.

google-search-console-indexed-pages-reportgoogle-search-console-indexed-pages-report

If the website has a lot of non-indexed pages, then it’s worth reviewing the pages to understand why they haven’t been indexed.

Price: Free

Google Looker Studio (GLS), previously known as Google Data Studio (GDS), is a free tool that helps visualize data in shareable dashboards.

Most common reporting use case

Dashboards are an important part of SEO reporting, and GLS allows you to get a total view of search performance from multiple sources through its integrations.

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Out of the box, GLS allows you to connect to many different data sources.

Such as:

  • Marketing products – Google Ads, Google Analytics, Display & Video 360, Search Ads 360
  • Consumer products – Google Sheets, YouTube, and Google Search Console
  • Databases – BigQuery, MySQL, and PostgreSQL
  • Social media platformsFacebook, Reddit, and Twitter
  • Files – CSV file upload and Google Cloud Storage

Sidenote.

If you don’t have the time to create your own report manually, Ahrefs has three Google Looker Studio connectors that can help you create automated SEO reporting for any website in a few clicks

google-looker-studio-partner-connectorsgoogle-looker-studio-partner-connectors

Here’s what a dashboard in GLS looks like:

ahrefs-seo-audit-dashboardahrefs-seo-audit-dashboard
Ahrefs Google Looker Studio integration

With this type of dashboard, you share reports that are easy to understand with clients or other stakeholders.

Favorite feature

The ability to blend and filter data from different sources, like GA and GSC, means you can get a customized overview of your total search performance, tailored to your website.

Price: Free for 500 URLs

Screaming Frog is a website crawler that helps you audit your website.

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Screaming Frog’s free version of its crawler is perfect if you want to run a quick audit on a bunch of URLs. The free version is limited to 500 URLs—making it ideal for crawling smaller websites.

screaming-frog-user-interface-screenshotscreaming-frog-user-interface-screenshot

Most common reporting use case

When it comes to reporting, the Reports menu in Screaming Frog SEO Spider has a wealth of information you can look over that covers all the technical aspects of your website, such as analyzing, redirects, canonicals, pagination, hreflang, structured data, and more.

Once you’ve crawled your site, it’s just a matter of downloading the reports you need and working out the main issues to summarize in your SEO report.

Favorite feature

Screaming Frog can pull in data from other tools, including Ahrefs, using APIs. 

If you already had access to a few SEO tools’ APIs, you could pull data from all of them directly into Screaming Frog. This is useful if you want to combine crawl data with performance data or other 3rd party tools.

screaming-frog-api-accessscreaming-frog-api-access

Even if you’ve never configured an API, connecting other tools to Screaming Frog is straightforward.

Price: Free

Ahrefs has a large selection of free SEO tools to help you at every stage of your SEO campaign, and many of these can be used to provide insights for your SEO reporting.

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when-to-use-ahrefs-free-tools-across-the-seo-process-illustrationwhen-to-use-ahrefs-free-tools-across-the-seo-process-illustration

For example, you could use our:

Most common reporting use case

One of our most popular free SEO tools is Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT), which you can use for your SEO reporting.

With AWT, you can:

  • Monitor your SEO health over time by setting up scheduled SEO audits
  • See the performance of your website
  • Check all known backlinks for your website
ahrefs-overviewahrefs-overview

Favorite feature

Of all the Ahrefs free tools, my favorite is AWT. Within it, site auditing is my favorite feature—once you’ve set it up, it’s a completely hands-free way to keep track of your website’s technical performance and monitor its health.

If you already have access to Google Search Console, it’s a no-brainer to set up a free AWT account and schedule a technical crawl of your website(s).

Price: Free

Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar is a free Chrome and Firefox extension useful for diagnosing on-page technical issues and performing quick spot checks on your website’s pages.

Most common reporting use case

For SEO reporting, it’s useful to run an on-page check on your website’s top pages to ensure there aren’t any serious on-page issues.

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ahrefs-seo-toolbar-overviewahrefs-seo-toolbar-overview

With the free version, you get the following features:

  • On-page SEO report
  • Redirect tracer with HTTP Headers
  • Outgoing links report with link highlighter and broken link checker
  • SERP positions
  • Country changer for SERP

The SEO toolbar is excellent for spot-checking issues with pages on your website. If you are not confident with inspecting the code, it can also give you valuable pointers on what elements you need to include on your pages to make them search-friendly.

