Sophisticated Online Lodging Solutions
It’s Friday so I figured a little brevity is ok. Our office is located right on the bay in downtown Miami and today when I walked downstairs for some coffee, I saw this guy:
One of the wonderful things about Miami is the close access to the bay and the ocean. Right now during “Winter”, the manatees migrate to the warmest water they can find. In this case a marina outside our office. In a few weeks, he will most likely swim out to the wider bay to feed on the sea grass. Manatees are very gentle animals that are unfortunately endangered. Many are injured in boating accidents, since the tend to lie still right under the surface making them very hard to see from a distance.
Hardly a day goes by when I am not speaking to a hotelier or lodging manager about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This is a topic that has continued to become more and more important in most hotels’ and vacation rentals’ marketing mix. And that’s no wonder, as properly done, SEO can very effectively increase any lodging organization’s bottom line. But beyond catch phrases like: “drive tons of traffic” or “rank at the top of Google” and other hyperbole common in the sales process of SEO services, how is a successful SEO project run and how can you be sure you are getting the results you are paying for?
Given the title of this article, the answer is obviously, yes. However, many times the evaluation and metrics produced from an SEO project do not really tell the stakeholders what they need to know: Is this working very well, ok or poorly? The reason is, often only certain metrics are measured and those items are not being evaluated in a full context. Below is an outline of metrics and other considerations that when taken together produce the context that allows you to truly evaluate whether or not your SEO project is successful.
Before starting a new project, it always makes sense to define some objectives. I think most of the time the objective is to drive more traffic to the property website, which is likely to lead to closed bookings. Ensuring you have top ranking for key phrases is important, but not the only strategy as we will discuss below. Establishing Your Baseline If your website has been live for more than a few months, you are most likely already receiving organic search engine traffic (but probably not to the degree that you would prefer). Take a snapshot of that data and save it. All SEO gains are incremental and if you don’t know where you started from, you won’t be able to measure your progress.
While it would be nice for any hotel to rank #1 for a phrase like “Hotel”, that is not realistic for any individual property or small chain website. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t set your sights high. Pick the 3-4 attributes that represent your property best (e.g. luxury, boutique, business etc.) and your market areas in incrementally smaller segments (e.g. South Florida, Miami, Miami Beach, South Beach). Then, use a tool like Google’s keyword research tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) to research the number of monthly searches you get for each combination when paired with common words like “hotel” or “resort”. The more searches, the higher potential. This tool also gets you some insight into the competiveness of each keyword. Do some trial searches in a search engine and see which sites rank above you. That’s your competition. The best keywords are the ones that reflect your property the best, have the highest amount of traffic and the least amount of competition. Measure Your Rankings Once your project is underway, start measuring your ranking for your top keywords. Ranking position is critical. The difference between ranking #1 and ranking #8 for a popular keyword typically produces very significant differences in SERP (Search Engine Result Page) click-throughs to your site. What’s also important is that today, rankings are fluid. Because of constantly updated links, algorithms and content changes, sites move up and down in the rankings. Keeping track of rankings manually is very time consuming, so using a tool that does it automatically allows you to track it fairly frequently and graph it over time. You want steady improvement and top 3 rankings for at least some of your keywords. The best tools also cross reference the ranking data with keyword popularity and actual site analytics.
Assuming you are embarking on a successful SEO campaign, what type of changes should you see? A tripling of traffic in a month? That’s fairly unlikely. Rather, measuring organic search engine traffic as a percentage of all traffic, you should start to see an increase in that share. You should also see a shift in the actual keywords that bring you traffic (this requires that you also study your website analytics report carefully). Whereas in the past your property name might have been your primary search word, you should now start to receive significant traffic on other keyword combinations, preferably the ones that best match your core offering. This is important, since those searches are likely to have the greatest online conversion (percentage of visitors that actually book on your site). If your site has been properly structured and optimized, you should also start receiving more “long tail” traffic. Those are searches that have a fairly specific set of search words. This would be a 4 or 5 word search phrase, e.g. “Art Deco Boutique Hotel in Miami”, where each combination is fairly rare, but given the many possible permutations, they still represent a rather large traffic opportunity.
Once you have the above-mentioned statistics in place, how do you know whether you are successful or not? As mentioned, SEO progress tends to be incremental, so that clear indicators, like a doubling in the number of bookings from the previous month is rather rare. Instead, looking at the metrics described above over a few months time, you should see steady improvement across the board. And what is failure? Failure is no progress or even sliding backwards while actively engaging in SEO activities. Failure can also be that you are able to drive more traffic to your property website, but that traffic is not converting at the same level as you have experienced in the past. If your site has an effective booking engine and relevant content but you are not seeing an increase in booking conversions, chances are the keywords that you are using are not reflective of what your visitors are expecting when clicking on your search engine link. Either way, failure requires reevaluation, both of strategy, and accountability; the people that work for you must acknowledge problems and take responsibility to rectify them.
SEO is not a onetime thing. Even if you are able to reach a higher level of success, many of your competitors probably also employ SEO techniques and the landscape changes all the time. You will have occasional setbacks, but if you have a credible offering and an effective website that evolves with the times (lately we have found that various social media tools help generating significant incremental search engine traffic); you should be able to generate a positive return on your investment. How to Evaluate and Move to the Next Level? I am aware I just fed you a bunch of facts, terms and metrics, some of them rather esoteric. The purpose was to give you some insight and background. Don’t be afraid to ask your SEO team to explain and justify their results. After all, they are the experts. The idea is not accept everything at face value. Being an educated consumer always makes sense, especially in the SEO world… I’d love to get your feedback. What works for your company? What doesn’t? Have questions? Need advice? Email me at rob@bookt.com and let’s chat. Maybe I could even include your comments and ideas in my next article – coming soon!
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