Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Hotel SEO, 3-pack & Search Console: How to get the right data and how to improve CTR?
-
Hey guys,
I've been working with some hotels and I feel like there are some specific issues which need special solutions.
Maybe some of you also work for hotels and face similar problems.Question 1: Google "forces" 3-packs impressions to OTAs like booking.com via Hotel Ads. You basically have a big blue "book now" button and a small little website button. This ends up basically leading to CTRs below 1% despite a 1-3 Position. Is there any way to improve the organic CTR? Of course we use hotel ads, but they offer bad analytics AND we basically pay for our SEO-Performance.
Question 2: Search console doesn't specify wether or not a impression comes from 3-Pack or the rest of the organic results, which basically leads to a average position which says nothing. It's hard to evaluate the performance of meta-titles and texts, because the ctr is also mixed. What would be a better way to get this data or do you think google will change this in some time (new search console doesn't offer this).
Question 3: Hotel Rankings are dominated by OTAs, Meta-Searchers and BIg Chains. Has anyone experience in SEO for smaller, family owned Hotels? Any tricks how to get a steady traffic source outside of brand results?
Hope there are some travel experts in here
-
Woohoo!
A question that I can definitely help to answer. I was in the Hospitality industry for 2 years working on purely hotel sites, from large international chains to small family owned businesses.
The hospitality industry is definitely one of the MOST competitive industries that I've ever been in and competed on. The majority of the SERPs are already dominated by OTAs and Google's HPA isn't helping much either. Here's my answers, I hope they help!
-
I totally hear you on HPA. It's a very specific product that's rolled out by Google to target the hospitality industry and one that does NOT get as much attention as HPA. What you CAN use HPA for is for data-mining purposes. HPA offers quite a bit of insight into the search behavior of the possible customers for your hotel clients. That data can help to guide you in focusing your efforts for organic search. For example, looking at the historical data in HPA, what are the top sources for bookings? Is it Google Maps? Which countries are they coming from? What days of the week are they booking for and when are they booking? (This was particularly useful as I was also managing their PPC search campaigns.)
-
I might be wrong on this as it's been about 6 months since I stopped working on the Hospitality industry, but I think you can find the CTRs for the knowledge graph or 3-pack in Google My Business, and the CTRs for SERP rankings in Google Search Console.
-
SERPs are essentially dominated by the OTAs for the top converting keywords. Fist-bump I totally get how you feel about this.
My strategy for traffic was to build up the OTHER pages. Smaller sites aren't going to rank for top-level queries like 'chicago hotel rooms' for example. They can however rank well for associated keywords that are relevant to the hotel itself. For example, 'beach front hotel in east florida' or my personal favorite type 'family rooms near ****'
Also look towards the property's other features. Restaurants, spas and other facilities are key targets to work on for SEO.
Another tip I can give you is to analyze the countries that the site's traffic comes from. I saw some decent results from optimizing the site for Naver (Korea), Yandex (Russia), Yahoo (Japan), and Baidu (China). It's definitely challenging to try to optimize for other search engines, especially the language barrier. But I definitely saw good results from this.
Feel free to reach out to me for other queries!
-
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Best way to handle outdated & years old Blog-posts?
Hi all, We have almost 1000 pages or posts from our blog which are indexed in Google. Few of them are years old, but they have some relevant and credible content which appears in search results. I am just worried about other hundreds of non-relevant posts which are years old. Being hosting hundreds of them, our website is holding lots of these useless indexing pages which might be giving us little negative impact of keeping non-ranking pages. What's the best way to handle them? Are these pages Okay? Or must be non-indexed or deleted? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Ecommerce SEO: Is it bad to link to product/category pages directly from content pages?
