Local SEO for Hotels: The Key to Gaining More Local Customers

With cut-throat competition, it’s really difficult for a hotel to sustain it for the long term. Meanwhile, local search engine optimization (SEO) paves the way for hotels to boost search engine visibility, discover more guests, increase booking, and earn huge revenue. According to recent stats, 75% of users book hotels online by accessing the websites. It reflects the importance of local SEO for hotels.

Well, local SEO involves the actual process of optimizing the online presence of hotels. It includes different techniques and strategies that focus on increasing the direct bookings of hotels by making it convenient for potential guests to discover and book more rooms through Google and other major search engines.

So, you are desperate to know the best way of performing local SEO for hotels, right? Well, we will discuss here everything you need to be familiar with local search engine optimization, right from knowing several important factors that impact local search rankings to implementing a local SEO strategy for your hotel.

What is Local SEO and Why Does it Matter for Hotels?

As we already discussed, local SEO includes the activity of optimizing your hotel website to improve its online visibility to rank high in Google search results. This process is important for many hotels since several travelers look for accommodation near the destination they visit.

When you optimize your hotel website properly, it gives your local business a wonderful chance to pop up in their local search results. These make it convenient for users to spot you. You need to understand that Google considers several important factors for determining the Google search results to reflect. These include relevance, distance, prominence, and more.

Local SEO matters a lot for several reasons that are as follows;

One of the major benefits of local SEO for hotels is it maximizes appearance of your hotel in local searches. When you optimize for local SEO properly, it ensures your hotel is visible in Google maps, Google’s Local Pack, and organic search results.
Once your website ranks high in search results, it boosts your hotel’s appearance in SERP. It yields increased direct bookings rather than depending on third-party platforms.
You can optimize your Google Business Profile properly to reflect various details about hotels. These details include location, direction, reviews, ratings, images, amenities, special offers, and more.
Local SEO also includes the activity to manage customer reviews. It also influences your potential guests as well. Higher reviews and ratings are important to enhance trust and bookings.
Local SEO increases organic traffic to your hotel website, which minimizes dependence on third-party commissions.
When you compare local SEO with other forms of marketing, it’s indeed cost-effective in the long run. It’s also useful to increase traffic and bookings with an improved ROI.

Tips for Local SEO for Hotels

So, after going through the importance of the benefits of local search engine optimization for hotels, you may now be seeking to explore the way to do it effectively. You can gain an impressive search engine result only when you do it properly.

Make your Website Mobile-Friendly

Before you indulge yourself in local search engine optimization, you need to ensure that your hotel website is mobile-friendly. As per the recent data, 61% of smartphone users get in touch only with local businesses, especially when they have a mobile-optimized website.

You can leverage various tools to check whether your hotel website is mobile-friendly or not. Some of the popular tools are as follows;

PageSpeed Insights
Mobile SERP Test
Google Search Console
Chrome DevTools

You can pick any of the above tools to check the mobile-friendliness of your hotel website. All you need to do is enter the URL of your website, push the button, and then the search engine results will be displayed.

Do Keyword Research Effectively

Keywords are one of the most important things that ensure the success of local SEO by driving more targeted traffic from local searches. So, you need to focus on keyword research extensively to attract local traffic to your website.

Once you identify and also target several specific keywords that many potential guests use, you need to ensure your hotel appears in search engine result pages. While performing keyword research, you can implement the following practices;

You should always find local keywords. It’s necessary to leverage tools including SEMrush, Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, and more related to the services and location of your hotel.
The next thing you can do is to overview search intent. You need to be familiar with what potential guests look for when they use these keywords.
Competitor analysis is highly important. You need to ensure which keywords your competitors rank for and also find out several gaps to gain a competitive edge over them.

Tools and Techniques for Keyword Research

To find the right keywords, you can leverage various tools as well. Following are these tools that will make your task convenient and less time-consuming.

Local keyword generators
Google Trends
Content gap analysis tools

Optimize your GMB Listing

Any local SEO strategy is incomplete without a perfectly optimized GMB. It’s indeed highly important for the local search appearance of your business. When any potential guests search for any hotels in your location, a perfectly-optimized Google business listing gives you a surety that your hotel appears in Google Maps and local searches.

