It should be no surprise in today’s world of marketing how important reviews are for your hotel. For a little refresher: 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations and 95% of consumers say that online reviews influence their buying decisions.
Your hotel has reviews, so you are golden, right? Not so fast. There is probably more that you should be doing to ensure your maximizing benefits from guest reviews. Uberall did a study from analyzing 64,000 GMB (Google My Business) profiles in 4 countries to find out what turns consumers into customers.
We all want the best reviews possible and a perfect score is the ultimate goal. What people don't realize is that even a review star rating increase of just 0.1 could increase the conversion rates of a business location by 25%, one study finds. The sweet spot for star ratings is 4.4 (Growth Jump 3 in the diagram below). The study found that there is less competition at this mark and is where the conversion rates start to dramatically increase.
Conversion rates peak when they have attained a 4.9-star rating, but when businesses improved from 3.5 stars one year to 3.7 stars the following, they saw an almost 120% increase in conversions, which is the highest percentage growth jump from any star rating.
The chart below shows growth across SMBs (small to medium size businesses), enterprise locations and global brands. As you can see, across the board, conversion growth peaked between the 3.5 to 3.7-star mark.
Reviews Across Industries
Reviews are allowing SMBs to compete with enterprise businesses and global brands and they should definitely take note. SMBs across the board are achieving higher star ratings allowing them to achieve higher conversion rates up until the 4.4-star rating mark.
Replying to Your Hotel’s Reviews Is Just as Important
So, your hotel has a substantial number of reviews and a great star rating, now what? Reply! Enterprise businesses are hovering around a 10% reply rate. Understandably, they have more locations and thousands of reviews and it can be time-consuming. It is also estimated that 75% of small businesses don’t respond to their reviews at all, though they do reply more on average than enterprise businesses.
Looking at the chart, you will find that SMB and enterprise conversion rates intersect at just about the same point. When the reply rate starts to increase to the 20-30% range, you will start to see the conversion rate really climb for enterprise companies.
“According to this data, enterprise locations that reply to an average of 32% of reviews will have an 80% higher conversion rate than enterprise and SMB locations that reply to 10% of reviews and 40% higher than SMBs that also reply to 32%” the study finds.
While enterprise locations will outperform SMBs at certain review star ratings and reply rates, most brands are not currently adapting to the reputation management revolution to achieve growth rates that they are capable of.
Next time you think you can’t compete against your local small competition, let alone the big brands in the hotel market, think again. Early adaption is key to get ahead and to maintain market share and position once you get there.
GCommerce offers solutions to help you adapt and maintain your hotel’s market share and local position. Reach out to your Account Executive for more information!
How To Uncover SEO Keywords Hiding In Your Hotel’s Paid Search Accounts
In the world of digital marketing for hotels, paid search and SEO are often managed as separate channels and by separate teams. While they are contrasting specialties with different approaches, they have key similarities that can be cross utilized in order to increase performance for your hotel’s marketing campaigns. Let’s jump right in!
4 Steps To Successfully Using Your Hotel’s Paid Search Campaigns to Improve SEO Performance
1. Use Paid Search Tools to Identify SEO Opportunities for Your Hotel
Paid search keyword planners are one useful tool employed by paid search specialists within the travel industry to identify high volume keywords that will produce clicks, impressions, conversions & more for their ads. This can also be used to find SEO keywords for your hotel by getting a sense of how much search volume there is for any given keyword along with a rough estimate on the competition for it.
2. Use High Performing Keywords from Your Hotel’s Paid Search as SEO Focus
Start by looking at metrics that are important to you as a hotel. These could include clicks, impressions, conversions, etc. Let’s get an understanding of what some of these metrics could signify.
Impressions- Impressions can give a good idea of total search volume for any given keyword.
Clicks- Clicks can provide an idea of how much traffic that keyword actually generates for your website as well as the quality of the search intent. For example, if your keyword has a lot of impressions but not very many clicks, it could mean that that keyword has a lot of competition or that the keyword isn’t very qualified for your property.
CTR- Click-through rate is a better way to see the ratio of impressions to clicks. You could test using high performing CTR paid search ads within your page title and meta description messaging for on-page optimization.
