How to use SEO to win more hotel booking revenue 7 essential tips for online hotel booking sites An Expedia Affiliate Network eBook Introduction SEO Matters How many online hotel bookings start with a search engine? More than you can rightfully ignore. Search engine performance has a big impact on your revenues. Traffic from search is more profitable than traffic from pay-per-click ads. And, since paid traffic’s getting more expensive, it makes a lot of sense to focus more on the organic kind. The good news: there are lots of things you can do to improve your search engine rankings. The bad news: there are thousands of travel websites hoping to win the exact same traffic you’re aiming for. That’s why you need to be good at search engine optimization (SEO). And that’s why we have produced this eBook, outlining seven top tips to help you rank higher on the right search terms, earn that traffic and convert it into revenues. Why is it so important? Because, done well, SEO is the most cost-effective way of generating traffic to your website. These tips will help you. Some of the tips may seem obvious but, in our experience of working with hundreds of EAN partners, many of them are still not widely practiced. For you, that’s an opportunity. We’ll cite some great references and resources for you to deepen your understanding of SEO. These are all gathered at the back! The golden rule of SEO Search Rank Position Average ClickThrough Rate 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 36.4% 12.5% 9.5% 7.9% 6.1% 4.1% 3.8% 3.5% 3.0% 2.2% Click Thru Rate 40% 35% 30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0% Search Rank Position This one is simple: the higher you rank on any given search term, the more traffic you get. The top ranking listing on any search results page gets 36% of the clicks. And the top three results get 58% of the traffic. (source: Zink) After these three coveted positions, the traffic falls off steeply. Conclusion? You need to rank as highly as possible on the search terms that matter the most to your business. Page one is a must. Beyond that, you might as well not be there. The second golden rule of SEO Google and the other engines invest billions ensuring they return the most relevant results to users. The best way to rank higher is to deliver relevant content and make that content easy to discover. Trying to beat the system or trick the search algorithm is the old way of doing SEO – it will eventually be penalized. Put the user first and you’ll always do better. It helps to understand the factors that Google uses in its algorithm so you can optimize your content. SEOmoz summarises these in an excellent report on search factors [see the references section at the back of this eBook]. The big factors are: Page and domain level link metrics Including your page and domain authority; the number of sites linking to it; the anchor text of those links, etc. Keyword usage Using keywords on the page and in title tags, etc. Social metrics Sharing on Facebook, Twitter activity, Google, etc. Page level traffic Reviewing click-through rates and bounce rates from Google for each keyword. These factors indicate to Google how well a page on your site should rank for relevance towards a specific phrase. We could write an entire book on each – and many have been written. But the tips that follow focus on the low-hanging fruit, the quick wins that many online hotel booking sites still aren’t getting right. 1 Get your niche and keywords right Tip: The most competitive search terms – like ‘cheap hotels’ – are far too difficult to win. Success in SEO depends on defining your niche so that you can compete for keywords that have plenty of traffic but aren’t too competitive. Search Volume Look at your offer and determine the things you’re uniquely great at. Then build your SEO strategy around these. Generic Terms ‘Romantic Miami Honeymoon Hotels’ is a winnable niche – as long as you’ve got a lot to say about romance, honeymoons, hotels and Miami. ‘Montreux Jazz Festival Hotels’ will be easier to win than ‘Switzerland Hotels’. Yes, the ‘long tail’ search terms have fewer searches than the big ones. But if you can rank highly and win a greater share of this traffic, you’re better off than being on page two for the monster search terms. Specific Terms Keyword research tools How do you find out how many searches a given keyphrase has and how competitive it is? There are lots of tools to help. Google’s own keyword tool is a popular one. SEO Book has also done an excellent collection of keyword tool reviews. SEOMoz has a good one too. You’ll find them all in the References section. 2 Tip: Get your site structure right A clear, intuitive site structure helps search bots (and humans) find their way around your site so they can index all of your content. A clear structure will also make sure that the search engines give your most important pages the highest authority. Three action points: •Decide on the most important information your users need – or tasks they want to complete – and make them easy to discover and reach. •Submit a site map to Google to help make sure your site is indexed properly. • Test crawl your site to uncover any problems. Try SEOMoz Pro Tools, Screaming Frog or Xenu for this. Typical crawl errors Search bots can trip up on things they can’t read, like: • Missing or blocked pages • Duplicate page content, titles, descriptions • Missing titles or descriptions • Redirects or canonical URLs • Logins, frames or input forms Continued: Get your site structure right 2 Tip: 1. Personalisation – Allowing visitors to customise the presentation to suit their specific needs is a conversion magnet. Logo Flights Flights Hotel Car Rental 2. Filter results – Shoppers love to tune results to suit preferences. These can also be inspirational – “Party town!” Travel Guides North America | Global Login Flights + Hotel Continent Locations: Please select... Departure City Please select... Filters: Prices: Top 30 All Arts and culture Canada Under £300 Beaches Mexico £300 - £350 History United States £350 - £400 Party Town Over £400 Scenery Dates: 3. Spectator Sport Please select... Nuuk £000.00 Moscow £000.00 Vancouver £000.00 London £000.00 New York £000.00 Tokyo £000.00 Melbourne £000.00 La Paz £000.00 Auckland £000.00 Suva £000.00 Beijing £000.00 Casablanca £000.00 Alindao £000.00 Sidney £000.00 Christchurch £000.00 Visual presentation of information – Information is presented dynamically on a map, making it easy for visitors to browse and select options that are interesting to them. 3 Tip: Generate quality content Links are the single most