How to get your head around SEO

Taking responsibility for your SEO in house can be a challenge, especially if you aren’t sure of how it works to begin with. We’ve put together the top tips below to provide you with a solid basis to start understanding the service including the first steps you should be taking in your journey towards SEO excellence:

Organise a professional audit​

Carrying out a full SEO audit of your website is extremely important as this can help determine where there might be underlying problems which will hinder your SEO activity. Hotels often struggle with the technical side of these audits, such as reviewing page load speed, which is down to how your site is built and the quality of the code, or the reviewing and amending the meta data. These issues can be difficult to review and fix without having advanced knowledge of what to look for. Most digital marketing agencies should have this offering and if you are looking into doing your SEO in-house, it is definitely worth doing.

Understand your Google Analytics​

To understand your SEO activity and what needs to be improved, you have to understand the data behind your website. Ensure you have access to your Google Analytics. This will help you determine where your visits are coming from, which search engines your audience are using, the number of bookings you are receiving from SEO activity and much more.

Know your keywords​

As a hotel, you need to understand what your potential guests are searching for when they look for you online. There are a range of tools that you can use to help give you a better understanding of the keywords people are using to find your hotel and the search volume they carry. Once you have selected the keywords you want to focus on, you have to ensure you mention them throughout your website in order to boost your SEO.

Produce interesting content​

To benefit your hotel and improve its SEO ranking, you should be sharing and creating informative content regularly. Hotels regularly have great opportunities to write about, but these opportunities are regularly missed. Get your staff involved to help produce content such as a recipes and top tips or advice. Build up an annual content calendar to plan your activity in advance and input key dates, events and opportunities where fresh content can be produced.

The magic three​

Whilst many think that PR, Social Media and SEO are all separate services, they actually go hand in hand and work perfectly together.

Once your SEO content is produced, you must ensure it is shared across all platforms, including PR and Social Media. This will generate quality links back to your website. You are seen by customers and search engines alike that you re a knowledgeable source. It also allows you to be seen by and associated with key brands in the industry, which is great PR.

This article was written by Tom Beasley of Wired Media​.