This article tackles the topic of local SEO and addresses the hotel and camping industry. It provides you with real life figures collected through our clients from this field. From digitalisation to the optimisation of your online visibility, we give you some tips and best practices to increase your online performances.
1- Increase of online actions
Customers’ habits have changed over the past decade. Envies, needs evolve and companies have to keep up with it. In order to understand the ever growing importance of digital in this industry, we gathered data provided by Google My Business between 2018 and 2019 on our current customers from this field.
This table below focuses on hotels and camping resorts and highlights the sharp increase in different key elements. This data basically depicts how people are looking for you, and thus why it is important for your business to present updated and consistent information throughout the internet. It sends a positive sign to the customer that’s looking for you, and definitively influences them in their decision making process.
Some vocabulary to all be on the same page:
- Indirect searches: Searches not directly targeting your brand
- Direct searches: Searches clearly mentioning your brand
- Itinerary requests: Internet users clicking on the “Directions” button from Google Maps
- Phone calls: People calling from the phone number on your Google My Business’ listing
- Clicks on the website: How many people clicked on your website pages.
Additionally, as for every industry, reviews are becoming increasingly important for both customers and businesses. Customers check online reviews, average score and so on before deciding to go to a business or not, and businesses use GMB as a showcase for their shops, they can use it to spread their values through answering reviews, or even communicate better by having thorough information.
These figures illustrate that people are leaving more and more reviews from their experience in your hotels or campings. Therefore, you should take them seriously and manage them accordingly.
2 – Increase your online visibility
In order to increase your online visibility, you have to follow different steps. But know that having created listings for each of your shops and providing basic information such as your business’ name, address, phone number and a few pictures is already boosting your online visibility.
In order to increase your online visibility, you have to follow different steps. But know that having created listings for each of your shops and providing basic information such as your business’ name, address, phone number and a few pictures is already boosting your online visibility.
In case you don’t have listings for all of your businesses, you should:
- Request the ownership of a business profile if someone else is owning it, or if no one owns it
- Create your missing Google My Business listings so that each of your local business has one
- Delete any duplicates you can find
Moreover, you should diffuse your information on as many platforms as you can, such as directories and GPS (Waze), Social Media (Facebook) and search engines (Google, Bing).
Categories
In order for your businesses to appear higher on search results, you need to add your main business’ category and up to 9 other sub-categories. That way, if a user types in “Hotel”, they will find you if you provided this information.
Attributes
Attributes allow you to describe your business, its services and facilities. You can quickly inform your customers if reservations are required, or if you are ‘pet friendly’ for instance.
Moreover, you can use a feature called Google Posts to communicate with your customers about special offers, events or discounts; in short, about what is going on in your local business. We recommend you to use the “EVENT” post that remains visible for more than 7 days on Google My Business.
Finally, adding secondary URLs on your GMB appears to be really helpful and time saving for customers if they want to book a room or service for example. They can do so thanks to those links redirecting them on the right webpage.
Get found …. online!
