SMX West Takeaways: Earn Google’s Trust, Optimize Your Hotel Website for Voice Search

Search engine algorithms are always changing. Our SEO team is constantly researching and trying new methods to stay on top of trends and keep our hotel customers at the top of Google. Here’s what Nizam learned at SMX West to help hotel’s with their SEO.

Voice search is a huge trend going forward. This revolutionary technology is getting more sophisticated and better at understanding the way people ask questions. For example, asking “Do I need an umbrella today?” is really a question about the weather. Voice search is catching up with these small distinctions to deliver the desired search results—in this case, that day’s weather forecast.

If you’re wondering what Google Voice means for hotels today—the answer is not much, yet. At this point, people are primarily using voice search for general and informational queries. For the travel industry, this is just the discovery phase of the shopping journey, before a potential guest is likely to get their credit card out and book.

That doesn’t mean you should ignore voice search! We recommend optimizing your hotel vanity website for Google Voice so that your hotel pops up throughout the research phase. Here are some ways you can do this:

• Create an FAQ page on your website that answers real guest queries
• Write your website in a conversational style (hint: write for people, not the bots)
• Focus on speed: slow sites will not rank

“Trustworthiness” is a key ranking single that is impacted by the quality of links from other sites that link back to your hotel website. As Google’s ability to crawl and monitor the web has become more sophisticated, review and content quality content have become increasingly significant to the way they rank your website.

It’s no secret that good reviews are essential for hotels. Travel shoppers will always seek external validation before booking your hotel. But did you know that good reviews impact your SEO performance? The more consistent, positive reviews your property receives online, the higher you will appear on Google.

Reviews are more important than ever if your hotel wants to increase direct bookings.

Another way to increase your website’s trustworthiness—and thus your organic rank and likelihood of getting direct bookings—is through your site’s text content. Publish only high quality content on your website.

Travel shoppers can find a plain list of attractions or local businesses elsewhere on the web. Every time you publish content to your website, ask yourself:

• Am I providing value to my reader?
• How can they use this content?

Always think about the end user (your potential guest) before you consider Google’s bots. If your content is relevant, valuable and useful to your guests, Google will reward you.

Our Search Marketing team spends their days creating SEO strategies for high-performing hotel vanity websites. Every hotel SEO strategy includes:

• Keyword strategies to structure and inform every page of the website
• Off-page strategies to ensure external listings are built to drive website traffic and revenue
• Ongoing monitoring and adjustment of both the on-page and off-page strategy.

Learn more about our Customer Success Team to read about their day-to-day.

Book a demo of our hotel website + SEO solution to see how we use these strategies and more to increase direct bookings for hundreds of hotels worldwide.