If you want to get more reservations and visitors on your hotel’s website, you need people to visit your site first. No matter where these people come from, however, the best sources of traffic are the search engines. People who find websites through a search engine are much more likely to use their credit card and make a reservation online. This means direct sales to the hotel.
If you have a hotel and your website is not converting visits into sales as much as it should, you have to know the following: even the most beautifully designed hotel websites have no chance of generating sales if they are not being seen by users. It is now when you must enter local SEO for the hotel.
What is SEO for hotels?
Imagine traveling for last minute work. Time is of the essence and you did not have time to book a hotel room before you left. Like most hotel reservations made from a mobile device, you need an urgent room for that same night.
You are already in your destination city and start looking for hotels near you. Instead of a large block of local search results, Google offers some of the lodging options in the form of information cards. Each card indicates not only where the hotel is, its review ratings and nightly rate, but also the size of the bed and the square footage of the room. The card allows you to book with two or three quick taps directly from the search result.
Now, what would you think if you knew that this complete, dynamic and sales-generating result did not cost the hotel more than a little time to add some code to its web pages?
Companies focused on the hospitality and tourism industry have obtained new ways to share information with search engines in the latest version of Schema, allowing hoteliers to specify everything from what type of rooms are offered to whether or not pets are allowed.
These improvements in the marking standards that Google uses to improve the search results of a site, set the stage for travelers to evaluate more in detail what the companies have to offer, and book directly.
Schema Markup for Hotels
Schema Markup is definitely one of the latest developments in SEO that are breaking patterns. It is a standard way to organize and disseminate information on a web page, as a data source incorporated directly into a web page, either through a special markup on the key content of the page or metadata.
Schema Markup is a code (semantic vocabulary) that you place on your website to help search engines get more informative results for users. If you have used Google Rich Cards, you will know exactly what we are talking about.
Search engines can more easily identify those key points, and use that knowledge to better rank the page in their natural search results and place some of those key points in their search results. Currently, there are more than 25 ways to appear on Google, many of which are driven by this marking.
When managing and organizing the information related to a hotel in the web content with Schema, there are three main axes:
A business accommodation, hotel, hostel, tourist center or camping site established. Basically the place and the local businesses that house the current units of the establishment, which can even include several buildings.
An accommodation, that is, the establishment’s actual establishment units – hotel rooms, suites, apartments, meeting rooms, camping pitches, etc. These are the current objects that are offered for rent.
An offer to rent a hotel room (or other forms of accommodation) for a particular type of use (for example, occupancy), generally more restricted by early booking requirements and other terms and conditions.
In Schema, an offer for a hotel room uses the same patterns as an offer for any other type of product or service. However, a hotel room is not a subclass of Product or Service.
When an instance of an Accommodation is defined, which is offered by a hosting business, it is described as a specific category, which is appropriate for the product being offered. This is how the hotel makes offers for a room, which in this case is also a product.
How does it work?
Summarized, Schema tells search engines what your data means, not just what it says.
The content of your website is indexed and returned in the search results, that always happens. But with Schema Markup, some of that content is indexed and returned in a different way.
How? Schema markup tells the search what that content means. For example, let’s say the word “Hotel California” appears in an article. The search engine sees this and produces a SERP entry with “Hotel California”. However, if I put the correct outline marking around the name “Hotel California”, I just told that search engine that “Hotel California” is the name of a Place of Accommodation and that it is a physical business, and this is not confused for example with the name of the famous song.
Go ahead to the game
Even as simple as it is to implement, you will be surprised to learn that very few businesses use Schema Markup yet. Although Google Rich Cards have already gained popularity in some sectors, they are not yet the “natural” way to achieve local SEO results.
Schema Markup is one of those SEO innovations that are here to stay. Now is the time to learn and implement relevant microdata to improve the results of your search. Doing it immediately will put you ahead, giving you an advantage in the competition.
CG Media – Local SEO NYC
