Tracking your SEO performance

Just like the other aspects of your hotel’s marketing strategy, there are a few key metrics that will indicate whether your SEO efforts have been successful. Regular check-ins with the team you are working with will ensure that you are improving your SEO and adopting the right strategies.

Organic traffic is the traffic that arrives at your hotel’s website from search engines rather than paid sources. Seeing growth in your organic traffic means your SEO is improving and indicates that your pages and posts are becoming more optimized. You may see organic growth each quarter but can better understand it on an annualized basis. If you see annual declines, work should be done to improve your content for search engines because of the cycle of traffic hotels receive based on the seasons.

Also have regular check-ins on your search rankings and visibility. Keep track of common Google searches such as “hotels in [your location]”, “travel tips in [your location]”, “things to do in [your location]” and other searches that tourists would have. Following strong SEO practices should lead to your hotel’s main pages moving up these rankings. Work to get onto the first page of Google and above as many of your competitors as possible.

Pay attention to the average session duration on your website. Search engines favor engaging sites and pieces of content. Three and a half minutes is a good objective to work towards. Shorter sessions could indicate that your hotel’s site is finding the wrong audience, or that your copywriting and content isn’t capturing the attention of visitors.

There are a number of tools that will help further evaluate your SEO. BrightEdge is a tool that will help you see how your site is performing online, what keywords it’s indexing for, and help you understand if your keyword strategy is working. Datarama is a similar analytics platform to utilize. SEMRush is another tool that can track any website. In a similar but more comparable to other websites manner to Google Analytics, these other tools canwill pull data and show what you can improve based on your site health and how you compare to competitors.

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Interested in learning about more ways to boost your hotel's marketing campaigns? Read more at the 97 Switch Guide to Hotel Marketing.