BEST PRACTICE: Reservations

In a new three-part series, Hotelier Middle East explores the changing landscape of hotel reservations. Here, we focus on search engine optimisation and discover how to make sure your hotel is visible online

otels in the Middle East have recently been reporting significant successes when it comes to online bookings, which now dominate the hotel reservation landscape. According to Insights Middle East, around two thirds of all bookings are coming through digital channels, with online penetration in the UAE market topping 84%.

However, with most bookings coming through aggregation websites such as Booking.com or Expedia — rather than the more cost-effective route of direct bookings — there is much more to be done.

In the first of this new series exploring hotel reservation trends — which will cover the full spectrum from search engine optimisation (SEO) to developing your own booking engine to mobile bookings — we go back to the beginning of the process.

To enable consumers to book at your hotel online, you must firstly ensure it is as visible as possible on the internet, particularly in Google searches. This is where SEO comes in — and according to our experts, it’s well worth the investment for large chains and small independents alike.

As Lee Mancini, managing director of Sekari, a Dubai-based search engine optimisation (SEO) agency, optimistically states: “It’s a real open door for anyone at the moment”. He warns that the global giants need to think more locally when it comes to SEO.

“The international brands will suffer because they perhaps don’t have as many of the local indicators — they’ll be spending on a global scale, but not on the local indicators, or looking at the local, regional links,” says Mancini.

On the flip side, while regional chains are likely to have this knowledge, they have been more reluctant to invest, reports Grand Millennium Dubai’s director of revenue Oussama Chalak.

“Smaller hotel chains and independent hotels are yet to realise how essential it is to have some strategies and yearly budget allocated for SEO.”

But, optimising your web presence does not have to be an expensive task to undertake — as long as you have a marketing department that can dedicate time and effort to the process. Some hotels may choose to appoint an external firm but this isn’t strictly necessary admits James Lowery, head of SEO at digital marketing agency Latitude.

“There’s nothing that an SEO agency does that someone internally can’t do,” asserts Lowery.

Consider Keywords
The place to start when implementing SEO is with the use of keywords, agree Lowery and Mancini. First, hotels need to research the market to see what keywords are working for competitors on search engines.

“What you want to do is search for what you expect people to search for when they’re looking for you,” says Lowery.

He recommends that aspiring SEO masters then look at the websites of hotels appearing on the first page of searches and analyse why they’re appearing to the target clientele, that is, what key words they are using in their page titles and the body copy. Too often, website text is not adequately tailored to SEO requirements.

At Hospitality Management Holdings’ (HMH), vice president of e-commerce development Girma Wossenseged says that 65% of all bookings are through online channels.

He advises: “First and foremost, one should pick up the right keywords, which is not done often. Secondly, the content has to be correctly defined without overloading it with different keywords. It has to be created for your target audience in a creative and concise way”.

One way to find keywords that work is by first carrying out a pay per click (PPC) campaign, says Mancini. “PPC is a great way to bridge the gap before you get a high ranking. The great thing about PPC is that it gives us the data we need. From PPC we’re able to seek out all of the key phrases, which are the ones that people are clicking through and booking from. You then use that data to influence SEO campaigns,” Mancini adds.

Lowery agrees, saying that it’s a great indicator for offers — “hotels can test whether their customers click more on the heading 50% off or $50 off”.

Google’s head of travel for the Gulf, Marie de Ducla, says that even when competing against the biggest hotel brands, independent hotels “have all the chances in the world” to make it onto the search engine’s first page of results — “if their keywords are well defined and precise”.

She says that by using phrases such as ‘Dubai hotel’, “chains and independents are competing against online travel agents, so they need to be quite specific so that they don’t compete on too generic terms.”

For example, Google reports that searches for hotels with wi-fi have increased 10% in the last 12 months alone, while searches for ‘hotels with free wi-fi’ are up 30% in the same period.

Article continues on next page ...

Localisation
One of the main factors to consider when it comes to SEO is the use of appropriate languages and local sites, says de Ducla.

“It’s important to be aware of all the languages that would be used, and then if you have your website in these languages and have it optimised, it has more chance to appear in the first page,” she says.

Both Mancini and Lowery echo this sentiment, suggesting that if a hotel doesn’t have the resources to create a fully functioning website in all different languages, even just having a few crucial pages in the necessary languages will bring substantial benefits.

