Marketers love exclaiming “SEO is dead!” and heralding the next big thing that will save your website – social media, retargeting, mobile, tablets, you name it. However, regardless of what some in the industry say, SEO is still alive and well. HeBS Digital’s own experience categorically shows that more than half of website booking revenue (56% to be exact) across our client portfolio comes as direct referral from the search engines, including organic and paid search.
The ongoing Google Panda updates (Panda 3.9 just launched) have made many hotel websites with thin content obsolete and have raised the bar for hotel websites, demanding not only unique and engaging copy. The Google Venice update had a heavy impact on the localization of search. In summary, it means that Google will try its best to serve you localized results based on your location, whether or not your search query is geo-targeted – you could type in ‘hotel’ and Google bases search results off of your location.
Hoteliers are also challenged to keep their hotel website consistently updated with fresh content as this significantly affects SEO. This means that budget dollars need to be allocated to keeping the website current or investing in a tool such as the HeBS Digital CMS Premium which – among other things – allows hoteliers to add and edit both textual and visual content on a 24/7 basis.
Read full story at: http://www.hebsdigital.com/blog/is-hotel-seo-dead/