SEO Tips to Increase Your Online Bookings

 

 

Search Engine Optimization is a cornerstone of most digital marketing success stories, yet it’s often presented as this sort of vague concept. In fact, a lot of the time, you’ll hear tidbits of SEO advice that sound something like…

“Focus on your target keywords”

“You need to write good meta descriptions”

“Don’t forget to interlink to other pages on your website”

And while all of those bits of advice are logical and actionable on-page SEO tasks that you should be doing anyway, they are only a few of the pieces in a much larger puzzle. In order to get the most out of your SEO strategy, you need to determine what your end goal is.

• Are you trying to raise brand awareness?
• Marketing a new product?
• Maybe you are just wanting to increase engagement with your contact form?

For the purpose of this blog post, we want to pinpoint a few of the lesser known but highly effective ways that we can increase the speed at which a website visitor on a hotel website goes from being just a visitor to becoming a room booking customer.

The tactics that we are presenting here are not just about climbing the search engine rankings; they’re about strategically positioning your website to convert curious visitors into confirmed bookings. From leveraging schema markup to optimizing for Google’s featured snippets, these techniques are designed to enhance your website’s visibility and increase your online bookings.

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Leverage Schema Markup for Rich Snippets

Schema markup is a powerful but often underutilized tool that everyone has available to them. Schema markup is a form of microdata that you can add to your website to create enhanced page descriptions (known as rich snippets) that appear in search results. Doing so is also referred to as creating structured data.

Rich snippets can help drive more clicks to your pages.

You can use schema to highlight events, give more in-depth reservation information, or even drive more online bookings. If you know your ideal customer and all the important information you want front and center, adding schema markup to pages is not terribly difficult to achieve.

To get started, visit the Google Structured Data Markup Helper and follow the prompts on the page.

 

Optimize for Featured Snippets

Featured snippets appear at the very top of Google search results. Who doesn’t want to have their content listed on the first page of the Google SERPs for a relevant search? That is the ultimate goal of organic SEO.

Featured snippets are not something that you can simply add to your website in the same way you can with rich snippets. In order to have featured snippets, you must earn them.

Featured snippets are awarded by Google to pages that feature direct and concise answers to search queries

While you cannot directly affect featured snippets, there are a few things that you can do to optimize your pages for them.

For starters, you always want to try to provide clear, concise answers to common questions early on in your content. Also, try to include bullet points, numbered lists, and tables where appropriate, as Google often pulls these formats into featured snippets as well as they are already structured to be easily consumable by the average reader.

 

Improve User Engagement Metrics

Google’s algorithm considers user engagement metrics like exit rate and time on site as indicators of your website’s expertise regarding your subject matter.

Improving user engagement looks differently from one business to the next, but it always starts with collecting some preliminary data regarding what your website visitors are currently engaging with on your site and which pieces of content they skim over quickly.

Once you know what content your users engage with the most, the better you can tailor future content and offerings to them in the future.

However, the most common task that most businesses will undertake in this effort is to improve the overall quality of their content. This generally takes the form of creating long-form pillar content, revising past blog posts or putting together some sort of free offering such as a newsletter.

Aside from optimizing written content or marketing it more, some other strategies might include incorporating videos, interactive tools, or engaging visuals to significantly increase the time visitors spend on your site.

 

Utilize Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) Keywords

Latent Semantic Indexing, or LSI keywords, are terms and phrases that are related to your primary keyword(s).

Let’s say that you want to create a piece of content about a new salon service offered by your hotel as part of an exclusive members package. You decide that after some preliminary keyword research that your primary keyphrase should be “hotel booking”.

But what if you didn’t just stop your keyword research there? With your primary keyphrase in mind, it’s time to dig a little deeper.

LSI keywords help search engines understand the context of your content, improving its relevancy and, therefore, its position in search results.

Now, there are various ways to go about this but the end goal is the exact same… you want to find other words and phrases that are somehow related to your main keyword. For instance, if you were looking for LSI keywords for “hotel booking”, you might consider also using “hotel packages”, “booking a room”, or “hotel room rates”.

This is just an example, of course. Following this strategy still requires you to research your LSI keywords before implementing them. You want to be sure that these are keywords and phrases that will help you rank well and drive more traffic to a specific page.

Optimize for Image Search

Images from your website can drive traffic through Google’s image search. More than you might realize.

If you are looking to increase the number of hotel room bookings you are receiving online, you may want to consider optimizing your images. All images that are on your website should feature descriptive keyword-rich file names, titles and alt tags.

This is even more important for images on your booking or reservation pages.

Simply optimizing images actually works really well for hotels, restaurants and other hospitality-focused businesses. The reason for this is that there are two things that your potential guests will almost always do when deciding on the hotel they will stay at; they read online reviews and they look through images of local hotels.

Here’s an example:

You have a hotel in Downtown Houston. A potential guest is getting ready to visit Houston next week. They know that they want to book a room that’s a bit more luxurious and preferably located in Downtown Houston, specifically.

So, like any other person who has a smartphone, they perform a Google search for “luxury hotels in downtown Houston”. And like most people, they start by just looking at pictures of hotels in the area via the Google Images tab to get an initial idea of their options.

Here’s the thing… Google is going to populate that section with images that contain that phrase or LSI keywords, first. This is why it is important that you include relevant keywords on images across your website.

In the above example, if you had images on your bookings page and they were properly tagged with keywords, you might just gain a new guest if they click-through your image and land directly on your booking page.