Anantara, part of the Thailand-based Minor Group, has recently launched its Arabic website. David Garner, regional director of sales and marketing, Anantara Middle East, says that due to 60% of all bookings for its three properties in the Middle East coming from the GCC, “our distribution to the Arabic speaking community is crucial to driving this revenue segment”.

He reports that in the first seven months of 2012, bookings from Western Asia — the Google Analytics defined region which includes the Middle East — have increased 42% year on year. This region is now the second largest in terms of bookings via the brand website.

According to Google, 13% of all searches for hotels in the Middle East are in Arabic, whereas, in Russia, 87% of hotel searches are in Russian, highlighting the importance of local sites across the board.

Once an Arabic site — or at least, a partial site — has been created, it then allows for targeted SEO campaigns towards this market. While online penetration in MENA is 57%, according to eMarketer in March 2011, Lowery says that search is “less mature” than other markets around the world, meaning users will be more generic with their search terms.

This, he adds, is both an advantage and disadvantage. There are more hotels competing for the same generic keywords but, on the other hand, SEO strategies are less advanced than those carried out in other languages, so it’s easier for smaller chains to get a good foothold.

Anantara’s Garner agrees: “Some keywords are very competitive, so choosing these can lead to less ROI.”

At Fairmont Raffles Hotels International, director of internet marketing Michael Innocentin says the solution is to take a holistic approach.

“Hotels need to expand beyond basic SEO strategies and ensure they have a holistic digital marketing plan that encompasses paid search and display advertising, as well as social media engagement and reputation management,” Innocentin advises.

Social Engagement
Over the last few months, digital marketing agencies have noticed an increase in the influence social media is having on search results.

When using sites such as Facebook to share a photo or video, Mancini explains that hoteliers often don’t consider SEO. He says that many hotels, for example, call their logo image, simply ‘logo’. “What is ‘logo’? Google doesn’t know what it is – it needs to be called ‘Atlantis The Palm Hotel Dubai logo’, for example,” Mancini explains.

But social media isn’t simply Facebook and Twitter – it also encompasses TripAdvisor and other hotel aggregation and review websites. Typically, these are the first to appear on Google’s search results, due to their sheer size, relevance and amount of content.

One common problem is the occasional bad review — the trick is not to try and remove it, but instead to make the positive reviews more visible. This can be achieved through commenting and thanking the guests, and linking to the posts from your websites.

At the same time, it’s important to still acknowledge the bad review — customers need to know that you recognise the review and are doing things to work on the issue.

However, Google’s de Ducla warns: “What we see sometimes is that hotels have social media but have nobody managing SEO and it’s a very big surprise, as it’s so basic. Social media is very exciting and everyone wants to be on social media and recognised and see their number of fans and likes.

It’s nice to have and good for the overall strategy but the first thing you need to question is ‘is your presence optimised on search engines?’. In the end, this is what will impact your bottom line, not social media”.

Article continues on next page ...

Link Building
The last piece of the SEO puzzle, and the trickiest part of the process for those dedicating in-house resources to it, is link building. Like different language keywords, the application of this process also depends on locality.

While Google takes into account all of the links it scrawls to find the relevance of your hotel to searches, in the Middle East, and especially with GCC locals, search culture is different.

In English-speaking territories, link-building should follow a definite lifestyle route – luxury hotels should link-swap with luxury fashion retailers, for example. However, in the less mature Arab market, it’s mainly focused on a subject-orientated route – hotels should link to local travel websites and vice versa.

Link building is where the amateur can sometimes be caught out, however. Place too many links on unrelated websites with an aim to trick Google into thinking your site is popular, and you may find that you site is removed from from the search engine, or at least dropped down the rankings.

Sekari’s Mancini asserts: “Marketing managers need to understand that it can take around six months of effort to start seeing good, sustainable results.

“Agencies that promise to provide a quick and sudden boost to your rankings do so at great risk to your brand by using black hat techniques.”

Once an SEO campaign is up and running, it is important to both monitor its progression and to not rest on your laurels.

“SEO is ongoing – not a one-off project,” says Garner.

Fairmont’s Innocentin adds: “Monitoring SEO performance is very easy to do. We monitor the rankings of our targeted keywords through position analysis reports and we also measure our visits and conversions referred through the search engines.

