In the 10 Tips for Hotel Internet Marketing – Part 1, we have already discussed the first three tips for conducting effective hotel internet marketing. These tips for hotel online marketing are:
1. Have a secure and mobile-friendly website.
2. Start blogging.
3. Create social media pages.
Let us now see further.
4. Join online communities and blog about the top tourist attractions in your place.
Joining online communities that are relevant to your industry is one of the best ways to understand your target market. The first step of this strategy of hotel web marketing is to find various online groups that are relevant to hotels, resorts, travel and tourism in Facebook groups, Google+ communities, LinkedIn groups, online forums, and other communities.
By actively participating in the conversations of such online communities, you can understand the needs of your target market even better. A few examples of types of online communities which are ideal for promoting your hotel online marketing are:
- Groups about travel and tourism. This type of group is a meeting joint for travelers to exchange relevant information.
- Travel groups which are specific to your geographic location.
- Groups of travel bloggers.
- Groups of travel and tourism deals.
After joining these online communities, it is also important to post various blogs and articles. The ideal subject for you to write a blog or article about for your hotel web marketing is the top tourist attractions nearby your hotel. These could vary from beautiful beaches, historical landmarks, fun-filled festivals and the reasons why tourists flock to your city or country. Travelers are searching for such type of information on the search engines as well as social media platforms.
5. Use stunning photos and interesting short videos.
A good photo can speak a million words. For the hotel SEO internet marketing, photos and videos play a very important role. Those web pages and blog posts get higher search engine visibility which utilizes different interesting pictures because images and videos are also indexed in search engines.
Therefore, it is vital to click photos and videos of different angles of your hotel and events and celebrations organized by your hotel. And especially short videos posted and shared on your website and other social media sites have an ability of becoming viral.
The key to use this hotel internet marketing tool successfully is to promote your city’s or country’s tourism along with your resort or hotel.
6. Do local SEO.
Every year, at least a trillion searched are answered by Google. Therefore, being a hotelier what you need to do is target a fraction of those searches that are relevant to your hotel and services.
For example, if your hotel is located in New York then optimizing your hotel website for your location, i.e. ‘Hotel in New York’ (and this is just 1 keyword) will generate much more relevant traffic than those for a generic keyword, i.e. ‘Hotel in USA’. This is called Local SEO.
It is a proven fact that hotels that are shown on the first of search engine results receive more traffic than those that are at the next search engine result pages. Therefore, if your hotel is not displayed on the first page of search engine results page for its relevant local search queries or keywords, then you’re losing important web traffic and leads.
Here are some tips to perform and improvise local SEO for your hotel or resort.
- Add location to your page title. For example, ‘Name of your Hotel – in New York’.
- Include your address and contact numbers on every web page of your website.
- Add Google Maps to your website and other social media pages.
- List your Hotel in local business directories such as Google+ and on travel websites such as TripAdvisor.
- If possible, list your hotel or resort on different travel portals such as Agoda, Expedia and Booking.com.
- Ask your guests to post reviews about your hotel in these business directories.
- Make sure that your contact information and other details are the same across your website, directories, social media pages and listings.
- Publish blogs and articles, keeping in mind these local keywords.
In the 10 Tips for Hotel Internet Marketing – PART 3 we shall take a look at the remaining 4 tips for effective hotel internet marketing. If you have any doubts or queries, please do not hesitate to contact us.