Conversions- The most qualified keywords are the ones that drive the most conversions. Select keywords that drive conversions and try to own the SERP for these keyword searches. Ideally, one would want a keyword with a decent amount of impressions, a great CTR and lots of conversions.
3. Use Paid Search Campaigns to Test SEO Elements for Your Hotel’s Website
Paid search ad titles and descriptions can be a great way to test SEO titles and shortened meta descriptions with the associated keyword that you would like to test. This will give you data-driven results of what works for your brand. Indicators of what elements are working well should include the metrics we discussed above as well as:
Quality Score- This metric gives you an overall idea of how Google views your ad in regard to your keyword, website landing page, and ad relevancy. You can learn more about what defines quality score here.
Expected Clickthrough Rate- This allows you to see what Google thinks your clickthrough rate will be for that description and headline paired with the keywords. This is a good indicator of whether or not that ad is relevant and compelling to searchers.
Landing Page Experience- This allows you to see how Google views your landing page content in regard to your ad’s content. If Google can’t find information relevant to your target keyword then you will have a low landing page experience which means that your page probably needs to be optimized for the keyword before or during your search engine optimization for the tested keyword.
Ad Relevance- This allows you to see how relevant Google views your ad to be paired with the final URL and keyword. This is normally based on past data.
Calls-to-action are an important part of meta descriptions and ad descriptions because they encourage the customers to book, reserve a venue, etc. These calls-to-action can be tested within Google Ads. To do this:
Choose the keyword that you would like to focus on
Create headlines and descriptions that focus on that keyword and that you will be utilizing as a page title and meta description after the test. Note: You will be adding your calls-to-action to the descriptions so make sure that they are shorter than 90 characters with the calls-to-action
Formulate calls-to-action that you would like to try
Create a new single keyword ad group with the desired keyword. Note: You can also test multiple keywords by creating more single keyword ad groups with the other keywords that you’d like to test
Input the previously created descriptions with different calls-to-action. Make sure to keep everything the same over each of the ads except for the calls-to-action to get the best test results
4. Bonus Points for Aligning Your Hotel’s Paid Search & SEO Efforts
As you implement the optimized titles and meta descriptions onto your hotel’s website, it will help your SEO elements to align with your Google Ads keywords. This will increase your keyword quality score because your pages will be more relevant to your ads.
Conclusion
Paid search is a great tool that can be used to find SEO keywords for your hotel. Take advantage of this tool if you are running paid search ads to increase SEO performance and in the long run paid search performance. Learn more about other marketing strategies that you can use for your hotel at our hotel digital marketing blog today!
What We Learned in Two Years of Writing Hotel Blog Posts
Nearly two years ago we embarked on a content marketing journey with one of our bigger clients, Coast Hotels. The goal was to help them establish their 40-plus properties as thought leaders in the market while also being a resource for guests’ trip-planning needs. An incredible team of developers, designers, and digital marketers came together to help Coast achieve just that. And thus, the No Place Like Coast blog was born.
Since then we have expanded our content offerings and now work on blog services for a number of clients at all scales. We’ve learned a lot about producing content for hotels in the past two years and now it’s time to share some of our findings. If you haven’t jumped on the content marketing wagon yet, now is the time to do so.
Your Hotel’s Blog Title Matters
For many users, the title of your hotel’s blog is the first thing they will see, whether it’s from a Google search or browsing the blog page of your hotel website. Similar to the ad copy, it should be enticing and include the juicy details first. We’ve tried all types of title variations and so far in our analysis, two things have stood true in terms of success: including your hotel’s location and relative keywords in relation to the body copy.
Call Out The Location
When we look at our top five performing blog posts (based on both organic performance and performance with Facebook distribution) we see that they all contain the location or Coast Hotel’s destination in the title. This tells us that using location is key not only for driving rank in Google (more on this later) but for qualifying the reader on whether or not the blog will be relevant to their needs.