Hi ! In Moz' Whiteboard friday video Headline Writing and Title Tag SEO in a Clickbait World, Rand is talking about (among other things) best practices related to linking between search, clickbait and conversion pages. For a client of ours, a cosmetics and make-up retailer, we are planning to build content pages around related keywords, for example video, pictures and text about make-up and fashion in order to best target and capture search traffic related to make-up that is prevalent earlier in the costumer journey. Among other things, we plan to use these content pages to link directly to some of the products. For example a content piece about how to achieve full lashes will to link to particular mascaras and/or the mascara category) Things is, in the Whiteboard video Rand Says:
Algorithm Updates | | Inevo
_"..So your click-bait piece, a lot of times with click-bait pieces they're going to perform worse if you go over and try and link directly to your conversion page, because it looks like you're trying to sell people something. That's not what plays on Facebook, on Twitter, on social media in general. What plays is, "Hey, this is just entertainment, and I can just visit this piece and it's fun and funny and interesting." _ Does this mean linking directly to products pages (or category pages) from content pages is bad? Will Google think that, since we are also trying to sell something with the same piece of content, we do not deserve to rank that well on the content, and won't be considered that relevant for a search query where people are looking for make-up tips and make-up guides? Also.. is there any difference between linking from content to categories vs. products? ..I mean, a category page is not a conversion page the same way a products page is. Looking forward to your answers 🙂0 -
Old school SEO tools / software / websites
Hey Mozzers, I am doing some research and wonder if you can help me out? Before Moz, Hubspot, Majestic, Screaming Frog and all the other awesome SEO tools we use today what were the SEO tools / software / websites that were used for aiding SEO? I guess we can add the recently closed Yahoo! Directory for starters! Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | RikkiD220 -
Has anyone used Capterra and will I get penalized for paid links?
Hello - I'm contemplating buying a directory listing on the software promotion website http://www.capterra.com/ . It's a site that gets quite a bit of traffic for people searching for software products and I was interested in promoting my software product there, but I don't want to ruin our very good standing with Google at this time if Google deems Capterra as selling paid links. I'm not interested in this for links but instead as a good source of referral traffic for my software site. If anyone has used Capterra or has advice on whether Capterra might injure my SERP rankings, I would appreciate it. Thanks, Jeff
Algorithm Updates | | DenverDude0070 -
Your search - site:domain.com - did not match any documents.
I've recently started work on a new clients website and done some preliminary work with on-page optimisation, and there is still plenty of work to be done and issues to resolve. They are ranking ok on Bing, but they are not getting any ranking on Google at all (except paid) - I tried the site:domain.com search and comes up with no results... so this confirms that something is going on with the google search rank! Can anyone shed light on what can cause this or why this would happen? My next step is to look at their webmaster tools (haven't had access yet), but if anyone has any tips to resolve this or where to look, that would be great! Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | ElevateCreativeAU0 -
How to get global search results on Google ? Also, is it possible to get results based on some other geographic location?
I don't want results based on my geographic location. When I am in India, I don't want local search results. In fact, I want results which are not dependent on my current location. Also, can I change my current location to some other city and will it affect the results ? For eg: While I am in London, can my search results be modified as if I am sitting in New York ?
Algorithm Updates | | EricMoore0 -
How do I get the expanded results in a Google search?
I notice for certain site (ex: mint.com) that when I search, the top result has a very detailed view with options to click to different subsections of the site. However for my site, even though we're consistently the top result for our branded terms, the result is still only a single line item. How do I adjust this?
Algorithm Updates | | syount1 -
Singular vs plural SEO
Hi everyone, OK I've been looking at the Google adwords keyword tool and it's thrown some of my On-page SEO into question (everything said here are examples, I haven't used any real life terms or figures). Lets say my page is about "Green Apples", let's say the keyword tool shows that the singular version "Green Apple" gets more searches (as an example). Should I optimize for the singular or the plural? Also lets say my title tag for that page is "Green Apples | Apples Galore UK" would Google/SEOmoz count that as an optimisation for the singular "Green Apple" or do the search engines take the title literally and don't differenciate between singular and plurals? Thanks in advance everyone! Regards, Ash
Algorithm Updates | | AshSEO20112