Your SEO Marketing Strategy for Beach Resorts
A beautiful resort, a strategic location, excellent cuisines on offer, a broad range of amenities just to name a few. All these statements are just meant to attract and retain customers. The challenge is that most hotels and resorts fail to attract new customers and retain existing ones. The secret behind effective marketing is the strategy that the marketers use. We are living in a world where everything is going digital. You cannot under estimate the role that SEO plays in your hotel and resort marketing strategy.
Travelers use several channels to research and identify the best deal that will meet their needs. Travelers no longer rely on the travel agents as the only vetting source for beach destinations and hotels. The consumer is becoming increasingly active in researching and exploring the available options. The process also entails relishing these options.
Integrating Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in the marketing strategies for luxury resorts is becoming more important than ever before. SEO works well when targeting travelers and if you want your brand to maintain a competitive edge in the market. The travel industry heavily relies on online marketing strategies whose role is becoming more important than ever before.
This article presents some of the online marketing tips that can enhance the brand visibility of your resort. These tips can assist your hotel to attract more tourists from all over the world as you spread some of the beautiful words about your destination. The primary intention is to ensure that your business in on the right track of growth.
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Focus on Proper Keyword Research
Keyword research plays a critical role towards the success of your website. Not doing keyword research is like shooting blanks in the dark. It is important to learn how to find resort related keywords and integrate them into the SEO strategy for your resort if you wish to record success.
A keyword refers to a term, word, or phrase that people type as they look for information on various search engines like Google. For instance, a couple can use the words “best romantic resort in Maui” while looking for the right vacation destination for their honey moon. If you have a resort in the region and have not optimized it for the keyword “best romantic resort in Maui,” there is a high chance that the couple will not come across your website. The process of using keywords to enhance your position in the search engine is what online marketers call organic ranking.
One thing you could be asking is how do I get the right keywords. You cannot just wake up one day and begin to think about the best keywords. You need to find the exact phrases that people type into the search engine. Several keyword tools can assist you to meet this objective with a lot of precision.
Some of these keyword research tools are free and readily available online. You can get access to some of them by searching through the search engines. Just learn how the chosen keyword tool works and search the best keywords according to the hospitality industry and your region. Optimizing your content with such keywords will greatly enhance the visibility of your website.
One thing you need to note is that you should place the keywords in the body of your text in a natural manner. Trying to force the keyword in the context of your content can do more harm than good to your marketing efforts. It will also be meaningless if you use inappropriate keywords that no one is searching online.
Why It’s Important
The website for your resort may organically rank for some terms on its own, and this is a very wonderful thing. However, you must always have a plan in place even if this is the case. You can significantly enhance the search ranking position and resort engine optimization by making use of targeting the right keywords when creating content on your website.
When optimized properly, your resort website will appear on top of the search engine results when a user searches using the matching keywords. You also need to understand that your site can rank for multiple keywords on a single page. Getting to the first page of Google for your keyword is important in driving more traffic and sales to your beach resort.
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Create Content Pages to Enhance the Experience of Your Guests
Suppose you took an inventory of the property of your website right now! Ask yourself how it can be useful to your guests especially if they understand which room that want to lodge in. If your answer is ‘very little,’ then you are not alone. This response is a clear indication that you should begin to create content that is useful to your guests.
Travelers always look for more than just a place to stay when they begin to plan for their trip. The visitors will look for a resort that will offer them places to go, things to do, or restaurants to try. Offering such services will allow you to bond with the traveler and there is a high likelihood that they will choose to stay at your place.
Make sure you highlight how staying in your hotel or resort will make visiting such attraction more convenient. Also, you need to explain the amenities that your resort has can complement the activities in the region. For instance, you can put down a list of the nearby golf courses and how you can get them if you have visitors that love golf.
The baseline is publishing content that is not only informative but also engaging. You can have very rich content but the way you put it forward is very critical. The type of content you publish on your website will determine the bounce rate. Reducing the bounce rate is a sure way of increasing the number of visitors who will spend time researching your resort in the future.