Analytics solutions are easily accessible and affordable for everyone. There are free solutions such as Google Analytics and Enterprise-class analytics solutions such as Adobe Site Catalyst”.

“Smaller hotel chains and independent hotels are yet to realise how essential is to have some strategies and yearly budget allocated for SEO,” concludes Grand Millennium Dubai’s Chalak. “For those who haven’t started implementing SEO yet, they should allocate some budget in their 2013 plan for SEO and either have someone onboard to run online marketing campaigns and strategies or have a third-party contract with an agency doing a good job in this area.”

The next stage
With SEO sewn up, the next challenge is to ensure that once potential guests find your website, they stay on it — and book on it. Too many hotel websites offer complicated or slow booking engines, with hidden prices, and consumers end up reverting to aggregated sites, where they believe the booking process to be fast and transparent.

With the ultimate aim of digital reservations being to drive consumers to book directly with hotels, next month Hotelier Middle East will bring you a guide to enhancing your own website and online booking capabilities.

Article continues on next page ...

CASE STUDY 1
THE HOTEL: Fairmont Raffles Hotels International
THE AGENCY: Sekari and iCrossing

Objectives
• Increase search visibility for Fairmont properties in the Middle East and Africa.
• Deliver localised search strategy to support the Middle East and Africa region.
• Support Fairmont’s 11 properties in the region as well as properties set to open in future years and increase the brand visibility of the regional website within the Arabic natural search results.

Strategy
• Identify target keyphrases which provide maximum volume potential for relevant terms and then map the keywords to individual pages to provide the framework for on-page optimisation.
• Through a search engine simulated full crawl and analysis of the website top level, technical recommendations were then provided to help enhance the crawl-ability of the website in the eyes of search engines through the resolution of issues identified.
• Finally, utilising the competitors identified from the online competitor analysis, a link audit provided a detailed analysis of the link landscape, both for the competitors and Fairmont. The requirements and focus for the off-site optimisation are strategically defined based on the competitor analysis.

Results
• Year-on-year, Q1 2012, MEA natural search visibility for Google first page rankings increased 14%.

Article continues on next page ...

CASE STUDY 2
THE HOTEL: Corp Executive Hotel Apartments
– Al Barsha Dubai
THE AGENCY: Marketing Pro-Junction

Objectives
• Being a new hotel, as well as a new brand, the objective was to position the hotel strongly on all major search engines.

Strategy
• Start with the basics of SEO and then implement advanced techniques. It took a realistic and practical approach.
• Create website content, very carefully produced, keeping the keywords and target audiences in mind.
• As a next step, incorporate all other requirements with extensive digital marketing.

Results
• The hotel has had excellent results with its website enjoying a high page rank in all major search engines. In the last eight months, there has been a massive increase in the number of unique visitors as well as page views (that grew by almost 40%) which indicates the success of the SEO strategy despite the stiff competition the hotel faces being located in Dubai.
• There has also been a significant drop in bounce rate. The hotel has been running a high occupancy all year round and won the top award from HMH for being the best performing hotel under the group.

Article continues on next page ...

CASE STUDY 3
THE HOTEL: Haven
THE AGENCY: Latitude

Objectives
• Haven is one of the largest travel accommodation companies in the UK, offering a selection of luxury lodges, summer houses and retreats to let across the UK. The objective was to raise brand visibility in natural search results, while increasing the number of bookings and, subsequently, revenue.
• Boost the relevance of the Haven domain for touring and camping keywords and providing content that adds to the user experience.

Strategy
• Focus heavily on uniqueness and originality of website content. These were specific to the needs and interests of the Haven customer, as well as their search behaviour. As a significant SEO project, www.caravancamping.co.uk was migrated into www.haven.com/touring-camping.
• Regional and seasonal content across the website was also built. As part of this process, Latitude targeted the optimisation of Google Places’ listings for all parks. In addition, video and image optimisation and seeding was introduced to build awareness of the Haven offering.

Results
• Website visitor volume grew 25.3% year-on-year through the natural search channel during the 12-month campaign period. This equates to an additional 908,585 visitors to the website, taking the total traffic from the channel to 4.5 million visitors across 12 months.
• The natural search-led booking volume on the website increased by 34.3% over the course of the year to a total of 75,833 bookings. This represents an increase of 19,382 bookings.