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!