Travel and accommodation: SEO basics
Backlinks. Content. Meta copy. Page load speed. SEO (and digital marketing in general) can be a complicated thing to get your head around. The good news is our specialists are here to make things super simple and crystal clear. We love working closely with clients across the hospitality space to create tailored marketing strategies.
So let’s come together and give your brand the leg up it needs to stand out from the crowd. The hospitality industry is fiercely competitive, after all. And it’s only with the right approach to SEO that you can capture your customers’ attention, build brand trust and drive sales.
Why do you need SEO for travel & accommodation businesses?
Great question! And the answer’s pretty simple. Over 50% of leisure travellers and 64% of business travellers start planning for their trips by researching online. This means there’s a world of opportunity for savvy businesses to advertise themselves online when these prospects are typing away from behind their keyboards.
But how can you actually get noticed? Well, one bullet-proof approach is through organic search ranking. For hotels and travel businesses in particular, having strong organic search placement unlocks plenty of potential business.
To be successful, you must have a carefully implemented SEO campaign. The kind that requires meticulous planning, a unique content strategy, and a clear understanding of your target audience and their interests.
That’s why you should always work with a trusted digital marketing agency. One that can tick all the above boxes. And score you knockout results.
What if I own a hotel – is SEO still important?
A subset of travel and accommodation SEO, hotel-specific SEO is just as important as it can boost your digital presence. It can help you to become more visible to search engines, increase bookings on your website and stay ahead of the competition. Don’t rely on affiliate booking sites to get your hotel’s name out there. SEO is a great and affordable marketing option for hotels.
How can I improve my hotel SEO?
You can improve your hotel SEO by using the right keywords, creating unique content, optimising your page load speed and using analytics to track and adjust your overall strategy.
How can I increase direct hotel bookings through my website?
You can increase direct hotel bookings by providing incentives or loyalty perks to your customers. For instance, you could offer discounts or coupons when people purchase a certain package, or if they return regularly. Make sure your website is easy to use as well. A great user experience will encourage people to choose you over your competition.
Strategy Backed by Execution
We deliver SEO management in Sydney for brands across finance, ecommerce, healthcare and SaaS. Our case studies demonstrate structured planning, disciplined rollout and measurable commercial growth.
The Memo
Mattel Australia
Sydney Tools
SCANLAN THEODORE
TRAILD
Podium
Lifely
Kogan
MAAP
Kennedy
Roll’d
Billy J Boutique
Kudosity
Autobarn
digiDirect
VIKTORIA & WOODS
ZANUI
Rail Online
FRAUDWATCH
iSelect
Kookaburra Sport
KOOKAI
MODIBODI
NINE WEST
REVIEW
Rola
Synergie Skin
T2
BLUE ILLUSION
Zero Latency VR
KNOBBY
ZULU & ZEPHYR
Acer
Luxo Living
Here’s your winning SEO formula
SEO strategy comes down to research and planning. From there, you need to execute to a T to ensure that you’re firing on all cylinders.
Here’s what you need to do:
Find the right keywords
Make sure you’re targeting the right keywords. For instance, if you’re selling hotel accommodation in Melbourne, then focus on these search terms. While if you’re looking to appeal to holidaymakers heading to Bali, then be sure to lock down these phrases. Cast a wide net, too. This means including any common variations of your search terms so nobody slips through the cracks.
Write unique content
Content is king (provided it’s unique.) Whether you’re writing product descriptions or adding a blog to your website, make sure what you’re publishing is fresh. This is important because people are only interested in useful and engaging work. At the same time, Google penalises content that’s old and stale, or of little value.
Add direct booking to your site
Where possible, add a direct booking function to your web pages. This could be in the call-to-action at the end, or threaded throughout the body copy as an internal link. Either way, make it easy for your customers to access your booking feature.
Track your site traffic
Analytics. Being able to track and record your site traffic is key to SEO performance. The reason? Because when you know how your website is performing, you can adjust your strategy accordingly. If one page has a high bounce rate, then maybe the content isn’t relevant enough for searchers. Or if it’s not getting much action at all, maybe it needs to be re-optimised for different keywords.
Who are Urban Willow Retreat, and what were their challenges?
Urban Willow retreat is a combination Spa & Cafe based in Armadale, Melbourne. Their services include spa facilities, cafe and a yoga studio. They’ve been operating for several years, with a solid local presence due to their high-quality services. Outside of Armadale, however, they had minimal reach. This was mostly down to limited organic visibility of their website. Urban Willow Retreat wanted to improve this reach and promote a newer service, ‘infrared sauna’ across Melbourne.
A food chain that became a household name across Australia within a few short years of opening
+781%
Increase in conversion rate
21k
People reached on Facebook
+210%
Improvement on average Google position
THE CHALLENGE
For a long time, Bao Hoang had sought a way to bring the Vietnamese food she grew up with to a wider audience so that more people could enjoy the flavours she’d become so accustomed to as a child. She began by making the rice paper rolls her mother would make for her as a child, but she developed her culinary skills, and her vision, as she set about creating an exciting new eatery for the Australian market. In just a few years since the opening of its first store, Roll’d has become a household name across Australia, with a grand total of 31 stores. Renowned for its rice paper rolls and pho, Roll’d offers authentic Vietnamese cooking in its franchises around the country.
