Growing your blog’s traffic takes time, commitment, and a consistent output of well-written posts. That’s a given. However, in a cluttered blogging space, there are other ways to draw readers into your blog and stay ahead of the competition.
Optimize your post titles
It’s all too common for content marketers to spend hours crafting the perfect blog post, but only spending a few moments considering the title. A quality title is important. Making your blog title enticing, catchy and optimized for search engines will draw more visitors to your site, and in the long-term more guests to your hotel.
Keep keywords in mind when deciding the title of your post. Use Google Keyword Planner as a tool to sort through the most valuable words revolving around your topic that should be included. Consider the core of what your post is about and hone in on 2-3 words that are most relevant to what you’ve written. Include these words in your title.
Blog titles should grab the readers’ attention. This means being concise. Don’t ramble on for multiple lines what the post is about–keep it less than seventy characters. Consider which emotions you can weave in, whether it’s an interesting promise or a surprising statistic.
Brainstorming without holding back can make the process more effective. If you’re struggling to write a good title, get a blank sheet of paper and write out as many ideas as possible. Take the list and refine from there.
Use an ad budget
Using a paid ad budget is an effective way to initially bring attention to your blog content. You can start with as little as $100 per month Meta ads, and build up from there As you invest more, it’s a good idea to hire professionals to create your ads to ensure the copy is well-written, the right audience is being targeted, and the ads are being optimized as results come in so that you can increase engagement to your blog.
As you start using ads, expect for more people to interact with your blog. Paid ads are often a springboard for blog posts and can be used as a long term tool as you see the benefits. Google, Meta and other channels have become heavily pay to play platforms so you’ll want to keep up your strategy.. Don’t hesitate to increase your ad budget and continue to utilize them as you see positive results that you’re looking for such as high engagement on site, more organic indexed terms on search engines, and overall your primary pages seeing a lift in visibility.
View competitor’s content
When aiming for more blog traffic, it’s worth looking at what your competitors are doing. Audit other hotel blogs and see which of their content is performing well and if there’s any inspiration they can give you.
BuzzSumo is a helpful tool for auditing your competition. The platform will give you an overview of your competitors’ blogs and other pages on their sites. From here, you can see which content is performing well and being shared the most. Even a quick look into this can be valuable for your content marketing. Seeing what’s working and what isn’t for other hotels will give you ideas on which blog topics you aren’t utilizing enough and which should be avoided.
Use links
Links will help build the path a visitor takes from browsing your content to booking a room in your hotel. They also build credibility and improve your search engine performance. When citing statistics in a post, provide a link to your source to back up what you’ve written.
Internal linking will be useful for getting traffic to other blog posts and different pages of your website. Link to your other blog posts whenever a relevant topic is mentioned that could connect them. However, be careful about overdoing it. Too many links will make your blog look cluttered and overwhelm visitors. For best practice, aim for about four internal links per blog post.
A call to action is an essential aspect of hotel blog posts and links play a role in it. Once you’ve gotten visitors acquainted with your site and offered them valuable information for free, it’s time to act. In the last paragraph of your post, invite readers to stay at your hotel and include a link to book a room.
Historically optimize posts
Historical optimization is another way to improve the reach and effectiveness of your blog. By changing your old posts to be up to date, you can vastly improve the amount of leads they generate and traffic they get.
For example, take a hotel in Chicago that had a 2019 guide to the city’s best restaurants that performed better than most of their blog content. Three years later, people will be less interested but the post could still be drawing traffic. By changing the title, going through making edits for the current year, and ensuring everything is up to date for 2022, the article can remain a great asset and draw in traffic without being completely rewritten. Perform an audit of the blog posts that have performed best. From there, find ways to update them so people will continue to engage.
Interested in learning about more ways to boost your hotel's marketing campaigns? Read more at the 97 Switch Guide to Hotel Marketing.
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