Local SEO for hotels is very important because it helps restaurants to make more online traffic. Local SEO gives both a great amount of backlinks and authority (from natural search results). This tells visitors very much about the hotel, whether or not they should try it. It’s important to have a strong presence on all the major search engines, to compete well.
When people search for a local business on a search engine they will not normally include the address of the business. This means that having a strong local SEO campaign for a hotel is vital. That is because it appears more professional and relevant to customers who type in local search terms. For example, if someone searches for “Indian Restaurants in London” they would more likely type in “Indian Restaurant London” than “Indian Restaurants in London”. If they were to do a local search using only local search words then the results would be different as it would include both Indian restaurants and non-Indian restaurants.
Therefore, local seo for hotels is about building backlinks to increase rankings. There are many ways to achieve this, but the most effective are article marketing, guest blogging and submitting to the local tourism bureau. An article can be written by you for your hotel website or used from one of the directories, such as Dmoz. A guest blog discussing the hotel, its location, atmosphere and other amenities is also a great way to build up backlinks, but needs to be done with care.
Backlinks are very important when trying to compete against the big international brands. However, there is more to off-page and on-page SEO than just building backlinks. On-page SEO refers to optimizing the website for Google and other major search engines. This includes meta tags, title optimization, keyword density, site maps and so forth. Off-page SEO, on the other hand, refers to things like building inbound links from related websites. These links can come from social networking sites, blogs, article directories and so forth.
However, not all SEO techniques are created equal. Some off-page techniques can actually hurt your business more than help you. For example, if you have a bad name in your area (and this is very common) then people will be less likely to find your hotel in the directory or on online search directories. Another example of this is when you do an on-page search for “hotels in London” and you come across a local business listing (a.k.a. PR listing).
This example shows how important it is to do off-page SEO. On the other hand, if you do some on-page local search optimization, such as building link building and social media promotions, then you can actually increase your hotel website’s ranking on the local search results for that specific location. So you have to balance the on-page/off-page SEO. Just don’t make the mistake of overlooking the importance of local SEO, especially if you’re a business that has to be found in a specific area in order to be successful.