Be Specific
Aside from incorporating location in the title, using specific and descriptive keywords also helped improve performance. What does this mean? Being specific and descriptive in your hotel blog’s titles means you are letting the user know what kind of content they are going to find in the blog. Similar to adding location, this will also drive more qualified readers to your hotel blog website, decrease the bounce rate, and increase time spent on the page.
Optimizing your hotel blog titles may seem like a small and insignificant change, but it can have big results when it comes to enhancing the customer journey.
A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words
Using high-resolution imagery should seem like a no brainer, yet surprisingly many hotels are still using poor images on their blogs (and websites!). High-quality images are important for a number of reasons:
They help break up large chunks of text. Let’s face it, who likes to read long blogs with no visuals?
They help convey the message. Whether you are describing a luxurious, two-bedroom suite or a local hike at sunset, an image will assist in getting the point across faster and more efficiently.
They showcase that you know what you’re talking about and evoke a sense that your blog is a serious thought leader.
Last, but not least, high-quality imagery creates a connection with the user and can help them recall your blog at a later date, whether that’s to gain more information or potentially book.
And, as always, don’t forget to add alt text to every image!
Hotel Blogs Need to be Search-Friendly
All of the blogs written for Coast Hotels start with a content idea. We then research what types of keywords people are searching around the specific ideas and locations that we would be writing about. This process helps us to identify which keywords have the most volume and are most likely to be associated with what people are searching for on search engines. For example, “tulip festivals in Abbotsford” has five times the search volume of “tulip festivals in British Columbia,” so we tried to use the former in more instances where it made sense than the latter. We also tried to optimize the meta elements of the page, the headings, on-page content, photos, and internal links, among other items on the page to better align them with search engine best practices as recommended by Google.
All Blog Aspects Must Align
We touched on this earlier in the blog title section, but a major key to success for writing hotel blogs is to make sure all the components align and flow. To expand on this, let’s first determine what your blog strategy is.
In the hotel space, your blog could serve a few purposes:
To showcase your property or brand and highlight top amenities and key differentiators
To provide additional trip-planning information
To serve as a potential travel guide for your location(s) at the community level
To connect and engage with a potential new audience
Once you have established the purpose of your blog, you can better understand how everything needs to align together: the title, content, keyword research and implementation, and imagery.
To create a successful blog post, your content must include researched keywords that will lead a user to your blog. From there, your blog title must entice the right user to click through to the site and then the content and imagery must give them the relevant information they were looking for.
If we look at two top-performing blog posts from Coast Hotels, Fun in the Flowers: 3 Great Tulip Festivals in BC and Washington and Hidden History in Osoyoos, BC, we see the alignment magic happening. They both included descriptive titles, relevant keywords, specific and detailed information, and high-quality imagery. These elements led each blog to result in having an average of over five minutes of time on page and lower bounce rates than comparable blogs. This tells us that these blogs attracted the right readers who in turn found the right content.
Tracking Website KPI’s
Another key aspect of any marketing effort is to analyze how those efforts are helping your overall website goals. Blog pages are a great way for hotels to get more content and help engage with their guests while also supporting increases in search engine exposure. However, it is important to have custom analytics tracking on goals and events throughout your website. Part of the success we are able to measure with our partner websites is not only the audiences that are visiting your hotel’s website, but how many of those people go on to look at your availability. Of those audiences, which dates are they looking at? Or, are they signing up for email lists? How many become members of your rewards programs? More in-depth and custom tracking on websites helps us answer those questions and get more data on how we can re-engage with guests throughout the entirety of their booking journey.
Start Blogging For Your Hotel Website
We have certainly learned a lot through the last two years of writing hotel blog posts for Coast Hotels. While it has been an enjoyable ride, we’re looking forward to taking what we have learned and applying our knowledge to help drive even more success for our clients. By writing in-depth, specific blog content that utilizes compelling imagery and SEO best practices, we are able to align the overall goals of a hotel website with the additions to their blog. If you are interested in learning more information about starting a blog for your hotel website, contact the experts at GCommerce.
What is Google My Business Q&As and Why It Matters
Google My Business released a “Questions and Answers” feature in August of 2017 which allows users to ask and answer questions about a business directly on their Knowledge Panel. Yes, you read that right, any user can also answer any questions that have been asked about your business.
