SEO Guide For Hotel and Restaurants Owners

SEO Guide For Hotel and Restaurants Owners. Do you want to grow your hotel and restaurant business online? Are you looking to drive more sales, revenue, and conversion for your hotel business with the help of the internet?

 

If your answer to the above question is yes, then we have got you covered. In this blog post, we’ll be talking about how you can take your hotel and restaurant business to the next level by leveraging SEO. 

 

So, the following are the topics that you’ll discover in this blog post:

 

1. What is SEO and why you should care about it?
2. Keyword research in SEO.
3. On-page and off-page SEO.
4. Content marketing and link building.
5. Technical SEO.
6. How to track SEO results and so on.

 

So, without wasting any more time, let’s dive deep into these topics and get things moving.

 

1. What is SEO and why you should care about it?

 

SEO or search engine optimization is the process of improving the website’s ranking and organic traffic from search engines like Google.

 

It is a type of digital marketing strategy that focuses on creating the best-optimized website for users and search engines. 

 

The main purpose of doing SEO is that it helps in traffic, leads, and eventually the more revenue for your company. 

 

SEO Guide For Hotel and Restaurants: Why should you focus on SEO?

 

Lots and lots of people search online. In fact, on search engines like Google, billions of searches take place every day. This means by ranking on top of Google, you can drive a lot of organic traffic to your website. 

 

For example;

 

If you sell cars, would you prefer to showcase a billboard ad, or would you like to rank for keywords like buy cars online, cheap cars to buy, and so on? We feel you would prefer the second option as it has commercial intent associated with it. 

 

On Google, people are not only searching for things that are associated with your business, but also things that are closely associated with your business. In the case of hotels and restaurants. 

 

People could search for the following;

 

1. Best hotels in Chicago.
2. Best restaurants in Chicago.
3. Cheap hotels in Chicago and so on.

 

So, if your hotel or restaurant is located in Chicago, then you can target these keywords in your SEO strategy and improve your rankings. 

 

SEO Guide For Hotel and Restaurants: What drives traffic from search engines?

 

First things first, you need to know that Google is the number 1 search engine in the world. It has to have over 90% of the market share in the search engine industry. This clearly shows that Google will be responsible for driving most of the traffic to your website. 

 

However, the percentage of traffic may vary from one niche to another. It usually depends on the number of search volumes associated with the particular keywords. By targeting and placing the right keywords, you can actually skyrocket your traffic to the next level.

 

We will discuss more about that later in this guide. Until then, you need to understand that Google has changed a lot in recent past years. The SERP listings that appear in 2021 are completely different from the listings that appeared in the early 2000s.

 

Today, SERP comprises featured snippets, local listings, Google Ads, people also ask section, Google’s knowledge graph, and much more. Also, ranking on Google is getting difficult day after day. 

 

But you don’t need to worry about that as we have got you covered.

 

So, if you are wondering what works? And, how does Google determine which pages to return in response to what people search for? How do you get all of this valuable traffic to your site?

 

Then here are the answers to the above three questions:

• Google is always looking for content and web pages with quality, and a lot of information that satisfies the user’s query.

 

• Google determines which pages to rank on top with the help of crawling, indexing, and search engine algorithm. 

 

• Apart from this, Google also considered the speed of a website and security as a ranking single. If your site is secured by an SSL certificate and loads under 3 seconds, it might get good rankings on Google. 

 

• Additionally, backlinks are also one of the most important ranking factors. According to research done by Spark in 2019, backlinks were the topmost factor that determined the ranking of a web page.

 

Sounds too difficult, right? 

 

But the good thing is ranking on Google is not that difficult. Yes, with the right effort, hard work, and dedication, you can surely rank any website on Google. We have seen this. 

 

And if you follow the tips, tricks, and advice mentioned in this guide, you’ll also be able to rank your hotel or restaurant website for any keyword. 

 

2. Keyword research in SEO

 

Now here comes the most important part of SEO which is keywords. The first step in SEO you need to do is determine which keywords you are trying to optimize your site for.

 

This means you need to hunt for the keywords that your targeted audience might be looking for on Google.

 

With the hotels and restaurants industry, the following are the keywords that your audience might be looking for. 

 

1. Best hotels near New York.
2. Budget hotels to live in New York.
3. Top hotels to eat in Chicago.
4. Best hotels for non-veg food in Ohio.

 

These are some keywords that your targeted audience might be looking for on Google if you own a hotel or restaurant in New York, Chicago, or Ohio. These were the only basic or so-called primary keywords.

 

In order to get the best SEO results, you need to dive deep into keyword research and make a bucket of 50-100 keywords in your niche. 

 

Following are the things that you need to keep in mind while doing keyword research: 

 

• Search volume, SEO Guide For Hotel and Restaurants

 

Search volume refers to the number of people searching for that keyword per month. Ideally, you should go with keywords that have 1000-2000 monthly search volumes.

 

If you rank for such keywords, then you might end up getting a small chunk of organic traffic.