important success factor in SEO. And the greatest way to get good links is through fresh and useful content. Great content is what people want – and what search engines value the most. We talk about this in more depth in our eBook, How to use Content to Drive Hotel Bookings but the key is to create content that meets four criteria: Original Search engines don’t like duplicate content. You need to create your own. Engaging The goal is not just to get people to read or view it; it’s to get people to share it. Relevant The content has to speak to the specific topic or task that the user is most interested in. Keyword-rich Use the exact terms that prospects use in their searches. We can all pretty readily distinguish between great and poor content. Put in the effort, add a lot of value for your users and the search engines will reward you for it. Add social content Reviews, ratings and user-generated content are great for SEO and have the added benefit of driving conversion once people are on site. Reevoo and Distilled have published an excellent eBook on user-generated content for SEO. 4 Tip: Incorporate relevant keywords on landing pages People don’t just come in to your site at the home page. Search engines drive traffic to webpages across your site. It’s always a great idea to help them (and your visitors) out by adding keywords on each page. For generating hotel bookings, think of content that’s relevant for someone who’s actually ready to book. Try creating dedicated landing pages by hotel attribute: ‘Spa Hotels’, ‘Romantic Hotels’ or ‘Pet-Friendly Hotels’ would all benefit from a dedicated page full of relevant content. About Us | Responsible Business | Careers | News | Contact | Blog Spa Example Home | Our Hotels | Conferences & Meetings | Business Travel | Spa | Fitness | Golf | Weddings & Occasions | Food & Drink | Offers | Gift Vouchers Spa Homepage | Spa Days | Spa Promotions | Spa Breaks | Leisure Clubs & Membership A general ‘Travel Guide’ to a destination is good content but it will mostly attract people in the earlier stages of research – or people who have already booked and are planning their visit. Leisure and Spa membership Spa & Fitness Spa Days Spa Offers Spa Breaks Spa membership Add urgency Attracting traffic is half the battle. Converting it to bookings is the other half. Make sure you build a bridge from your contentcentric landing pages to your booking wizard – with lots of offers and urgency messages. 5 Tip: Earn backlinks Backlinks to your site from sites with high authority are gold dust for SEO. But these links don’t happen by accident, they’re the result of your excellent content – the content that people are proud to link to. Link-building shortcuts tend to fail. If your link-building process isn’t natural, you could get penalized by the search engines. Don’t do this This is bad link-building: •Go for quantity over quality – or get too many links, too fast •Have similar, perfectly optimized anchor text across many links •Have lots of links on worthless or unrelated sites •Focus all your links on just a few pages All of this will be suspicious to the search engines – as well it should be. 6 Tip: Get your title tags and descriptions right Every page on your website has ‘meta-data’ that describes what each page is about. You need to optimize this metadata so search spiders will know exactly what each page is about – and which keywords it’s relevant for. And your page descriptions are the snippets that come up in the search result pages, so make sure these are clear and compelling. They may not matter much to the search engines but they’re the things that convince people to click through to your site. Example of great use of the keywords “Romantic Getaways”: Action points: •Put the most important keywords at the beginning of the title tag •Limit the title tag to 70 characters •Give each page a unique title and description •Make page descriptions short and active, with clear calls to action •Limit page descriptions to 150 characters 50 Best Romantic Getaways - Articles | Travel + Leisure www.travelandleisure.com/articles/50-best-romantic-getaways-2010 Rediscover romance this year by getting away to one of these hot spots. 7 Tip: Use well-structured URLs A proper URL structure helps the search engines do their jobs better: indexing your content under the right keywords. A good example: So place the most important keywords as close to the domain as possible in your URLs. www.yourtravelsite.com/appperformMDLPDealsContent ?dealid=vegasvacation&cnt=PKH–em_htLas-Vegas-Hotels www.yourtravelsite.com/Las-Vegas-Hotels A bad example: And if you change your URL structure, make sure to set up 301 redirects from the old URLs to the new – or you lose all that SEO juice you’ve worked so hard to earn. A Five-Step SEO Process 1. Perform your keyword research 2. Develop content for your most important keywords 3. Plan your user experience and site structure 4. Promote your content for link-building and sharing 5. Track your performance to keep improving Conclusion SEO’s best when it contributes to a great user experience on your site – visitors coming to relevant pages based on their search phrase. And that’s what the search engines are constantly working to reinforce. Organic traffic is the gift that keeps giving (as long as you stick to the right principles), while paid traffic gets more and more expensive. We hope this eBook has given you some insights that will lead to changes that improve your SEO performance. And we’ll see you at the top of search results for “_______ _______ Hotels”! SEO References & Tools About Expedia Affiliate Network Google Webmaster Tools Google Analytics Google Website Optimizer Google AdWords Keyword Tool Expedia Affiliate Network (EAN) is part of Expedia Inc., the world’s leading online travel company. SEOmoz Search Engine Factors report SEO Book Collection of keyword research tools Reevoo and Distilled eBook on user-generated content and SEO The EAN blog – full of best-practice advice for our partners EAN creates the tools and technology that help millions of travelers find the perfect hotels for their next trips. As the world’s fastest-growing private label travel affiliate network, EAN works with over 10,000 partners in 33 countries to turn their web traffic into hotel bookings and happy customers. EAN helps companies airlines, online travel agencies and search marketers maximise their Total Partner Return™ through a combination of the world’s best hotel inventory, an optimized technology platform and the best partner support in the business. Find out more at ean.com. Follow us on Twitter: @ExpediaEAN