Inside HOM – Hotel Online Marketing Blog

Aaron Darc explains the often bewildering world of Search Engine Optimisation and why your hotel is losing customers without it…

OK, so your new website makes the hotel down the street green with envy. It looks beautiful, it works like a dream – you’re sitting there waiting for your new customers to come flooding in. Here they come! Any minute now. Won’t they?

The question is quantity of traffic (how many people come to your website) and the quality of that traffic (that those people are potential conversions, because your website is offering what they’re looking for). Good looking websites that offer a breadth of information and capability convert traffic to sales, but aesthetic and functionality do nothing alone to create traffic. Without the right elements in place to achieve both these tasks (the creation and conversion of traffic) your website isn’t doing enough.

Getting the best traffic flow is the art of Search Engine Optimisation. This is a relatively recent development of the online world, one that many business owners with a commercial online presence still don’t understand and, therefore, address. It rose to prominence for two main reasons: the rise of the search engine in collective online behaviour, and the evolution of major search engines in response to this.

So, just how important is the search engine to the modern cyberworld? We all know of Google, right? The importance of appeasing the search engine is no better proved than the simple fact that Google is such a powerhouse in the online world, one of the true kings, worth astronomical amounts and wielding power that can have major cultural, and even political, impact. And what is Google? The world’s most popular search engine.

This means that it is effectively the portal that users’ online experiences begin with. Because of the hierarchical nature of the search engine (answering queries with a list of options) combined with user behaviour (to select the options at the top of this list), how Google creates these lists, and, more importantly, who makes it to the top, has a major impact on site traffic. For the world of commercial websites – looking to convert traffic to sales – the importance of this is obvious. Recent statistics show that modern consumers are making over 60% of purchases online, and that over 85% of these sales originate from a search engine result. It’s little wonder that Google holds such importance for the commercial and corporate world!

The Search Engine & The Hotel Industry

Within these statistics, some businesses and products suit search engine behaviour more than others. People still rarely use search engines to find and purchase grocery items, as we still consider a trip to the supermarket to be the easiest solution to making a large range of weekly purchases. However, for the hotel industry, the reverse happens, and consumers are more likely to prepare and purchase holidays online. Recent statistics show that a staggering 90% of bookings for hotels that have an online presence have included the website at some stage of the consumer’s journey to point of sale. This is largely because it allows consumers to easily compare different hotels, and explore businesses that are logically located far away. It also means not having to pay for long distance phonecalls, combined with the general convenience consumers find in evaluating businesses without having to engage in actual human interaction (where they feel they will be unduly pressured to purchase). The hotel website is a favourite way to find the perfect accommodation, and for good reason.

Furthermore, the search engine is also perfect for finding the choices available, as most people tend to travel to locations they haven’t been, meaning they are more than likely to be completely unaware of the hotels in the area. Most search engine results that lead to accommodation bookings are based on location searches (for example, “hotels Grafton”, or more specific searches like “hotels Sydney near harbour”). The search engine is a great way to find out exactly what hotels are available – meaning that getting on those search results is crucial.

Google will eventually index most sites, but being on search engine results means little, if you’re site is sitting on page 6. In fact, only 15% of users in a recent Google survey said they look any further than page 3 of search results. So how do you get your website onto those first three pages, and under the keen eyes of travelers?

This actually changes constantly. Google uses a complex algorithm to convert a search term into results, endeavouring to find what sites most suit the query, and then listing them in what it considers most relevant to the user. This algorithm is constantly refined, resulting in an ever-changing series of factors that can be appeased and manipulated by those who understand and follow the formula of SEO.

This includes understanding the placement of search terms, embedded within copy, and understanding what search terms will yield the best results. But it also extends to the actual development and functionality of the site. There are over ten major techniques and elements the best SEO experts will apply to a website in order to get the site into those high rankings and big dollars. Too many business owners overlook SEO in their websites, simply because they feel overwhelmed or alienated from the technical world of the search engine. They do so to their own misfortune.

Organic versus Paid Search results

Needless to say, the search engines themselves have seen dollar signs in the commercial quest to be on the top of search results pages. This has led many of them – particularly, Google – to offer paid advertising placements at the top of search results pages called “Sponsored Links”. This term in itself is a deliberately ambiguous one, as it knows that users increasingly dislike and mistrust the commercialisation of the online world, and are looking for organically generated results. It is for this reasons that although sponsored links will certainly provide some increase in traffic, they are increasingly less effective than organic results (those that are open to SEO) with only 30% of users opting for paid results, and nearly all of those users also comparing these results to organic ones anyway. Not to mention that paid result placement is also incredibly expensive! If your only effort to utilise SEO is to simply pay for search engine placements, you’re not really utilising SEO at all – and you’re not getting the most for your money.

Hotel Online Marketing SEO Services

Hotel Online Marketing understands the complex world of the search engine. In fact, it’s founder and Managing Director, Sophie Constanti, is herself an SEO guru. She knows the importance of SEO in all facets of online marketing, which is why she has chosen a team who can all inject this sensibility into their work – whether designing, writing or developing commercial websites.

Because many sites were either created with now outdated SEO principles, or never had SEO applied to them in the first place, those who already have a website can save dollars by simply having their site SEO reviewed and altered, without needing to purchase a new site altogether. Talk to HOM today about your site and how it can rise in the rankings of major search engines, generating up to double the business you’re getting today! And if you’re thinking of getting a new website, HOM will work with you to make sure your site is purposefully SEO developed.

Better still, HOM will combine their SEO knowledge with sound marketing strategy. Many agencies claim to optimise your site for search engines, but are often cheating – using shortcuts to generate higher quantities of traffic, without worrying about the conversion of that traffic to bookings. SEO is not just about higher traffic rates, but, with the increasing developments in SEO practice, can now target quality of traffic. What would you rather? 1000 hits from a search engine result with 20 bookings converted, or 500 hits with 300 conversions? Using the search engine to target specific and relevant markets is vital to truly getting the best you can. HOM keep their eye on the end prize, and know how to achieve it.

Call Hotel Online Marketing today on (02) 9007 2453 and speak to Sophie about getting your site seen by the people who need to see it!