While Google continues to expand its preset business information and attributes for a business to provide directly through their Google My Business profile, it is still limited and does not provide all the answers a consumer is looking for about a business. If your business is not answering these direct-from-consumer questions, you are missing out on a great opportunity. The problem with allowing other users to answer the questions means you are allowing people to speak for your brand. The answers may be inaccurate, unprofessional, unhelpful or the questions could simply go unanswered and you have now lost a potential customer.
It is important that your business is present and responds to your customers wherever the conversation is happening. This includes responding to reviews across platforms but also answering questions on your Google My Business listing directly; even if someone else has already answered. Then moving forward, you want to be sure that you monitor and answer any questions before another user or local guide does so first.
Users are constantly searching the internet for information and Google is constantly evolving to serve up the most relevant and user-friendly content. This is your chance as a business to protect your brand, incorporate some keywords where relevant and ensure that the information that is being shared to your audience is accurate and helpful. While there is no direct correlation between these Q&A’s and ranking, there is some speculation. Even if it doesn’t directly impact your business’ rankings, you want to ensure you are providing accurate information about your business.
Most questions and answers are hidden behind the “see all questions” link, but this is not always the case. If a user “likes” a question, it can appear directly on the knowledge panel with an associated answer as seen below.
Another reason for monitoring your Google My Business profile’s questions is that a customer may use it to file a complaint or write a review versus its intended use for asking questions. By monitoring this on a regular basis you can get ahead of the situation. If you do notice this to be the case, Google does have an avenue to allow for reporting of any misuse and/or abuse in the Q&A section. You can review Google’s guidelines here prior to reporting to ensure the offender is truly misusing the section.
You can even take this Google My Business feature one step further by creating your own FAQs to get ahead of your users and anticipated questions. Aside from providing valuable information to your users, it also makes your business listing look useful to those who are seeking answers to their questions.
6 Reasons Why Organic Social Media Content Matters for Your Hotel in 2020
The current hotel digital advertising climate is “pay to play,” meaning that major platforms now prioritize paid advertising over organic posts, making it extremely hard for your hotel’s organic posts to gain any traction in the online marketplace. This being said, an organic social presence is still very important in the hotel space. When consumers are researching hotels they often turn to social media to help make their decision, and not having a social presence could come as a red flag.
Six reasons why organic social media content is still important in the hospitality industry:
It’s cheap! You can post as much as you want on all your platforms for literally no cost (minus the man-hours involved of course).
It’s authentic. Unlike paid advertising, organic social media content gives you the chance to showcase who your brand is and what it stands for without promoting or selling anything.
It compliments your hotel’s paid advertising. If a consumer is served one of your ads and then later researches the hotel, they expect the messaging and content to match up. Complimentary messaging comes off as both authentic (see above) and balanced. Why not reinforce your ads with free, organic content?
It fosters engagement. With paid advertising taking over the digital space, organic social media has become a space to spark conversation and engage your audience. Use the opportunity to connect with your audience by asking questions, encouraging responses, and creating a space for conversation.
It helps build up your audience. Audience size matters when it comes to hotel digital advertising, there’s no question about that, but did you know organic engagement can help with that? Through Facebook, you can create a retargeting audience based around people who have engaged with your Facebook page, and then from there create a lookalike audience to assist in pulling more people into the booking funnel.
It serves as a help forum. Consumers and hotel guests are increasingly using social media pages as a way to contact your brand directly. Whether it’s to leave a review or send a direct message with questions, social listening is extremely important. If a consumer visits your page and sees there hasn’t been a post within the past couple of months (or even years!) that may lead them to think the page (or even property) is abandoned, leaving them without an outlet for contact.
Now that we’ve established how important organic social media is for a hotel’s brand presence and awareness, let’s dive into a few of our recommendations for the top players in the game!
FACEBOOK
Facebook is huge when it comes to social listening. Make sure to check your contact outlets at least once per day (direct messages, comments, and community posts). Guests will often reach out through these channels with questions, concerns, complaints, etc. You will want to respond within one day, especially if it’s a complaint. Often consumers use public social outlets as a cry for help or a last resort when no other contact options have worked.