You need high-quality content that is 100 percent unique for your blog. Such an approach will make your resort website to stand out from the rest. Travelers will take the time to read what your message as long as it is interesting. No one wants to waste time reading something that does not add value to his life. It beats logic to repeat things that are obvious on your website. The traveler will want to learn something new that will make him choose to lodge at your destination.
Why It’s Important
You will help your website with ranking keywords and rise in the search engines by producing more pages and content. You need to frequently publish fresh content that is up to date on your website. Also, make sure you direct any content that is no longer relevant to a newer post or page on your website.
Visitors will spend more time on such a site to familiarize themselves with your brand. You will enhance the chances of booking in more guests by becoming the go to resource for the things the traveler can do in the region.
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Make Use of Interesting Short Videos
We cannot run away from the fact that most people spend a lot of their time on social media and travelers are not an exemption. You can upload and share short videos on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram among other social media platforms. Such videos can get viral on social media if you target them to the right audience, but mostly, your videos are an excellent resource for you to use to increase the booking experience for your future guests.
The good thing with short videos is that you can produce them with a lot of ease just like photos. Allow your employees to visit some of the remarkable tourist attraction destinations in the area and shoot some short videos from there. You can also take shoot videos for some of the events in your place such as an annual festival.
The videos should be short for to keep the visitor engaged. No one has the time to listen to a very long clip. Make the videos precise and exciting if you want to attract higher viewership. The most important thing is to have a call of action for each of your videos.
Why It’s Important
Apart from the fact that videos engages the viewers more, the videos will also begin to rank in the search engine and this will enhance the exposure of your brand to potential guests. YouTube ranks in the second position in the internet search engines and travelers will desire to virtually see where they are booking as they research for their upcoming trip.
Videos will give you an opportunity to showcase your resort or brand and bring your future travelers into your doorsteps from their mobile device or desktop and send viewers to specific landing pages on your website.
From a SEO standpoint, having links to your website from your videos will also help your rankings because video sites such as YouTube are considered to have high authority links.
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Set-Up a Mobile-Friendly Website
Mobile searches have surpassed desktop ones and any website that lacks mobile optimization will receive ranking punishment from Google. Make sure that your website is appropriately optimized for mobile searches if you want it to appear on the first page of the search engine results.
Why It’s Important
Having a mobile-friendly website will show your audience that you are accessible and current. Google penalizes sites that are not mobile friendly and rewards those that comply with this requirement. Given that most travelers use their Smartphones and tablets to do their search, having a mobile friendly website will increase the likelihood of getting someone to spend more time looking at your brand.
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Make Your Website secure
The address of a secure website will always begin with https instead of the standard http sites. An excellent example of a secure site could be https://beachresortmarketing.com. The address bar will also have a lock to tell your visitors that they are visiting a secure site. Travelers wanting to book their vacation want to be sure that their information is safe as they search for the best resort to stay in during their trip.
Why It’s Important
Your visitors will have a lot of confidence when you have a secure website in place. Visitors can go ahead to book for rooms through your site if they are sure their payment information will not be subject to a risk. Any website that allows online transactions must have this encryption of high security that allows for financial transactions. Having an HTTPS website is also a ranking factor with Google in its algorithm.
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Start Blogging
A blog is a handy hub in any website. This section will allow your target audience to read some interesting articles and stories among other content regarding your resort, the experiences and the surrounding areas that the visitor can expect when they stay in your place. It allows you to showcase what you are offering when guests come to your resort.
Why It’s Important
A highly useful blog can attract thousands of visitors to your website. The blog can also assist your resorts website to increase the number of indexed pages on the site. This approach will enhance the visibility of your website in the search engine and increase the organic search traffic. You can also boost your content asset in the form of blog posts which you can share on social media and encourage viral marketing.
You can also use blogs to establish the brand of your resort as a top influencer or thought leader in your industry. This platform will allow you to spread information about your cause to the entire world. You will also be able to gather insights feedback and other valuable data from your target audience. Finally, a blog will assist you to build and maintain healthy relationships with your prospective and existing clients.