You can consider the following important practices to optimize your Google business profile listing properly. Take a look;

You need to first claim the Google business profile listing of your hotels and complete the verification process successfully.
Fill out the necessary details by maintaining a higher accuracy. These details include business name, address, website URL, contact details, and more.
Select the appropriate business category. For instance ‘Boutique Hotel’.
Display your important features and amenities like a swimming pool, Wi-Fi, free breakfast, and more.
Never forget to upload images and videos of your hotels, local attractions, facilities, and more.
Be it events, regular posts, special events, or news, you need to upload recent and top-quality images.

Technical Optimize

In search engine optimization, website optimization is necessary. In local SEO, you need to perform technical optimization of your business. You need to keep in mind that any incorrect or misinformation tends to lead to fewer conversions.

Therefore, when you optimize your business card, you need to check the following vital information;

Name of your business
Contact details
Opening hours
Correctness of any location
Opening date
Links to the website
Attributes

Do On-Page Optimization

If you are already aware of search engine optimization, you can find that several typical SEO best practices apply here. For instance, you need to be highly focused on using keywords in the right way. It’s advisable to use keywords in H1 tag, Title tag, URL, and more. The most important thing you need to do is to use short URLs.

Apart from this, you need to do several other important things to do SEO for hotels in the most effective way. Make sure you do the following things properly;

Optimize the homepage of your hotel across your prime location. You need to display NPA details. It should be the footer on your website.
Make sure your NPA matches exactly or also close as closely as possible to what you submit to the local listing.
The next thing you need to do is to add to your website to boost search engine reading and thus represent your website page in search engine result pages.
You can utilize the structured data markup helper of Google to remove the entire mess of complex coding.

Off-Page SEO

Apart from on-page, off-page SEO also remains of great importance. It’s the right practice to emphasize creating top-quality editorial links. If you put the right effort into maximizing the number of top-quality backlinks, Google opens doors to produce an excessive amount of traffic to your website. For off-page SEO, you can consider the following most important practices;

The most important thing you can do is to promote your local resources that should be related to your location. You can do it in several ways such as creating blogs and articles based on guides. It’s a good idea to create top-quality content based on the actual needs of your target audience, including their wants, dislikes, likes, and desires.
The next important thing you can do is to start guest blogging which helps you create a backlink for your website. For this, you need to first approach local blogs that accept guest posts related to the hotel industry.

Redefine the Booking Process and User Journey

It’s necessary to understand various stages of the entire user journey in the hotel booking process to optimize the conversion of your website effectively. These stages include;

Awareness
Consideration
Decision
Booking

A smooth booking experience is necessary to increase conversion rates. Let’s understand several important elements to focus on: mobile optimization, user-friendly interface, fast loading times, and clear information.

You need to ensure that your website comes with easy navigation along with individual layout and clear menus.
Make sure you optimize your website for various mobile devices to accommodate many users who wish booking-on-the-go.
You need to enhance page load speed to minimize bounce rate and ensure a higher engagement of your potential guests.
It’s a good option to offer complete details related to amenities, room types, cancellation policies, pricing, and more.

Apart from this, you need to ensure the proper placement of CTAs with the right strategy through the booking funnel quite efficiently. You need to place CTAs thoroughly above the fold throughout the content, booking pages, etc.

Create Local Citation

Structured and unstructured are two important types of citations that are indeed highly important for your business. When it comes to structured citations, these consist of NPA details and also appear in a properly structured manner. Therefore, this consists of social profiles and business directories.

As far as unstructured citations, they are free from any structure of your business.

To create citations, you can approach the following reputed websites. So this will consist of business directories and social profiles.

Improve Page Loading Speed

Your website should have a fast loading speed that offers a perfect user experience and boosts the performance of your search engine optimization. If your website takes too much time to load, it frustrates visitors who often leave and thus leads to increased bounce rates and missed several booking opportunities.