When it comes to public complaints or negative comments, you’ll want to make sure you are also responding publicly and taking steps to alleviate whatever the issue is.
General posting: at least three times per week
Organic posts don’t need to be complicated. Posts could showcase amenities, your pool, the onsite restaurants, drink specials at the lobby bar, user-generated photos, property updates, community involvement, etc.
TWITTER
Although posting on Twitter isn’t as big of a priority as Facebook, we still recommend pushing whatever you post on Facebook to Twitter. Using a social publishing tool (like Hootsuite) is an easy way to do this.
Similar to Facebook, Twitter is also a place where people will try to contact the brand. Be sure to check your mentions and direct messages daily.
Aside from social listening, Twitter can also be a great platform for contacting influencers, sharing information from similar companies through retweets, and showcasing your brand voice in a fun way.
INSTAGRAM
Unlike Facebook, Instagram is a much more instant and in-real-time experience. This means you can’t just schedule out a bunch of posts ahead of time; you need to be actively engaging on the platform multiple times per day.
General posting: at least five times per week, or every day if you can. The more active you are on Instagram, the easier it will be to build a follower base and get your posts seen by your audience.
Include relevant hashtags in all your posts. We recommend starting with at least 10 and utilizing them in each post. Hashtags can include your hotel name, local hashtags, industry-related hashtags, or event hashtags. Make sure your hashtags have a large usage around them as well and not tags that have little to no use (Instagram will tell you how many times that hashtag has been used).
In order for your Instagram program to be successful, you need to have a large following. Here are a few tips for creating a follower base:
Be active in your own Instagram to show potential followers that you are worth following.
Start engaging with similar brands; follow them, comment on their posts, and interact with their followers.
Start following people who follow your competitors and/or similar brands (you can always unfollow these people later).
Interact in other brands’ contests.
Make sure you are replying to all comments and direct messages.
Make sure your Instagram handle is readily available (on your website, linked on Facebook, in your blog content, etc.).
Utilizing Instagram stories is also important, especially with younger audiences. Because Instagram’s algorithm is now similar to Facebook’s, stories are a great way to have your content seen by more people.
Additionally, you’ll want to create Story Highlights on your Instagram page and save your relevant stories there. Category ideas could include amenities, local attractions, food from an onsite restaurant, hotel activities, photos from your guests, etc.
Instagram Stories are also a great way for people to learn more about your property during the research phase, as they are front and center on the page.
PINTEREST
Once you’ve established yourself on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter and are ready to start exploring other options, Pinterest can be great for your hotel’s brand awareness. If your property has fantastic imagery, space for weddings, or is located in a buzzy neighborhood, creating and sharing boards on Pinterest may work in your favor.
We especially recommend Pinterest for properties that host weddings or have great image assets. It’s not uncommon for a bride to turn to Pinterest for her wedding planning needs, so getting your wedding imagery out there is a great way to advertise your beautiful space. The best part that is all you need to do is share it once and then you can rely on the Pinterest world to keep sharing and reposting your content. This also goes for hotels located in large, metro areas, like Los Angeles for example, as many consumers use Pinterest to plan vacations.
Make sure your boards are relevant to your property, include accurate descriptions, and updated. Photos within boards don’t need to be specific to your property either. Be sure to share similar photos to encourage sharing from other Pinterest users.
SOCIAL MEDIA CONTESTS
Although social media contests usually include some paid elements, they can still fall under the organic funnel. Whether you are looking to build up your followers, create more engagement with your audience, or increase your email list, social media contests can be majorly impactful.
Before you begin, make sure you are up to date with all the contest rules on your platform of choice. They are ever-changing, especially on Facebook and Instagram, and you want to be sure you are following the correct rules, as well as having your own Terms and Conditions page attached.
If your goal is to create more engagement with your Facebook and Instagram followers, we suggest a contest encouraging them to comment on and like your post. For example, one client recently held a contest to give away a free night stay and asked their followers to like the post and comment why they deserved to win. This not only garnered hundreds of comments on their post but helped the property create meaningful conversations with their audience.