Since 2012, Bao has been connecting diners with Vietnamese flavours and cultures through her work, establishing a strong and well-respected brand. Roll’d may deal in great foods from Vietnam, but the mission and the identity of the business offer far more than this, providing cultural connection and a great experience for all visitors. To expand this connection further, Bao and her team looked to the franchise business model.
With such a solid standing in the Australian hospitality industry, it’s no surprise that anyone interested in running their own food business would want to align themselves with the Roll’d name. Roll’d wanted to engage serious buyers interested in purchasing a franchise store across Australia.
Roll’d passed on the lead generation to Impressive, so they could focus on working through the influx of interested potential buyers. Find out how we created a campaign that was so effective it brought in almost too many leads.
STRATEGY
We knew that this was an enticing offer, so we had to build a campaign that appealed to the right target market and only brought in leads that were qualified. Otherwise, Roll’d would have weeks of work on their hands combing through stacks of irrelevant applications.
To get this right first time, we knew that we had to build the campaign on a foundation of solid research. We began by reviewing their existing franchise offers page on their website and found that it lacked the conversion points needed to really engage buyers, from why they should buy with Roll’d, to store availability and pricing that serious purchasers would need to know.
1. Landing Page
Upon the end of our analysis, we got things moving in record time. In under a week, Impressive was able to turn around a fully mobile-responsive landing page that was complete with stores, testimonials and detailed information designed to engage buyers.
The page was professionally designed by Impressive’s team to include an attractive call-to-action form and an engaging layout dictated by typical user behaviour.
2. Paid Search
Simultaneously, our Paid Search Advertising specialists reviewed the existing AdWords account for Roll’d. We designed and executed a powerful campaign that focused on buyers actively in the market looking for strong franchise opportunities and to get into the healthy fast food industry.
We made sure our PPC targeting was highly focused, so it attracted only the most serious of buyers and ensured quality leads for Roll’d. It’s easy to get people to say they’re interested in buying a franchise, but ensuring they follow through on that idea is often a different story.
3. Facebook & Retargeting
With the landing page and AdWords in place, Impressive’s Facebook team created a funnel that was constructed to get Facebook users to engage with a series of video and banner ads. These educational videos allowed Roll’d to tell their story and position their values, in order to attract a new franchise owner that would be a perfect fit for their brand.
The videos successfully planted the seed about franchise opportunities with Roll’d and established brand awareness.
Through extensive testing and consistently themed creative, we honed in on our target personas, budding business owners and entrepreneurs. As we moved them from educational videos, we were able to deploy more direct messaging through banner ads.
Our bottom of the funnel strategy was designed to retarget those users that didn’t convert. So, those ones that didn’t submit an enquiry on the landing page were served location specific ads about upcoming opportunities near them. By making the advertising more locally relevant, we were able to extract more conversions.
In contrast to AdWords, the Facebook ads allowed us to visually showcase the store setting to present potential leads with an example of what they could own.
THE RESULTS
At first, the campaign wasn’t looking as strong as we’d hoped. The first 2 weeks results were mixed, with only a handful of leads coming through the landing page. This was not what we’d promised our client and we weren’t about to sit around and let the campaign go stale.
Our Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) specialists got to work on the case. They began running a series of rapid A/B tests based on heat maps, click maps and Google Analytics user data. Then, things began looking up – drastically.
Impressive improved the conversion rate of the landing page by 781%! With so many highly-qualified leads, Roll’d requested that we pause the campaign for almost a month to allow the team more time to properly qualify and catch up with the volume of enquiries.
The Facebook campaign reached 210,961 people. Through the careful analysing of demographic data, we were able to further refine our target personas and minimise wastage on ad spend.
Impressive is proud to be able to work with a client that is so well-known in the public eye. This was a fun digital campaign for all involved and it was hugely successful, absolutely breaking past our targets.
What strategy did Impressive and Urban Willow Retreat follow?
Our strategy: We decided on a two-pronged approach to increase organic visibility for Urban Willow Retreat. Impressive’s content team would tackle a significant piece of work in upgrading the content on the client’s website to make it rank for Melbourne-wide searches. At the same time, our SEO team removed low-value landing pages to improve crawl and indexation rate, and tackled more technical SEO issues like site speed and establishing a high-quality link-building campaign.
Like the sound of the above? Work with Impressive – your new SEO agency
We’re one the best in the business when it comes to high-performing SEO strategies for hospitality clients. And, we pride ourselves on delivering impressive results. Every. Single. Time.
It’s no wonder we have a mantelpiece full of digital marketing awards. And the biggest names in hospitality come to us for support.
But we’re not meaning to brag. Or show off. We’re just big-time confident in all that we do. Want to see us put our money where our mouth is? Book a free consultation today.
Hit your Goals
Our clients achieve more because we become their business partner, not a service provider. With one digital marketing agency responsible for your entire strategy, everything gets simpler. Hit your goals faster with the elite of Australia’s marketing talent who use tools, not shortcuts.
Here’s how we do it.
A comprehensive audit
We’ll review all of your digital marketing channels and outline what’s working, and what needs to be improved.
Unique growth strategy
We’ll share our approach, covering how we’d scale your marketing – and how they relate to your objectives.
ROI projections
We’ll forecast the results you can expect, as well as your investment and the KPIs involved to get you there.
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What Our Clients Say
Businesses that partner with our SEO agency report stronger rankings, improved lead flow and clearer performance tracking.
Ready to get started? Book your free consultation today
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