5 Website “Housekeeping” Tips for Hospitality Businesses During COVID-19

It’s no secret that the travel and hospitality industry is feeling the burn of COVID-19. Neil Patel recently published data on how traffic rates and conversions have been impacted by the pandemic. 

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While travel and hospitality businesses are used to slow seasons throughout the year, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought a whole new meaning to the word. Unfortunately, many people have had to cancel their upcoming trips and accommodations, leaving the travel and hospitality industry in a serious pinch. 

Many businesses have had to stop bookings altogether. That said, it is extremely important that you continue your hospitality or hotel marketing strategy to keep the brand light burning. Now is not just a great time to deep clean your facilities or tackle those renovation projects you have been putting off – you should be conducting some digital housekeeping, too.

Your company’s digital presence is more important than ever - as the only contact you will be having for the foreseeable future with customers and leads is through the internet. Things will return to normal one day – and people will be looking for travel services once they are allowed to leave their homes. In fact, many will probably be aching to travel!

Hospitality SEO Tips During COVID-19

Now is the perfect time to tighten up your website, freshen up the content, and make some major improvements so you are prepared for your next round of bookings.

1.   Start with a Keyword Audit

Keywords are what connect you to new audiences.

Online behavior has been changing during COVID-19. Start by doing some keyword updating on your site. Go through your Google Analytics data to see which terms have been driving in recent traffic - and which ones are slacking on performance. 

You can do this by logging into your Google Analytics account.

Select “Acquisition”, then “Campaigns”, then “Keywords.” From here you can select either “Paid” or “Organic” to see your keyword performance reports, with data on each keyword’s bounce rate percentage, visit duration, and conversion data.

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For the short-term hotel marketing strategy, look for some new keyword opportunities that are available due to COVID-19. Google Trends has released some interesting search data related to Coronavirus - and they even publish daily insights.

While not all of this is relevant to the travel and hospitality industry, it could help you find new content topics and keyword phrases to capitalize on in the short-term. 

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You should also update your list of evergreen keywords that were trending before COVID-19. They will more than likely peak again once people are allowed to travel. You want to keep up with content creation during this time so that your SEO strategies don’t slack off!

Always remember, Google loves consistency – even in times of crisis!

2. Audit Your Content, Too

Now that you’ve got your list of keywords, it is time to comb through your website content and see where you polish things up, so to speak.

You will want to go through all of your website pages and see how you can revamp them to improve your content’s ROI.

A good start is to check the readability. 

You can simply copy and paste your content and use tools like Grammarly or Ginger to rate the readability score and point out any grammatical issues.

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Another good website content project to tackle would be optimizing your pages for rich snippets. These are selected paragraphs that Google will often use to answer a question directly.

For instance, if you type in the search “Can I buy a hotel gift card?” Google pulls up a rich snippet from hotels.com. 

This is because Hotels.com’s website had created a specific paragraph that answered this query perfectly – and it was formatted so Google could fit it into a snippet box. 

You can do this as well by either creating an FAQ-style page or simply rearranging your current content into “snippet bait.” This includes creating concise paragraphs addressing a specific question or creating bulleted lists, like this:

Creating snippet bait is a smart move because featured snippets attract nearly 9% of the clicks from the search engine results pages (SERPs). So, if you have had trouble earning top spots on the SERPs, this can be a great way to draw in more organic traffic

3. Focus on Behind-the-Scenes Details

Technical SEO matters a lot in a hospitality or hotel marketing strategy. 

It is what gives search engines the context clues to determine ranking. Pieces of your website like title tags and meta descriptions need to include important keywords and accurate descriptions of your business’s services so you pull in relevant traffic.

In fact, these “on-page signals” make up over one-fourth of your site’s local ranking factors in Google’s algorithm. Failing to have these details properly structured or missing important keywords could knock you down on the SERPs.

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Unfortunately, this content is rarely updated. The good news is it’s pretty simple!

Google has set some tips and guidelines for creating good page titles and descriptions. They recommend that you:

• Avoid keyword stuffing. Do not include multiple variations of the same keyword either, like: “hot tub”, “jacuzzi”, “whirlpool”, “hot tub spa.” Google’s algorithm is smart enough to understand synonyms; it is a waste to incorporate alternatives of the same word.
• Be descriptive but concise for the purpose of each page. For instance, rather than just naming your home page “home”, include additional features like “home page, book reservation, contact information, check rates.”
• Don’t use the same description for each page. Make the page’s purpose clear.

You should also search for website functions that are hurting your UX (user experience) – like broken links or 404 errors. You can use Google Analytics to do this by going to “Content – Content by Title” on your account’s dashboard. You then create a filter looking for 404 errors.

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Now, ironing out all the kinks behind the scenes of your website will require some digging. If you work with a hospitality marketing agency, this should be one of their first orders of business!

4. Consolidate Your Blog and On-Site Content

Having repeated content or overlapping blog posts can essentially make you compete with yourself on the SERPs. If you have multiple blog posts around the same topic, consider combining them or removing ones that are oldest or have lower traffic.

If you’ve got really old, outdated, or irrelevant posts on your blog that aren’t driving in traffic, it may not be a bad idea to delete them, too.

In order to determine which pages are worth keeping or removing, you should check for several KPIs (key performance indicators) like number of visits, bounce rate, dwell time, and conversions for call-to-action content (like “Book Now” or “Contact Us” pages).

If these numbers are low or have been consistently declining over long periods of time, then consider options to improve their performance.

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Given the reports for each page, some action items might include:

-     Leave it be

-     Re-format the content

-     Update with new keywords

-     Add new data/examples

-     Focus on building more inbound links

-     Combine similar blog posts into a long pillar page

You may not be getting tons of traction on ANY pages right now – so be sure to check your reports from months prior before COVID-19 came about!

5. Update Your Schema Markup 

Your website’s schema is the little preview that shows up on the SERPs. This will explain what content is on the page or what service your website provides.

You can create this yourself – otherwise Google will just pull content for you.

Writing your own is a fantastic way to include important location-based or industry focused keywords.

To do this, you can go to Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper and paste in your website’s HTML or URL. Then select “Start Tagging.” This will pull up your data items, like business name, address, hours of operation, and ratings. This information is very important to update during COVID-19, since your hours of operation or contact information may have changed.

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From here, you can also enter in missing tags that you would like to include. You can even select an image that will be displayed in your schema markup.

Now comes the trickier part of integrating your new schema markup code into your website. Here’s a good tutorial on it. You may want to hire a hotel branding agency to help with the process.

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Conclusion

COVID-19 is certainly presenting many challenges to the travel and hospitality industry.

It is important to remember that this time will pass and people will start traveling again. Now is the time to continue working on your most important digital tools so that customers can easily find your business when they are ready.

You’ve got a great opportunity in this moment to do a deep Spring cleaning on your website – make sure you take advantage of it and make some vast improvements! The last thing you want is to be behind on maintenance when people start traveling again!

For any help with your website and getting it up to snuff, please reach out to the team at LURE agency! We’re always happy to help!