Digital Marketing
10 SEO Factors to Change this Week for Better Rankings
As digital marketers know, SEO has always been a smorgasbord of options that help push a page closer to that all important top spot. Get it right and you can expect greater visibility, more traffic and in all likelihood, more direct bookings. Get it wrong and you can quickly see your competitors overtake you and your reservation line fall silent.
If you are handling digital marketing for hotels, these 10 SEO factors to change this week, as indentified by this infographic, could help you drive your hotel to the top of Google.
1. Watch Your Word Count
A healthy word count is important for all businesses but it’s one of the top imperatives for the travel industry. If you have pages that are scoring poorly, it’s probably time you reviewed the content and perhaps increased your word count.
2. All Your Content is Relevant
This certainly needs to be true when it comes to the main landing pages on website. There’s nothing search engines dislike more nowadays than content that barely matches the search term. To give yourself more chance of obtaining better ranking positions, relevancy should be high on your agenda. What exactly do you want this page to do for and say to your customers?
3. Include Multiple Images
Images have long been a staple of good SEO and that continues today. In the case of digital marketing for hotels, this means providing plenty of high quality images that are relevant to the page they are on. Make sure you optimise for the appropriate keyword and add strong alt text descriptions.
4. Boost Internal Linking
Internal linking is also key for good SEO but the question most marketers ask is: ‘How much is too much?’ First and foremost, you should go from the viewpoint that internal linking is intended to aid navigation on your site. Get this right and the SEO should realistically take care of itself.
One quick note: The more content you have the more effective and easier your internal linking strategy should be.
5. Include Unordered Lists
Unordered lists can be used for options such as menus and stringing elements of related content together. It shows search engine crawlers that certain kinds of information belong together while at the same time improving navigation.
6. Check Length of URL
Think of your URL as the foundation for your website. You want to keep this as clean and short as possible without diminishing meaning. Don’t forget to include relevant keywords and be careful about creating too many subdomains – you want to keep your architecture as shallow as possible.
7. Boost External Links
Links to strong, relevant and reputable sites has always been a winner when it comes to SEO. Think about this when you are creating content. Remember one key thing when it comes to digital marketing for hotels and avoid manipulative linking (for example, to an affiliate site); it can damage your reputation.
8. Include Interactive Content
It’s not just images and written content that work well for SEO. If you are running digital marketing for hotels, finding interactive content should be another thing to tick off your list. This can be anything from polls and quizzes to calculators and interactive infographics. As with any content, it needs to be relevant to your site.
9. Pay Attention to Your H1 and H2 Headings
Including keywords in your H1 and H2 headings is important for travel and hotel websites. These should be included in all content. The impact on SEO may be up for interpretation and the question of whether you’ll improve your rankings is in no way certain. You should include them, however, just to be on the safe side.
10. Make Sure You’re a .com
Finally, there are plenty of TDLs out there nowadays. The .com ending for your top level domain, however, still appears to be the most SEO friendly. That may well change in the future but for now ensure it is your first choice.