Why Technical SEO is Crucial for Hotels
In terms of SEO, content and keywords hold significance. However, the technical aspects of the website also contribute to ensuring that the site is well-ranked and functions efficiently. Technical SEO refers to the behind-the-scenes aspects of your website that allow the search engines to crawl, index, and rank the various pages on your website. It also ensures that your website is fast, secure, and specially designed for mobile users.
In the case of hotels technical SEO is the main part of gaining high search engine rankings. It is especially related to page experience and mobile performance. This guide will provide an overview of the primary technical SEO measures that you should adopt and implement to ensure that your hotel’s website is fully operational and performs higher in the search engine results pages.
Optimizing Your Website’s Speed for Better SEO
The speed with which a page loads has become a very important thing for search engines such as Google for ranking. In addition, a website that takes significantly longer time than normal to load may discourage and even frustrate mobile users leading to high bounce and low conversion rates. Thus, in order to consider the visitors’ prospective browsing activities uninterrupted is necessary. So, hotels should aim at minimum load times for their website.
Tips for Improving Site Speed:
- Compress and Optimize Images: Large picture files can make the performance of your website much slower. Employ tools such as TinyPNG or ImageOptim to reduce the size of images while still retaining the good quality of the image.
- Use Browser Caching: In the case where the pages are revisited, Browser Caching is useful because the visitor does not need to wait to reload the pages since the data has been cached in the browser.
- Reduce the Size of JavaScript and CSS Files: Reduce the size of your JavaScript and CSS files by minifying them. These new files do not have any characters and spaces that would increase the loading times.
- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN): A CDN takes your website contents and places them on different servers across the world which enhances the time taken to deliver the content to the end users who are far away from the main server.
For more tips on image optimization, see Image and Video SEO for Hotels: Optimizing Your Visual Content.
Mobile Optimization for Better Rankings
Optimization of websites for mobile devices is a technical feature of search engine optimization and also an increasingly important one as Google now operates on mobile-first indexing. This implies that Google uses the mobile version of the website when determining your search rankings.
Best Practices for Mobile Optimization:
- Use a Responsive Design: A Responsive Website Design is crucial for every site. It redesigned itself for smartphones, tablets, and even desktop computers to ensure that the site is accessible from both mobile devices and laptops.
- Enhancing the Loading Speed of Mobile Pages: Compress images and minify files to ensure that your mobile site loads quickly. Mobile internet users expect the loading times to be instant, especially in cases where they are making reservations.
- Simplify Mobile Navigation: Ensure that your mobile website has easy navigation and an uncomplicated menu with obvious call-to-action buttons such as “Book Now”, “Check Availability” and the like.
To learn more about mobile optimization strategies, check out Mobile SEO for Hotels: Why It’s Crucial and How to Get It Right.
Implementing Schema Markup for Hotels
Schema markup or structured data assists search engines in interpreting the information available on your site while offering additional information about your hotel. You can also implement schema for the purposes of enhancing the visibility of your hotel’s site in search engines’ Results Pages by displaying rich snippets such as reviews, ratings, and availability concerning the hotel on the Search Engine Results Pages.
Key Types of Schema Markup for Hotels:
- Hotel Schema: It is a type of schema that provides information about the hotel facility; e.g. its location, ratings, check-in/out times, amenities, and also available rooms. Adding the schema markup for hotels helps your websites stand out in search results.
- Review Schema: If you have guest reviews or testimonials on your website, use review schema to display star ratings directly in search results. It enables the reviews to be displayed in search results and to raise chances for click-through.
- Image and Video Schema: Images and video structured data also help increase the probability of finding the respective image or video in the Google images and video search results.
Learn more about how structured data can enhance your visual content in Image and Video SEO for Hotels: Optimizing Your Visual Content.
Fixing Crawl Errors and Improving Indexability
In order for the search engine to be able to categorize and evaluate your web page it is essential that its design allows for easy crawling and indexing of its contents. Crawl errors refer to situations when search engines are unable to reach some pages on your website due to certain restrictions, this situation could negatively affect your rankings.
Steps to Fix Crawl Errors:
- Use Google Search Console: Google Search Console gives you an insight into the way how google crawls and indexes your site. Regularly check for crawl errors and remember to rectify them promptly.
- Fix Broken Links: Make sure that the internal work of your website is perfect in that there are no broken links as this can negatively impact user experience, and also prevent search engines from crawling the pages effectively.
- Add an XML sitemap: An XML structure diagram is proposed to help search engines find and index all the pages within the website. Don’t forget to add your sitemap to Google by using the Google search console.
- Use Robots.txt Correctly: Make sure your robots.txt file isn’t mistakenly blocking important pages from being crawled. It is specifically used to block pages that should not be indexed for any reason such as pages with administrator or duplicate content.
Want to learn more about making your site crawlable? Check out On-Page SEO for Hotels: Optimizing for Maximum SEO Impact for tips on structuring your content for search engines.
Enhancing Site Security with SSL Certificates
The other factor that also helps improve technical SEO is site security. Google would recommend the use of an SSL certificate which converts your web address from HTTP to HTTPS. A secure site makes users comfortable when they provide their sensitive information like credit card details.
Significance of SSL for Hotels:
- Enhances Search Rankings: For every website or online platform, Google considers SSL as an important factor and that is why implementing it can improve the visibility of your site.
- Protect Guest Information: All the processes and transactions that take place between your website and the user such as provision of credit and debit card information during a booking process are secured with an SSL certificate.
- Boosts Trust: A secure site of a hotel builds trust in customers and increases conversion rates.
So if you own a website that is still in HTTP, then it’s about high time you applied for an SSL certificate and migrated your site to HTTPS.
Creating an SEO-Friendly URL Structure
When it comes to understanding the website, content structured and simplified URL paths are very beneficial to both the user and the search engine. Search engine-optimized URLs are usually short, descriptive, and include the right keywords.
Most Recommended Practices on URL Structure:
- Keep URLs Short and Descriptive: Do not make lengthy and complicated URLs that have unnecessary trailing characters. For instance, use “/luxury-suites-nairobi” not “/pageid=123.”
- Add Primary Keywords: Incorporate relevant keywords into your URL, which search engines will use to determine the webpage’s content. For example, the URL to your rooms page could be “/rooms-and-suites/nairobi-hotel-rooms.”
- Do Not Use Dynamic URLs: Dynamic URLs are URLs that are generated based on specific parameters (e.g., “/?id=123”). Such URLs are not crawlable or indexable. Hence, use static URLs, which are easier to read and more user-friendly.
Internal Link: For more on keyword optimization within URLs, check out On-Page SEO for Hotels: Optimizing for Maximum SEO Impact.
Conclusion
The use of technical SEO for hotels lays the foundation on which the remaining SEO strategies are based. Enhancing speed, mobile-friendliness, crawlability, and safety features of the hotel’s website guarantees high search engine rankings for the website as well as a seamless experience for the visitors. Apply this technical SEO advice to give your site the best chance to compete in the competitive market.
Next Steps:
- Internal Links Recap:
- Learn how to improve mobile load speeds in Mobile SEO for Hotels: Why It’s Crucial and How to Get It Right.
- For more on optimizing structured data, check out Image and Video SEO for Hotels.