There are some articles on ehotelier which show us the potential directions we might move in, and there are others which outline clearly and decisively what we must be doing right now in order to succeed in the industry. Patrick McCarthy’s article SEO for Hotels: What Hoteliers Really Need to Know is one such article, and happily he tells us exactly how to go about getting the basics of Search Engine Optimization in place for hotels.

How to Make Your Hotel More Relevant than Competing Hotels

As well as a clear, step by step guide to getting the search engines to know who your hotel is and what is does, Patrick raises some interesting and important questions around the why – why is your hotel more relevant than competing hotels? His suggestions for convincing search engines that a hotel’s website should be ranked at the top of the searches were, at first, surprising to me and then following the surprise came that satisfying feeling of ‘yes, this all makes sense.’ The two key tactics that Patrick encourages are Optimized Local Listings and Unique Relevant Links.

Let’s explore these two tactics. Even if a hotel is part of a national or international brand, it has a location that is unique to that hotel. By optimizing local listings, you are telling the search engines that the business located at the address of your hotel is the same as the business represented by your website. Why is this important? Because when a search engine detects a location-based search, they will include your hotel as a business located in that area, which might not happen if you just had your website.

To then go a step further, once the search engines know where your hotel is located, what will convince them that your site is authoritative, trustworthy and of high quality content? And this is the bit that really appeals to me – by building links from established local businesses and organizations. “Just as you would want local businesses, colleges, conventions centres, museums to recommend your hotel if someone asked in person where they should stay while visiting; you also want those same businesses to recommend your hotel online; and in the online world, that kind of recommending is done through linking to your site.”

It strikes me that in our internet age where we can make contact with the far reaches of the world, the most powerful evidence that your hotel is valuable lies in the endorsement of the community immediately around you. It doesn’t take technical skills – this is all about relationships between businesses and how well your hotel works with other businesses. This kind of link building is more of an attitude than a tactic. Patrick says that too often, hoteliers think of the online and offline portions of their business as separate entities and suggests that you start thinking of your website in the same way you think about your hotel.