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Create Social Media pages
Some of the social media platforms that offer free channels or pages for business include Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google +, Instagram and Pinterest. Any resort should leverage on some of these sites if it wants to improve its online visibility.
Facebook has close to 1.44 billion users every month, 1.25 billion of these monthly Facebook users access the platform through their mobile phones. Additional statistics reveal that 47% of all internet users are on Facebook.
Additionally, Twitter has 284 million users and 88% of them use their mobile devices. Instagram has 300 million users and close to 70 million videos and photos are sent each day on Instagram. 53% of internet users aged between 18 t0 29 years are on Instagram. Finally, 80 percent of those internet users who are on Pinterest are female. These statistics explain why you need to create social media pages for your resort website.
Why It’s Important
Having an active presence on social media comes with an endless list of benefits. From the viewpoint of SEO, your social media pages are high authority sites by the various search engines like Google. Linking to your website from different social media pages will give you powerful links that will boost the ranking of your site. It’s wise to link each of your social media pages together if you want to give each of them more power. You can literally rank your social media sites in the search engines as well.
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Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is an online marketing strategy that comprises of both creative and technical elements. Marketers use SEO to organically increase the authority, visibility, and presence of your website in search engine results.
The SEO techniques you employ will inform the search engine everything they need to be aware of regarding the quality of your content, how it is relevant to the specific content, and how much your audience can trust you. SEO has everything to do with your organic presence. The primary role of SEO is to drive unpaid user traffic to your site which makes it a real golden egg for the traffic of your website.
Why It’s Important
This idea is straightforward for website owners to understand. Any website that has no optimization in the search engine can rarely appear in the search engine results organically. Remember everyone strives to get his website at the top of the first page in the search engine results. Suppose you are searching the name of your hotel in Google and it comes out in the third or fourth page. Such results can be a nightmare, but you can reverse the trend with a little SEO tweaking to your website.
Guests who are searching for your brand name should find your site on the first result. The search is highly targeted and shows that the visitors have a lot of interest in you. Such a person is close to making a booking that anyone who types a keyword like “top resort hotels in Mexico.”
On-page SEO ranking of a piece of content on the search engine results page (SERP) is driven by the authority and relevance you build through the content you publish on your website. The first rule for on-page SEO optimization is to use the keywords that your target audience might be using to search for and ensure those keywords are relevant on the page. The most important thing is to make sure that you place this keyword in the body of your text in a natural manner.
The foundation of all on-site SEO is keyword research. Since the Hummingbird update from Google, the role that entities play has changed where topics now take the role of keywords in SERPs. Google has made great strides in concept grouping and synonym identification. You don’t need to create multiple pages about the same thing if you want to optimize for different keywords. Instead, have a single, well-written, citation worthy topic page and optimize them for multiple keywords. This is another great reason of using long-form content that is longer than 1000 words.
Meta Tags or Title Tags
These elements are key in the placement of keywords because what you write inside the ‘title’ tag appears in your results as the title of your page. The title tag should not exceed 65 characters, and the keyword should be near the beginning. Complying with these instructions will make sure that your page ranks highly in the search engine results.
Images
One thing you need to understand is that search engines don’t have the capacity to read images. However, they can read the textual description through the file name and tag of images. The two instances should include keywords and provide a description for the image. For instance, it could be a banner ad, lobby, or guest room.
Internal Linking
These are phrases or keywords that you link from one page to another page within your website. Internal links assist users to navigate and help in establishing the importance of search engines by the number and quality of links to a given page.
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Off-Page SEO & Backlinks
This is the cherry that lies at the top of the cake in the SEO strategy for your resort. You can improve the authority of your site by obtaining fresh and unique links from other high authority websites. Backlinks have a direct effect on the ranking of your site in the search engine.
