If your hotel hasn’t yet harnessed the power of featured snippets to help improve its SEO strategies, you could be missing an easy way to obtain more organic search real estate. In addition to increasing visibility on results pages, featured snippets work as a handy tool to make information about your hotel more accessible and useful to search users. Some research suggests it significantly helps with CTR, leading to as much as a 516% increase in sessions in some cases as well as greater visibility and the associated benefits that come from being able to generate more bookings from the increased traffic flow. 

But what are featured snippets, and how can you use them to advance your hotel’s own SEO?

Google is dedicated to helping your potential customers find what they’re looking for, constantly looking for ways to improve the relevance and veracity of search results in response to their queries. As a way of making the search experience more user-friendly, Google have developed methods of answering queries on the search results page itself without any need to visit the hotel website. The quick answers displayed take on two forms, either direct answers or featured snippets. They may look similar, but these are actually two distinctly different methods of information access and display. Direct answers produce fact-based answers about the weather or similar topics, while featured snippets source information from third-party websites to answer more complex questions, before linking to the source website below the information displayed. There are lots of different snippet options, from text right through to video – meaning there are lots of opportunities for customisation.

A common complaint amongst hoteliers is that by providing Google with information about your hotel, it could drive down unique hotel visits by preventing prospects clicking through to see the content on your site. This is certainly a possibility, but there is an alternative to consider – if you don’t provide this information, potential hotel guests are just as likely to pass by your offering completely. Lots of web-browsing relies on immediacy, and there are plenty of prospects who lack the patience to dig too far in search of the information they require. Google has itself stated that many sites are seeing increased visits as a result of adopting featured snippets, and some studies have shown a 30% increase in conversion rates after adding featured snippets to their SEO strategy.  

It’s vital that you keep control of the information which appears within featured snippets in order to assure the relevance of this hotel search engine marketing strategy. Your website will require some adaptation to Google’s structured data guidelines and you will need to provide the content you want displayed within your chosen snippet – but following these steps, featured snippets are a simple and user-friendly way of providing your customers with the information they seek and help drive more custom for your hotel.