If you are in the hospitality or tourism industry, you have surely realized the true benefits of a quality online presence. Simply, if potential guests or customers can not find you in search engine ranking pages in top positions, your company and brand surely will be missing a lot of potential business which online presence can get. Without good SEO, your travel agency or hotel website will be really useless. Connection of Tourism and Search Engine Optimization is really strong nowadays. But you would be surprised how many travel agencies and hotels fall in wrong and bad SEO practice.
What are the most common SEO mistakes that hotels doing?
- Loading Time (Design) – You have invest money in such a beautiful design and you put the most beautiful images of your rooms, hotel, landscape along with breathtaking photos of nearby sights & attractions. But the problem is that it takes over minute or two for the page to fully load. And by then, website visitors are gone, and will never return to your website.
- Social Media (Social Media Marketing) – One question – Do you have a Social Media Marketing Plan? Yes, we know that you monitor hotel reviews, but do you have a REALLY Social Media plan? What are your social channels? What are a channels of your competitors? How do you handle questions from guests on your profiles? How fast you reply on these questions? Do you have person who is in fully charge for your social presence? Introducing a quality Social Media Plan to address these potential issues IS huge benefit to your SEO success.
- Content (Content marketing) – In general when people talk about online content for your website visitors, they usually mean on writing interesting informations about the property and area. But, when we talk about content marketing we want to know things which guest want to know:
– Can they expect an upgrade if they arriving late?
– Are freebies negotiable?
– Can I get children’s portions?
– Why would we choose to stay with you over your competition?
– Always tell your website visitors and potential guests what makes you “unique”. - Link Building (off page optimization) – Do you know what type of backlinks your SEO worker building for your brand? Do you monitor natural and his backlinks? Do some other websites want to link to your pages because they think you have engaging content they find important? Do you link to other trustworthy websites?
- Back to Basics (on-page optimization) – Do your page Titles, Headings and Meta Descriptions make true sense for content of your page? For example, do you have page with the title “Luxury Hotel London | Near Wembley | Visit Us” and the page content talking about the guests experience? Or do you have the same Meta descriptions and Meta Keywords page after page? It may sound obvious, but you would be surprised how many travel agencies and hotels mislead their website visitors with the wrong informations.
If you have a desire to enter the tourism industry as the owner of the hotel, read our advice below.
Setting your finances straight before buying a hotel
Making sense of your finances when buying a hotel is a very important step. Fail to accomplish it, and you are heading towards disaster. And usually, people fail at this. One big thing that you should do is to secure the loan for the hotel. What does that mean? Well, you are probably going to need financial aid in the form of a loan when buying a hotel, and securing it means that you are positive and absolutely sure that the flow of cash when you buy the hotel, your income, will be enough to cover the loan and pay it off. If that cash flow fails to come in, you are facing a lot of problems, and the possible shutting down of your hotel.
People won’t wait forever for you to return their investment, so before taking money from them, make sure you will be able to return it when the time comes to do so. Having a detailed finance report before taking up a loan can’t hurt. Firstly, you need to estimate exactly how much money you are going to need each month to cover all the expenses of the hotel, and at the same time pay off the debt. If you lack the monthly funds, find another way. When all of this is covered, you need to look at some other financial issues. Check what your room rates are going to be like, and estimate the occupancy of the hotel. In that way, you are going to see what monthly profit you are going to get from that. Also, determine what nearby hotels hold for their room rates, and bend to that. If they are much cheaper than you, don’t expect a lot of people to stay at your hotel.
A summary of all the things said, you need to do your homework. Make sure all the finance are in check, and just then you might be successful in running your hotel. And remember one thing, buying a hotel is a huge life changer. Most people don’t even realize that, but when you buy a hotel, your life will be turned around. You may see great benefit, but like in everything, that is not always the case. Before committing, make sure your heart is set and you truly want to do it.
Photo by orangefred 
