Local SEO is an increasingly important element of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and aims to make your hotel appear in the top positions of searches performed by users for a specific location.
It can be simple searches such as “Hotels near me” or “Hotels in Madrid”, or longtail searches with keywords related to the services, facilities or features of your hotel. For example, “Hotel in Cancun for families”, or “Hotel in Bogota with swimming pool”.
After performing a local search on Google (“Hotels in Palma de Mallorca”), a user first sees the paid results, followed by the Local Pack results related to your Google My Business listing, and after these, the organic results.
Local SEO looks for your hotel to get the best possible result in the Local Pack and organic results.
Like any other SEO practice, local SEO generates traffic to your website without direct investment in advertising. And what’s more, that traffic is highly qualified compared to other marketing channels, which translates into better conversion rates and sales for your hotel.
The better your local SEO, the more users will find your hotel when searching online.
Local SEO is a key strategy for retail businesses with physical stores, but as its weight on total searches grows, its importance for hotels is increasing.
Let’s see why:
- 46% of all Google searches are related to a geographic location. Without a local SEO strategy, your hotel will not be present in almost half of all Google searches.
- …and it is a growing trend as the volume of searches with the words “near me” has increased by more than 500% in the last 3 years.
- Local SEO can generate up to 20% of a hotel website’s revenue.
- …and is more profitable, as the average purchase price of users who reach the hotel’s website through SEO results is 55% higher than other marketing channels.
- 24% of clicks are made on the first local search result.
Google My Business: a key element of local SEO for hotels
Obtaining good results in local SEO involves optimizing two main channels:
1. Your website’s homepage.
2. Your Google My Business listing, with all the elements that compose it:
- Description of your hotel and the services it offers
- Customer ratings
- Images of the facilities
- Remove duplicate Google My Business listings (created by third parties but using your hotel and/or website address) that penalize your hotel’s official listing
- Google maps optimization
Google My Business is important for any local SEO strategy. And in the hotel industry this importance is even greater, since in local search results related to hotels, Google prioritizes websites that offer multiple options and products to the user.
This means that the first organic results for a search “Hotels near me” will almost certainly show OTAs, which offer a wider variety of local results, and not hotel or chain websites.
In addition to Google, it is important to work and optimize your hotel listing in browsers implemented in markets with high search volume: Yandex in Russia or Bing in the United States.
How does local SEO help you to improve your organic positioning?
- Local SEO helps you generate more and better traffic to your Google My Business listing and your hotel website:
- It allows you to position your hotel not only by name and location but goes beyond that, allowing users to find you with more generic search ranges. For example, “Hotels for families in Playa del Carmen”.
- A Google My Business listing with updated information and a detailed description of the services offered by your hotel generates more trust in the user and more interaction in the form of clicks, questions or ratings made by users. Google rewards this increased interaction, giving more authority to your web domain and, therefore, better organic results for your website.
- If you implement the same keyword strategy on your Google My Business listing and your website, you will also see a noticeable improvement in your hotel’s organic results.
An optimized local SEO strategy will also help support and complement your paid marketing campaigns. The more times a user finds your hotel during their search and selection process, the better the results of your multichannel strategies – paid and organic.
At Roiback Digital – our agency specialized in digital marketing for hotels – we have a team dedicated exclusively to local SEO, which implements strategies to improve hotel positioning in local searches.
Our procedure is simple and effective:
- Initial audit of the current situation.
- Implementation of actions to boost the positioning of the hotel in local searches.
- Constant monitoring and continuous improvement.
It is important to emphasize that local SEO – like any other SEO strategy – requires a thorough work, without haste but without pause.
The results of local SEO are not immediate, but its impact on the online visibility of your hotel is very high, and it can become a very important source of traffic and sales, without direct investment in advertising.