If anything is wrong with the page, the toolbar highlights it, with red indicating a critical issue.

severity-highlight-ahrefs-seo-toolbarseverity-highlight-ahrefs-seo-toolbar

Favorite feature

The section I use the most frequently in the SEO toolbar is the Indexability tab. In this section, you can see whether the page can be crawled and indexed by Google.

indexability-tab-ahrefs-seo-toolbarindexability-tab-ahrefs-seo-toolbar

Although you can do this by inspecting the code manually, using the toolbar is much faster.

Price: Free

Like GSC, Google Analytics is another tool you can use to track the performance of your website, tracking sessions and conversions and much more on your website.

google-analytics-screenshotgoogle-analytics-screenshot

Most common reporting use case

GA gives you a total view of website traffic from several different sources, such as direct, social, organic, paid traffic, and more.

Favorite feature

You can create and track up to 300 events and 30 conversions with GA4. Previously, with universal analytics, you could only track 20 conversions. This makes conversion and event tracking easier within GA4.

Price: Free

Google Slides is Google’s version of Microsoft PowerPoint. If you don’t have a dashboard set up to report on your SEO performance, the next best thing is to assemble a slide deck.

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Many SEO agencies present their report through dashboard insights and PowerPoint presentations. However, if you don’t have access to PowerPoint, then Google Slides is an excellent (free) alternative.

google-slides-screenshotgoogle-slides-screenshot

Most common reporting use cases

The most common use of Google Slides is to create a monthly SEO report. If you don’t know what to include in a monthly report, use our SEO report template.

Favorite feature

One of my favorite features is the ability to share your presentation on a video chat directly from Google Slides. You can do this by clicking the camera icon in the top right.

share-video-chat-google-slidesshare-video-chat-google-slides

This is useful if you are working with remote clients and makes sharing your reports easy.

Price: Free

Google Trends allows you to view a keyword’s popularity over time in any country. The data shown is the relative popularity ratio scaled from 0-100, not the direct volume of search queries.

Most common reporting use cases

Google Trends is useful for showing how the popularity of certain searches can increase or decrease over time. If you work with a website that often has trending products, services, or news, it can be useful to illustrate this visually in your SEO report.

Google Trends makes it easy to spot seasonal trends for product categories. For example, people want to buy BBQs when the weather is sunny.

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Using Google Trends, we can see that peak demand for BBQs usually happens in June-July every year.

bbq-google-trends-graphbbq-google-trends-graph

Using this data across the last five years, we could be fairly sure when the BBQ season would start and end.

Favorite feature

Comparing two or more search terms against each other over time is one of my favorite uses of Google Trends, as it can be used to tell its own story.

google-trends-comparison-examplegoogle-trends-comparison-example

Embellishing your report with trends data allows you to gain further insights into market trends.

You can even dig into trends at a regional level if you need to.

regional-trends-via-google-trendsregional-trends-via-google-trends

Final thoughts

These free tools will help you put together the foundations for a well-rounded SEO report.

The tools you use for SEO reporting don’t always have to be expensive—even large companies use many of the free tools mentioned to create insights for their client’s SEO reports.

Got more questions? Ping me on X 🙂

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Study Reveals Potential Disruption For Brands & SEO

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Study Reveals Potential Disruption For Brands & SEO

A new study by Authoritas suggests that Google’s AI-powered Search Generative Experience (SGE), currently being tested with a limited group of users, could adversely impact brand visibility and organic search traffic.

These findings include:

  • When an SGE box is expanded, the top organic result drops by over 1,200 pixels on average, significantly reducing visibility.
  • 62% of SGE links come from domains outside the top 10 organic results.
  • Ecommerce, electronics, and fashion-related searches saw the greatest disruption, though all verticals were somewhat impacted.

Adapting to generative search may require a shift in SEO strategies, focusing more on long-form content, expert insights, and multimedia formats.

As Google continues to invest in AI-powered search, the Authoritas study provides an early look at the potential challenges and opportunities ahead.

