Technical SEO On the Hotel Website: One Of the Most Important Revenue Drivers
By Max Starkov, Adjunct Professor NYU Tisch Center for Hospitality and Hospitality & Online Travel Tech Consultant
It is really mind-boggling that after more than 23 years of SEO historical data and solid SEO best practices, technical SEO is one of the least understood and very much ignored digital technology and marketing disciplines in hospitality.
Good technical SEO on the hotel website sends Google multiple "signals" used by the Google search algorithm Hummingbird to determine how to rank your website pages in response to various searches and directly affects the PageRank score of the webpage. For example, if a webpage is determined to be mobile-friendly, this is a signal that is registered by the Googlebot and used in determining the page ranking.
Google has frequently stated that it is using more than 200 major ranking "signals" with many thousands of sub-signals and variations. The following three categories are well within hoteliers' control, and if the hotel website is optimized to communicate these signals to the search engines, will achieve higher ranking in SERPs and reward the property with significant organic revenues.
- Content: unique, highly relevant and enticing website content that is professionally written, informative, useful and of travel guide-level quality.
- Links: links to the hotel website from highly authoritative non-paid websites like CVBs, online magazines and newspapers, blogs, social media, etc.
- Technical SEO: an ecosystem of technologies, configurations, and processes implemented to the website and server designed to optimize the hotel website and enable the search engine bots to access, crawl, interpret and index your website, which ultimately results in increased search traffic and revenue.
NOW AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD: TECHNICAL SEO ON THE HOTEL WEBSITE EBOOK
Max Starkov
Max Starkov is a hospitality and online travel industry technologist, consultant and digital strategist with 20 plus years of experience in hospitality technology and digital marketing, hotel online distribution and revenue management, OTA channel management, hotel CRM and branding strategies. Until recently, Max was the Founder, President & CEO and more recently, Founder and Board Director at NextGuest (formerly HEBS Digital) in New York City, the hospitality industry’s leading digital consulting, technology, CRM and marketing firm with 150 employees and offices in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific.
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NextGuest provides hoteliers with everything they need to thrive in the digital world, with bespoke technology solutions developed to meet the needs of luxury hotel clients coupled with elegant design capabilities that bring brands to life. We marry the power of data with brand discovery to uncover unique strategies that apply to everything from website design, content marketing, CRM, and more, helping the world's top hotel brands maximize ROI as they acquire, convert, and retain guests throughout the travel planning journey. While each of our services is available on its own, the integrated technologies, marketing, and consulting offerings work together to increase digital engagement and generate revenue for hoteliers, allowing them to focus on what matters most — serving their guests. www.nextguest.com | [email protected]