Sometimes despite your team’s best efforts, you might find your hotel’s SEO strategy is faltering in its effectiveness. This might mean that you’re not generating real results or able to see meaningful change in your search positions. Worse, you may even be losing ground to rivals with a downward slide through the search results pages.  

There are several reasons why your SEO strategy could be hitting a brick wall and unearthing the root cause will demand some serious sleuthing and potentially even expert assistance. Before you hit the big red panic button, let’s take a look at four top causes of poor SEO performance and discuss how you can correct them to put your organic efforts back on course.

Your Efforts Are Out of Date

Be careful whose advice you buy, because SEO is a continuously updating, constantly evolving element of your hotel’s marketing mix. If you’re relying on outdated methods or, taking heed from an SEO consultant that has let their skillset wane, you’ll be rewarded by nothing but radio silence for your trouble.

Even more problematic, whilst an up-to-date SEO strategy will set your hotel in good stead when it comes to boosting your profile and encouraging bookings, badly-implemented SEO can be actively detrimental to your efforts. Many of these once popular tactics are now referred to as ‘black hat’ – which could lead to penalties and even greater SEO headaches. Ensure your SEO-lead has the cutting edge knowledge they need to propel your hotel business forwards, and stays continuously well-informed of the latest technology to help improve your SEO. Being up to date on best practise and well-versed in algorithm changes is the absolute minimum you should be looking for. You can trouble shoot this yourself too by taking the time to learn about what Google considers to be a well-optimised site now. Read up on its latest algorithms and advice and check that your local SEO marketing efforts fall in line with these requirements.

You Haven’t Targeted Your Market

SEO is not a generic, one-size-fits-all endeavour; you need your activities to centre around the audience you want to target, and go after them with a laser-like focus. If you don’t know who you’re targeting, there’s no way you can check whether you’re achieving your goals; so take a look at your bounce rate for an indication of who visits your website without making a booking. If the rate is high, consider who you want your hotel to appeal to and how and where they might be searching for you on the internet. Similarly, it may be that you’re targeting entirely the wrong keywords. While generic (shorter tail) keywords have their place in SEO, your hotel marketing strategies should also include a focus on more specific (longer tail) keywords to assure your success.


You Don’t Use Local Search

Hotels are inherently local. Whether an independent or part of a chain, you are installed in a single location, so why not use your local SEO marketing to help boost visits and increase your bookings from those who searched for hotels within your area?

You Don’t Track Your Data

Keeping track of your SEO strategy so you can make continual improvements and adjustments is one of the most important aspects of any SEO campaign. Be sure you have adequate systems in place for refining your SEO strategy on a regular basis.