 

You can also consider targeting long-tail keywords that have slightly less search volume but high conversational value. 

 

• Competition, SEO Guide For Hotel and Restaurants 

 

The next thing you need to focus on is the competition that keywords are having. It does not make any sense to target highly competitive keywords. If you have just started with your hotel or restaurant website, then go for keywords with less competition. 

 

This will help you in getting better rankings in less amount of time. 

 

With that in mind, we would suggest you go with long-tail keywords that have 5-6 words in them. 

 

To do keyword research, you can use tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs. If the budget is your constraint, then you can use free SEO tools like Google keyword planner, Answer The Public, and so on. 

 

3. On-page and off-page SEO

 

After doing the keyword research, it is now important for you to start with on-page optimization.

 

On-page SEO is nothing but optimizing the web pages and content of your site so that search engines can better crawl and index it. 

 

Each of the web pages on your site should be highly optimized under all the parameters of on-page SEO. 

 

Now let us look one-by-one what are top on-page SEO rankings factors:

 

• Title tag:

 

The most important element of on-page SEO is the title tag. It appears on your browser tab on the SERP results in blue colour. Search engine bots crawl the title tag in order to better determine the context of your content. That’s why you need to create sweet, simple, crisp, and easy-to-read title tags. 

 

The general length of the title tag is 60-65 characters. 

 

So, make sure that your title tags are within the specified limits, and you make maximum use of them. 

 

Another advantage of the title tag is that it can also improve your CTRs. If your title tags are click-worthy, then you’ll be able to attract a lot of traffic. 

 

• Meta tag:

 

Next to the title tag, meta descriptions are another important tag that will help you with on-page SEO. Meta descriptions appear just below the title tag. They give a brief summary of your content. 

 

In short, they help search engines and users understand the context of your content. So, make sure that you make maximum use of meta description tags. You can also include your primary and secondary keywords in the meta description. 

 

This will help you improve your rankings for primary and secondary keywords.

 

• Body content:

 

Now here comes the most important part of your entire SEO campaign: content. You might already know that content is the king in the world of the internet. It can either make or break your SEO strategy. 

 

So, make sure that you level up your content marketing efforts in order to make the most out of your SEO strategy. 

 

When it comes to content creation, you need to pull up your socks and understand the needs and wants of your users. Once you do that, you can start creating content that solves the problems for your audience.

 

With the Hotel business, following can be the problems that your audience might have:

 

1. How to find budget hotels.
2. Best hotels in XYZ locations.
3. Cheap travel guides and so on.

 

So, you can create content around these topics and help your audience in solving their problems. Also, keep in mind that you need to spend 20% of your time creating the content and 80% promoting it.

 

4. Link building

 

Now here comes the most important and difficult part of SEO which is link-building. Most SEO experts find link-building as the most difficult task in SEO. 

 

But the good news is we will make this process easy for you in this SEO guide for Hotel and Restaurants. 

 

Link-building will have 80% of the impact in improving the SEO ranking of your site. More links = better rankings and traffic. And once you have traffic, you’ll be able to generate tons of revenue, right? 

 

So, how to build links?

 

Here are the top 5 link-building techniques you need to follow:

 

1. Guest posting.
2. Blogger outreach.
3. Epic content.
4. Article submission.
5. Networking with bloggers.

 

Follow these techniques, and you’ll surely be able to take your link-building campaign to the next level. 

 

Important point: you need to make sure that you create high-quality backlinks from the high DA PA website. It is better to make 1 link from a high DA website rather than focusing on making 10 links from low authority websites.

 

5. Technical SEO

 

The next important SEO task you need to pay attention to is technical SEO. Although technical SEO might sound intimidating to you but is easy to implement and leverage.

 

Also, technical SEO plays a 20% role in improving the ranking of your keywords and website. It also helps you diagnose the errors that your site might be having. 

 

Apart from this, technical SEO will also help you in improving the overall health of your website. 

 

Following are the important technical SEO elements that you need to look into:

 

1. Redirections.
2. Duplicate content.
3. Broken links.
4. Google Search Console errors.
5. Website speed.
6. Security.
7. Internal links.

 

Make sure that you follow these factors while doing a technical SEO audit of your site.

 

6. How to track SEO results and so on

 

The last in this list of technical SEO guide for hotels and restaurants is to track and measure your SEO results.

 

Without tracking your performance, you won’t be able to know whether you are moving ahead in the right direction or not. 

 

You can keep a constant eye on your Google Analytics account and keep checking for organic sessions. 

 

You can also use a Google Search Console account to check your keywords rankings. 

 

Conclusion:

 

Doing SEO for hotel and restaurant business can be quite easy because there is not much competition involved. However, you still need to be very careful with SEO.

 

The right SEO strategy can take your business to the level of awesomeness and vice versa. With the help of this guide, you’ll surely be able to deal with the most important parts of SEO. 

 

The rest depends on your hard work and dedication.