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.
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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.
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