High Penetration Rate & Industry-Wide Effects

The study analyzed 2,900 brand and product-related keywords across 15 industry verticals and found that Google displays SGE results for 91.4% of all search queries.

The prevalence of SGE results indicates they impact a majority of websites across various industries.

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The research analyzed the typical composition of SGE results. On average, each SGE element contained between 10-11 links sourced from an average of four different domains.

This indicates brands may need to earn multiple links and listings within these AI-curated results to maintain visibility and traffic.

The research also suggests that larger, well-established websites like Quora and Reddit will likely perform better in SGE results than smaller websites and lesser-known brands.

Shifting Dynamics In Organic Search Results

With SGE results occupying the entire first page, websites that currently hold the top positions may experience a significant decrease in traffic and click-through rates.

When a user clicks to expand the SGE element, the study found that, on average, the #1 ranked organic result drops a sizeable 1,255 pixels down the page.

Even if a website ranks number one in organic search, it may effectively be pushed down to the second page due to the prominence of SGE results.

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New Competition From Unexpected Sources

The study revealed that SGE frequently surfaces links and content from websites that didn’t appear in the top organic rankings.

On average, only 20.1% of SGE links exactly matched a URL from the first page of Google search results.

An additional 17.9% of SGE links were from the same domains as page one results but linked to different pages. The remaining 62% of SGE links came from sources outside the top organic results.

Challenges For Brand Term Optimization & Local Search

The study reveals that SGE results for branded terms may include competitors’ websites alongside the brand’s own site, potentially leading to increased competition for brand visibility.

Laurence O’Toole, CEO and founder of Authoritas, states:

“Brands are not immune. These new types of generative results introduce more opportunities for third-party sites and even competitors to rank for your brand terms and related brand and product terms that you care about.”

Additionally, local businesses may face similar challenges, as SGE results could feature competing local brands even when users search for a specific brand in a regional context.

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Methodology & Limitations

To arrive at these insights, Authoritas analyzed a robust dataset of 2,900 search keywords across a spectrum of query types, including specific brand names, brand + generic terms, brand + product names, generic terms, and specific product names. The keywords were distributed across 15 industry verticals.

The study utilized a consistent desktop browser viewport to quantify pixel-based changes in the search results. Authoritas also developed proprietary “alignment scores” to measure the degree of overlap between traditional organic search results and the new SGE links.

While acknowledging some limitations, such as the keyword set needing to be fully representative of each vertical and the still-evolving nature of SGE, Authoritas maintains that the insights hold value in preparing brands for the new realities of an AI-powered search ecosystem.

Why We Care

The findings of the Authoritas study have implications for businesses, marketers, and SEO professionals. As Google’s SGE becomes more prevalent, it could disrupt traditional organic search rankings and traffic patterns.

Brands that have invested heavily in SEO and have achieved top rankings for key terms may find their visibility and click-through rates diminished by the prominence of SGE results.

SGE introduces new competition from unexpected sources, as most SGE links come from domains outside the top 10 organic results. This means businesses may need to compete not only with their traditional rivals but also with a broader range of websites that gain visibility through SGE.

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As Google is a primary source of traffic and leads for many businesses, any changes to its search results can impact visibility, brand awareness, and revenue.

How This Could Help You

While the rise of SGE presents challenges, it also offers opportunities.

Taking into account what we’ve learned from the Authoritas study, here are some actionable takeaways:

  • As SGE favors in-depth, informative content, businesses may benefit from investing in comprehensive, well-researched articles and guides that provide value to users.
  • Incorporating expert quotes, interviews, and authoritative sources within your content could increase the likelihood of being featured in SGE results.
  • Enriching your content with images, videos, and other multimedia elements may help capture the attention of both users and the SGE algorithm.
  • Building a strong brand presence across multiple channels, including social media, industry forums, and relevant websites, can increase your chances of appearing in SGE.
  • Creating a trustworthy brand and managing your online reputation will be crucial, as SGE may feature competitors alongside your website.

Looking Ahead

While the long-term impact of SGE will depend on user adoption and the perceived usefulness of results, this study’s findings serve as a valuable starting point for businesses and SEO professionals.

By proactively addressing the challenges and opportunities SGE presents, you can increase your chances of success in the new search environment.


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