In the travel industry, visibility is everything. These days, that means being easy to find on popular search engines. When it comes to improving your search rankings, Google is still the king of traffic, so optimizing for their method of indexing pages is the approach that is most likely to yield your highest ROI.

To do this, you need to know which keywords are most important for your hotel’s service niche and local area. Geo-location information like cities, county names, and address information helps with this.

Make sure your website’s content reaches out to your local community while providing clear, keyword rich information to customers.

#1: Keyword Rich Content

On top of having the keywords you need, your content also needs to maintain a few quality principles. It needs to be useful, readable, and high quality—meaning that the information is accurate and specific.

It also needs to be fresh, which means that your copy should be rewritten periodically so that your page updates in the search engine.

It shows that you are committed to keeping your information relevant, and it encourages you to highlight seasonal events to keep the pages’ information specific and useful in the near-term.

When it comes to the keyword research itself, focus on common sense phrases first, like your location and the word hotel. Keep in mind that these are likely to be highly competitive, so ranking at the top is not likely to happen right away.

Still, you want to be visible and over time, you are going to see your rank rise as long as you keep your information refreshed and keep its quality up.

It’s also important to find niche keywords that you have a chance of ranking near the top of, and that customers are likely to search. Using descriptors like “boutique hotel” or “resort hotel” are a great way to do this.

#2: Master Google Maps

The search engine isn’t everything! Work on mastering Google Maps by making sure your information is accurate and that you have provided as much rich and relevant detail as possible. This not only helps with location-based searches, it also makes you much more visible to those who use their smart phones to navigate and to make choices. This helps with reaching both advance planners and those who find themselves stopping unexpectedly.

#3: Keep Your Site Mobile-Friendly

Invest the time and money to research updated best practices for mobile sites as they come out, and use them to keep your mobile pages fresh so that they help your overall ranking. That way, you know you are reaching both those smart phone users that rely primarily on internet searches and the ones that use their map software effectively.

#4: Wrap-Up

These strategies are just a starting point for your hotel’s online outreach strategy, but before it’s worthwhile to move into more sophisticated methods of gaining Google rankings, it’s important to establish the fundamentals. Once you have a good rotation of information, high quality content, and you are easy to find from mobile devices, you will have established the basic presence you need to compete.