In this post, you’ll discover local SEO techniques that can help your hospitality marketing campaign achieve the highest organic traffic growth and improve your business’s search rankings.

First off, it’s a good idea to master the basics of local SEO before launching a full-scale campaign. However, staying on those ABCs may also result in minimal results. If you think your hospitality SEO strategy is missing some key elements, we’d like to share the most underrated techniques to help boost your rankings and website traffic organically.

With the worldwide travel market expected to rise by 3.99% in the next five years, growing your online visibility is now more valuable than ever. If you think your hospitality SEO strategy is slow in reaping the benefits, it’s time to explore new techniques. Keep reading to learn lesser-known methods that can complement the best local SEO practices.

Image Optimization for Better Hospitality SEO Results

Let’s begin with something that takes a significant chunk of your website content. Quality images are the backbone of hotel, motel, and B&B websites. For most business owners, image optimization focuses on using original, non-pixelated photos for hospitality digital marketing. But that’s just the basics.

Are you guilty of using images with filenames like “Download.jpg” or “1.png”? If yes, you’re not helping your local SEO efforts. Descriptive filenames help search engines index your images better. And with better indexing comes the possibility of higher website traffic. For example, using filenames like “luxury-hotel-room-sea-view.jpg” can make all the difference.

Aside from specific filenames, you may also want to use alt tags. If this sounds unfamiliar, alt tags (alternative texts) are HTML attributes. In a nutshell, it provides the images on your web pages with a text description, which is crucial for several reasons. The first is it supports your hospitality SEO campaign by helping search engine crawlers understand your pictures better.

Second, alt tags make your website more user-friendly and inclusive. These tags enable people who use screen readers to get a descriptive idea of the images. All of these help in maximizing the reach and effectiveness of your hospitality website.

When doing local hospitality SEO, geotagging images with location data can help improve local search rankings.

Using Social Signals to Improve Local SEO Rankings

colleagues looking at dataIf you’re a newbie in SEO, we understand how you may put all your efforts into website optimization. However, this might mean you’re restricting yourself from other means of improving your rankings. Nowadays, people can book their next vacation by just seeing a random social media ad; after all, 87% of travelers log in to their social media for travel inspiration. This emphasizes the importance of social media advertising when it comes to hospitality SEO.

Social signals refer to engagement metrics (likes, shares, etc.) that influence local SEO rankings. To help improve your site’s SEO rank, you can encourage guests to share their experience staying in your hotel, motel, or bed and breakfast online and then tag your business. Responding to their reviews and comments (even negative ones) can also help build a sense of community and trust.

Finally, consider adding social sharing buttons to your website content. That makes it easier for website visitors to share your blog and other content on their networks.

With positive social signals, search engines will learn that your website is trustworthy and popular. This can then lead to increased organic traffic and, eventually, more room reservations!

The Power of Schema Markup

Imagine a traveler scrolling through an endless list of accommodations. Among the choices, your hotel stands out with high star ratings and detailed reviews. That’s similar to how schema markup helps SEO for hospitality businesses.

Although often overlooked, schema markup—a microdata that you can add to your website’s HTML code—is an integral part of local SEO. It will help boost your organic rankings by helping search engines generate rich snippets of your website content.

Those snippets include additional details like ratings, prices, availability, and customer reviews. Those will then help your website become more eye-catching, leading to higher click-through rates (CTR).

On top of that, schema markup enhances mobile search experiences. By optimizing the content on your website, voice assistants can better interpret information from it. That ensures your website also caters to travelers who prefer using voice search to find their next travel accommodation.

Avoiding Keyword Cannibalization

Picture this: your hotel offers a lavish buffet for your guests. But the catch is they are being served with the same dish over and over again, and many guests are unsatisfied and demand refunds. This is akin to when your local SEO efforts result in keyword cannibalization.

If the concept doesn’t ring a bell, keyword cannibalization happens when many pages of your website target the same keyword. This weakens your hospitality SEO results, causing you to compete against your very own pages for rankings. That also causes search engines to get confused about which of your pages to rank higher.

When external sites link to pages with keyword cannibalization, the backlink authority gets split among those pages.

To avoid this, start by conducting a local SEO audit. It’s a tested way to help you identify existing pages that may be on an internal competition. Once identified, you can merge these pages into one authoritative piece that covers the page content more extensively.

Another approach is to diversify your SEO keywords. For hospitality SEO, this can be done by assigning similar pages with a different focus to prevent any overlaps. That means you’ll have a different page optimized for “romantic hotel getaway” and “affordable family hotel,” for instance.

Remember that the industry you’re in is no stranger to constant changes. Thus, regular updates in your keyword strategy are the best way to maintain strong local SEO rankings.

Why Website Structure Matters in Hospitality SEO

image of a person using laptop

Now, think of your website as your hotel. If the paths and signages are confusing, many visitors will leave with frustration. For the same reason, many travelers (as well as search engines) favor a well-organized website.

As was noted earlier, search engines send out bots called crawlers to index web pages. Having a clear and logical hierarchy of pages allows these crawlers to follow links from one page to another. But the benefits don’t end there. Using internal linking effectively will signal search engines which pages are the most valuable. As a result, your key pages will have a boost in authority, improving your local SEO ranking.

Organizing your website better also means easier navigation for your visitors. 83% of mobile users claim that a seamless website experience is something they value. With this in mind, do your best to make your site structure the best it could be. Check if each page has an intuitive path from the homepage. In addition, simplify your designs, menu items, and page titles. Empathy in digital marketing involves prioritizing users’ convenience and comfort—and this is a great example of such.

Lastly, always include mobile-friendliness in your hospitality SEO success equation. Most travelers are extensive mobile users. Hence, one of the first things you must check is if your website is responsive to smaller screens.

Also, as a professional local SEO company, we recommend installing a search function to help users find specific content without forcing them to browse through so many pages. In the end, the more coherent your website structure is, the more likely your site will appear high on local SEO searches.

Ready to Apply These Underrated Local SEO Practices?

Improving your local SEO rank doesn’t happen with a snap of your fingers. Like any worthwhile venture, it takes time, effort, and patience to enjoy lasting results. If you have your hands busy running your hospitality business and making your guests as warm and cozy as possible, how about opening your doors for local SEO experts?

If you’re looking for a reliable name in digital marketing, Zero Company can step in. For over 20 years now, we’ve been helping over 2,500 companies generate more revenues through proven online marketing tactics like SEO, PPC, programmatic advertising, and more. Unlike any other agency, we believe in empathetic marketing and design campaigns that are optimized not just for search engines, but—more importantly—for humans.

Book a free call with our SEO specialists today so we can start planning how to maximize these local hospitality SEO techniques and drive more guests to your site!