If the goal is to build up your list of emails, then we recommend doing contests through a company called ShortStack. ShortStack helps you create visually appealing landing pages, sign up forms, and offers analytics on your contest in real-time. All you need to do is create the landing page, attach your Terms and Conditions, and then start running your contest, either via organic posting or paid advertising. Once the contest has ended, ShortStack makes it easy to download all the emails you collected straight from the platform which can then be used for digital retargeting and email marketing (make sure this is explicitly stated in your terms and conditions).
USER GENERATED CONTENT (UGC)
When it comes to social media trends, UGC is at the top of the list. What is User Generated Content, or UGC for short? It’s simply just that, content that is generated directly from your users. And when it comes to authenticity, you almost can’t do better than utilizing UGC.
UGC is great for organic posts because it helps foster conversation. Guests are more likely to comment and share photos that came from consumers like them because it’s more organic. UGC is also huge for the hotel space because the photos are real and more accurately depict your property than the photoshopped images housed on your website. In other words, potential guests trust UGC and trust the companies more that use it.
There are a few ways to gather UGC, including social media contests, asking your guests to share photos using certain hashtags, or just by asking to use photos yourself. However, gathering UGC can be very time-consuming. We recommend going with a UGC-specific company to take out all the legwork. Using UGC software is much more efficient because their technology will pull in the images for you, file them, make asking permission a breeze, and even help identify potential influencers. There are many UGC platforms out there, so choosing the right one will come down to need, cost, and ability.
VIDEO
We all know how important video is to digital advertising, and the same goes for organic social media. Facebook prioritizes video, both for paid and organic. We highly encourage you to use video assets on Facebook and especially on Instagram. Because Instagram is more interactive, you’ll want to use video assets both in regular posts and stories.
Google has been busy this year when it comes to its travel-related search product. Earlier this year the search engine made changes to its hotel search and announced the launch of Google Trips, its all-in-one trip planning tool to let you organize flights, hotels, activities and more all in one place. Ever-evolving changes to the SERP have the OTAs and other travel companies calling out Google as a travel monopoly, although Google continues to deny it. Let’s dive into a couple more new features related to hotels that launched over the past month.
Google My Business Launches Hotel Attributes
On August 9th, Google launched a new section under Google My Business hotel pages to customize the list of amenities and services available at the hotel.
Why is this change to Google My Business hotel attributes important for hotels?
Accurate and thorough Google My Business listing information is critical for hotel local SEO optimization and to ensure that your hotel is visible for searches related to the hotel’s amenities and services. Google’s hotel search tool uses Google My Business information to understand what type of hotel it is and match it up when users search phrases such as “San Diego resort with pool” or “Boston pet-friendly hotel”. If you don’t provide this data through your Google My Business listing information, your hotel is less likely to appear for these qualified searches. If your hotel needs assistance in building out a well-optimized Google My Business and local listing presence, please contact GCommerce for information on our local SEO service.
Google Hotel Reviews Expands Information Requested
Currently, when you are using Google’s hotel search you are able to filter by criteria such as family-friendly, business travel or couples. Right now this data is being provided by Google’s 3rd party data partner, TrustYou. Google has now rolled out an expanded process for collecting reviews that incorporates asking for this type of data as seen in this screenshot:
This hints that Google is not only putting more focus on building out Google My Business data to improve its hotel search user experience but that they may also drop TrustYou as a data provider.
Why is this change to the Google Hotel reviews process important for hotels?
For years hoteliers have focused on pushing Tripadvisor reviews as the number one priority in the review ecosphere. This change to its review collection process shows that Google’s investing more in using its own review data within its search engine data. This means hoteliers should be investing more in prompting guests to write reviews directly on Google for the local search benefits. Additionally, a recent study from Womply found that “businesses with more than the average number of reviews bring in 82% more in annual revenue than businesses with review counts below the average”. If you’re not investing in a platform to drive a greater quantity of reviews as well as monitor and respond to reviews, such as Revinate or Podium, your hotel is missing out on a large piece of the local SEO optimization that can assist in driving more direct revenue.