Top Benefits of Quick Loading Speed

We will discuss here why the fast loading speed of websites matters. Let’s explore some of them;

It delivers an improved user experience. Since slow loading page speed is frustrating for many visitors and thus minimizes the overall interaction of your website.
A fast loading speed of your website is necessary to boost SEO performance. Google considers the overall speed of your website pages while determining their search engine rankings. A small delay has a great impact on both conversion rates and also user satisfaction.

To test the page loading speed of your website, you can leverage robust tools such as Google Analytics, Yandex Metrica, and many others.

How to Boost your Page Load Speed

You need to focus on many important areas when you optimize your page speed;

You need to optimize your images.
You should minimize HTTP requests.
You need to ensure browser caching.
You can use a content delivery network (CDN).

Create Backlinks

Backlinks are highly important when it comes to developing credibility and improving visibility in many geographic-specific searches. You need to create authority with the help of local backlinks signals for search engines that your hotel has a reputable source within its locale. It boosts your ranking in SERPs and organic traffic to your website.

How to Create High-Quality Backlinks

You can consider the following important strategies to create top-quality backlinks;

It’s advisable to collaborate properly with nearby tourism boards, restaurants, event organizers, etc. It helps you gain backlinks from their websites. It also improves community relationships as well.
Go for sponsorship of many local events. Apart from this, you can also participate in many community activities as well. These events include either dedicated pages of websites with a complete list of sponsors. It provides wonderful opportunities to generate backlinks.
The next important thing you can do is to write easy-to-read, informative, and highly engaging blogs for other websites in the same industry. It helps you leverage the advantages of guest blogging.
You can write press releases as well and distribute them to many local media outlets. Press releases result in creating backlinks from many news websites as well.
The next important thing you can do is to submit your hotel to many local business directories and also travel guides.

Implement AI and Voice Search

In today’s time, voice search technology witnessed an unprecedented rise in SEO strategies for hotels. It has grown quickly with the popularity of many smart devices such as Google Home, Amazon Echo, Siri, and more.

With the optimization of the online presence of hotels for voice searches, you can enhance its visibility on many voice-enabled devices. You can concentrate on several important areas;

It’s necessary to optimize your content properly to meet the conversational tone of many voice queries.
You should include many location-specific keywords to lure users to search for many nearby accommodations.

Improve User Experience with AI-Driven Solutions

You can implement the most effective AI apps in various ways. Let’s understand some of them in-depth.

You can provide fast customer support and can handle customer queries 24/7.
You should analyze guest preferences properly to offer tailored promotions and recommendations.
You should leverage data analysis for predicting various booking trends and also optimize many pricing strategies.

Guest Reviews

Review management is necessary to maintain a good and positive reputation. It’s pivotal in search performance as well. You need to focus on gaining guest reviews that impact the credibility of hotels and thus influence the overall decision of customers.

How to Gain More Guest Reviews

You can encourage your customers to leave reviews in various ways. Take into account the following important approaches;

You need to focus on providing outstanding services to impress your guests.
Get in touch with your guests and encourage them to leave reviews
Offer necessary deals and discounts to stay for a long time in exchange for reviews.

Once you gain customers’ reviews, you can place them on various social media channels, websites, etc. You can showcase positive feedback as testimonials, which boosts the credibility of your hotels. It also lures new guests.

Hire Top Local SEO Agency for Improved Results

It’s indeed quite essential to hire a local SEO agency that helps you achieve your core objectives by tantalizing nearby travelers and direct bookings. Let’s have a look at some other reasons why hiring a reputed local SEO agency can be a boon for your hotel business.

They have a group of experts who have proficiency in improving location-based keywords, optimizing GBP, managing online reviews, etc., to boost visibility in search results.
They have a good understanding of regional search trends and also completion, which ensures tailored strategies for higher impact.
A local SEO agency allows hotels to rank high in ‘near me’ searches, with mobile and voice searches increasing.

Wrap Up

Local SEO is one of the most reliable digital marketing tools to maximize visibility, popularity, booking, and revenue. So, you need to do it with the right strategies. One thing you should always keep in mind is that local SEO is an ongoing process. Therefore, you need to perform it continuously by implementing the latest industry practices.

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