Google Trends shows that over the past 12 months, despite peaks and troughs throughout the year, February 2017 has seen the peak of popularity for people searching for ‘Hotels in Leicester’ online. Hopefully, this is a trend set to continue and if trends from last year are anything to go by, there should be similar numbers of people searching for ‘Hotels in Leicester’ in March, May, August and September this year.
Firstly, what is SEO?
You will no doubt at least have heard of ‘SEO’ as it’s one of marketing’s most important digital areas. What it stands for is ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ and what it means, in short, is that a website and content for a website, is optimised to appear as high up on search engine rankings as possible. In an ideal world, your website would rank in position 1 on search engines such as Google, so that people who are searching for a certain term find your website because it is most relevant to what they are searching for.
There is another way to rank at the top of search results, which is by using advertisements. However, these are clearly labelled as ads, so there is less trust placed in these than in what are called ‘organic search results’. This is because whilst the ad may have been programmed to come up when someone uses the search terms that you have put into a search engine, people often find that the website the ad takes you to is not always as relevant as an organic search result would be.
Why SEO is important for hotel marketing
How do you book a hotel nowadays? Unless you have a long standing favourite, whose telephone number is in your mobile phone contacts and whose postcode is already programmed into your satnav, even if a hotel has been recommended to you, in order to book it, you’ll probably at least go online to find the telephone number. However, the chances are you’ll use a search engine like Google to search for a hotel in the place that you want to stay, for example, by typing in something like ‘Hotels in Leicester’.
How can hotels use online marketing to show up in Google results?
The next question is invariably, ‘so how does a hotel come up on relevant Google search results?’
The seemingly obvious answer to this, is to be featured on sites such as Trip Advisor, Late Rooms and Trivago as these sites consistently feature on the first page of Google results, when people are searching for hotels. However, the first thing that most people will do when they use a directory-type site, is to filter hotels by price. In this case, unless you are able to compete with large chains and budget hotels in terms of how cheap you can be, you’re not going to get noticed here.
What if your hotel could be featured on the first page of Google all by itself?
It’s not impossible. Take the search term ‘Leicester hotel deals’ which is put into Google as a search term at least 100 times on average per month. When this is put into Google, hotels such as The Belmont Hotel, Campanile and the Hilton Hotel all feature in their own right, on the first page of Google.
Are many people relying on SEO to find hotels?
Even if people don’t know that they rely on SEO to find what they want, there are thousands of people each month who rely on search engines such as Google to find what they are looking for. In the case of hotels for example, between 1,000 and 10,000 people search for ‘Hotels in Leicester’ on average per month, from places within the UK. This represents a lot of potential customers, who could be find your hotel in their first page of search results, if you are using digital marketing and SEO effectively.
Why is featuring on the first page of Google results so important?
The reason I keep going on about appearing on the first page of Google is because people very rarely venture onto the second page, before they click through to a website.
Research has shown that 90% of people do not go past page 1 of Google when they are searching for something and even within the first page, around 50% of people will only ever click on the top 3 organic results.
How can your hotel use online marketing better?
If you’re not sure of the answer to this, we are happy to help! We have a team of online marketing specialists who can talk through ideas and provide you with guidance to help improve your online marketing performance, either by doing it for you or by giving you the knowledge and tools that you need to do it yourself.
Website development and design for Leicester hotels
We are also specialists in website development and design and have created, maintained and optimised websites for hotels across the country (including some in Leicester and Leicestershire). If you think that your hotel’s website would benefit from an expert review, or if you are looking into a revamp, feel free to get in touch. We don’t charge for our first meeting with you and you could find that achieving the results that work best for your hotel, are far more cost effective than you may think!
