Hotels today face so many challenges around online visibility, but great hotel SEO continues to be the building block for attracting eyeballs online, even with AI overviews.
Content remains King
All SEO strategies prioritise good, well-rounded, engaging and original content. As chat GPT and its pals take over the production of that content, it has never been so important to go back to best practice and market your hotel’s strengths. This is appreciated by human searches and hence also the agentic AI bots.
Keeping offers highlighted on your hotel website, rate parity where possible and incorporating up to date promotions across all your digital marketing tactics has never been so important. Promote all the features and amenities guests ask for and like about staying in your hotel.
AI created content is available all over the internet as everyone explores Chat GPT and its functionality. AI content is not penalised by the major search engines, but it can be picked up by the bots and will never reap the returns original, fresh content that really describes your product or service will. We understand the keeping the content on your website fresh and scaling it may mean using an software production system to help with the volume of work, but never forget to use real human editors, add photos and real reviews from guests – all of the major search engines and LLM platforms will pick up on the originality and helpfulness of your content and display this over formulaic artificially generated images and text.
I've read blogs talking about this very subject that have a cadence or grammatical structure that screams AI, which always amuses.
On page SEO
SEO has always taken advantage of clear and optimised image descriptions, amenity information and fun places to go and see that are within walking or driving distance of your hotel, but it is now time to audit all of this and update the descriptions and review all the technical structures behind your beautiful front end design. AI results are ranked by relevant, authority and keyword phrases, but these phrases are more conversational.
When I look at videos and imagery on a hotel, the descriptions and alt tags can look keyword stuffed, so this is a great time to have your digital marketing specialist review all the tagging to ensure it is conversational in tone and if the design doesn’t lend itself to very many characters, to add text or FAQs around the imagery. Explain why you are showcasing these amenities and how or when people enjoy them, your focus here is to use natural language in a way that mimics how a guest might phrase their query..
In SEO terminology, short head phrases are often deemed core or seed phrases that cover your business and location, for example, ‘hotels in Edinburgh city centre’. Try to turn these into longer, conversational search phrases, such as ’family-friendly hotels within walking distance of Edinburgh Castle’ – adding a picture of the castle, information about how to get there by different means and maybe a map.
Think through what happens at the hotel, what are its strengths, from food to entertainment, location or amenities, and focus on this niche, especially if you know guests enjoy this aspect of their stay. Think through how you can bring this niche to life with real examples and encourage guests to write about it in their reviews.
Technical Hotel SEO
Too often, our clients have beautiful looking websites with amazing photography, yet no schema mark-up to help the AI bots understand the context of their room types, pricing or amenities – once you have worked out your niche and are investing time and energy to market it, make sure your digital marketing team work with your web developer to strengthen your website architecture with great technical SEO: schema mark-up, super-fast page loading speed, responsiveness across mobiles (where the majority of first visits occur), keep auditing broken links, especially old promotions that go to 404 pages and check the AI crawlers can access your site, that it has clean HTMl and appropriate robots.txt settings.
User Generated Experiences
Now that Perplexity has partnered with Trip Advisor, and Reddit and Quora answers are showing up in the AI overviews when users ask questions about hotels, it demonstrates the importance of authentic guest experiences and your responses to both positive and the negative reviews from guests. Use APIs and link out to different platforms that highlight these user generated experiences as LLMs love to bring in what they read as real reports of a hotel from real guests. Making the most of your Google Business Profile is essential as you control the responses and information it holds.
Off-site SEO
Check that your hotel’s name, address, phone number and amenities are accurate across all of the platforms you list upon – outdated logos, owners, pictures of rooms that have been refurbished etc should all be attended to.
Digital PR is back with a vengeance, so make sure your digital marketing team understand the personas you are marketing to, that they fit the niche you are focusing on, and then use outreach to hospitality and travel sites, local tourism boards and travel influencers to gain brand mentions, making sure they are consistently mentioning your strengths: it all helps with visibility when your potential guest turns their travel search towards generative AI.
Is any of the above new?
No, this is good solid SEO, but the focus is now on keeping it all real and authentic, no stock imagery or AI blurbs, no shrinking from the technical side nor cutting corners with the on-page information you share. Just as your hotel is well maintained and has clear signage to help guests navigate around, your website should be no different, and it will be rewarded with the same positive spiral of reviews and compliments online as are received in person.