For the hotel industry, the best starting point could be to have your hotel listed in the well ranked authoritative niche and local directories. You could try to use .org, .gov, and .edu directories; universities alumni directory and chamber of commerce. Strive to ensure that your top employees get listed in some of these top directories. An excellent example of beneficial directories for a domain could be non-profit contributor profile directories.
Why It’s Important
75 percent of SEO relies on off-page optimization. The process entails using inbound signals to build the online authority of your website. Off-page SEO is the relevance and quality of links to your website which will establish the authority of your website and ultimately influence your results in the search engine.
We can sun up link building in four words which include quality, authority, quantity and diversity. The similarity of internal links to external ones is that they use anchored keywords but point to the page of another domain and not a page from your own website. It is key to have links that come from other websites because the search engine uses them to evaluate and rank your website. No one will link to your website unless you are an authority in the niche.
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Social Connections and Interactions
Social media enables businesses to create meaningful connections with customers about their products and services by setting up an open online dialogue with users.
However, social activity can have a powerful secondary impact on your SEO efforts. Search engines will use your social signals as a factor to determine rankings. Branded social signals will increase the strength of your resorts brand and importance in the eyes of Google. Therefore, you cannot undermine the role of social interactions connection in supporting SEO activities.
The usual suspect social media platforms for building engagement include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest. You can consider integrating some of them in your future marketing efforts.
TrірAdvisor.com: – Though more of a travel website than a social network site, it can assist customers in finding travel information, posting their opinion on a product and reviews of travel related content and engaging in interactive travel. Primarily user-generated content, TrірAdvіѕоr.com is a direct platform for your customers.
WAYN.com: – This is one of the largest travel social networking sites that has more than 20 million users.
Bootsnall.com: This is a travel community for the independent travel community. It will give you a unique thing to get connected to Indie travel.
Why It’s Important
It can increase the number of visitors, brand signals and higher engagement among users who search your site. It will make sure that your content gets to the right users who are influencers. All this can result into more natural links that will directly come to your website and further sharing and this cycle will repeat itself. All these secondary effects will significantly boost your SEO efforts.
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Optimize Local Listings
One surprising thing is that this is the Achilles heel for most hotels and other businesses that invest in SEO in the hospitality industry. However, even some of the biggest brands in this industry miss out on this critical element of SEO. It is a must to optimize your local listings by 100% no matter how well-known, big or small your brand is. Travelers will search according to your location, and it will be tough for them to get to you if you are not optimized in the local listings. Therefore, you must abide by this expectation if you want to get on top of the search engine results.
Why It’s Important
It does not matter how many branches your resort has because each still is still a local business. A hotel will always be a local business by default. Optimizing your site for local listings may turn out to be the most key factor that search engines take into consideration while indexing local businesses. The location of a hotel is a unique factor to put into consideration. The best way to optimize for local listings is claiming and actively building the Google + local page for your resort. Your website will appear in the SERPs if you take this approach every time the hotel appears for local searches.
Take Action and Apply These Tips Into Your Resort Marketing Strategy
SEO is a critical component of any website because a site that is properly optimized will drive relevant traffic and reach out to consumers who are searching for your services online. Search Engine Optimization is a long term strategy that will help the growth of your beach resort.
Using best practices is more important in the hospitality industry because over 80 percent of travel shoppers begin their search online and keeping your brand in front of online searches will get you more visitors to your website where you start to get them into your sales funnel.
However, you need to be careful as you apply these tips. Make sure that you are writing for human beings and not the search engines. Google will penalize you if you attempt to deceive the search engines by using bad practices. You will also not attain a top-ranking status overnight. The process is gradual as you continue applying these techniques. Google has over 200 ranking factors in their algorithm and they are always changing and adapting.
In case you wish to hire an SEO company to manage your campaigns, make sure you understand the techniques and terminology that they use so that you can be educated on what processes they use. At Beach Resort Marketing, we have strong communications with our clients and make sure that every question is answered.
While SEO does not have any quick tricks, it’s important to understand the basic elements that are explained in this guide.
All you need is to put your website to the path of success.
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