Local SEO for hotels: a quick guide for search success.

Why focus on local SEO for hotels?

These days, most people seeking accommodation options explore hotels online. If your hotel doesn't appear among the top three organic search results, there's a high likelihood that potential guests will opt for your competitors. The significance of local organic search as a cost-effective and potent marketing strategy for hotels cannot be overstated. 
 Local SEO, the organic strategy of helping your business increase its local visibility, is critical for hotels for a number of reasons. Travelers use search engines to find accommodation in specific locations, and local SEO helps hotels appear prominently in these search results. Whether traveling for work or personal reasons, travelers usually search for a place to stay with location-specific keywords like "hotels in Tampa, Florida" or "accommodation near the Louvre". As a result, your hotel’s visibility is crucial in attracting guests who are actively looking for accommodation in your area. 

Additionally, local SEO is an excellent way for hotels to show their location-specific services, such as Meetings, Incentives, Conferences, and Exhibitions (MICE), spa facilities, gourmet restaurants, and wedding venues. This is not only beneficial for travelers seeking these services but also for locals looking for high-quality, convenient options in their vicinity. By leveraging local SEO, hotels can effectively target both of these audiences with the right keywords and content, ensuring they are the go-to choice for a wide range of needs. 

Perhaps most importantly, Local SEO is a great way to boost direct hotel bookings, which leads to increased revenue. Optimizing for local search plays a large role in placing your business high up in search results, which means outranking third-party online travel agencies like Expedia or Booking.com. This means obtaining placements in areas such as the Google local pack (more on this later), saving you your commission and increasing your profits.  

Google’s local pack or Google-3 pack places you above third party sites in organic search. 

Where should a hotel begin with local SEO?

The initial and pivotal step involves claiming (if it hasn't already been claimed) your Google Business Profile (GBP) and carefully filling in all essential fields for optimal performance. This includes selecting a pertinent main category, providing accurate business details, composing a compelling description incorporating targeted keywords, linking to your hotel's website and posting relevant promotions. 

For hotels, establishing a robust presence on GBP is not just about online visibility; it's a strategic move that can give you a competitive edge. When prospective guests search for local accommodations, Google Search and Google Maps heavily rely on GBP data to showcase your hotel's offerings. Searches like "hotels near me" or "lodging in downtown [city]" are more likely to direct users to your hotel if your hotel’s GBP is thoroughly optimized.

Here's the game-changer, though: having a well-crafted GBP can make it easier for your hotel to outrank competitors and third-party sites on Google. An optimized GBP not only enhances visibility but also increases the likelihood of securing a prominent position in the local pack or Google 3-Pack (an area displaying the top 3 local business results), as well as other essential online spaces related to the hospitality industry—such as Google Hotel Packs. The latter is a unique feature of Google Travel that surfaces when a user searches for a hotel, making it imperative to focus on optimizing key areas that enhance your local SEO positioning. 
What does this mean in practical terms? Well, Google Hotel Packs contain comprehensive details such as the hotel's pricing, star ratings, promotional highlights, and visuals of the hotel: all the characteristics that lead prospective guests to choose a hotel over another option. Being featured in these coveted map packs can significantly amplify your hotel's visibility and credibility, driving more organic traffic and direct bookings.

Additionally, they might showcase specific attributes of the hotel or include a brief, Google-generated description explaining the hotel's relevance to the user's search query, increasing their chances for a conversion. 

To secure a prime position in local searches and search packs, hotels must prioritize essential elements for boosting local SEO. This entails lots of additional tasks that go beyond GBP optimization, such as executing a robust strategy that encompasses meticulous management of comprehensive listings, adopting an active review strategy across highly trafficked sites, and optimizing content with local keywords, among other crucial tasks.

Thankfully, there are effective tools available that simplify the process of elevating your hotel's local SEO ranking. First, let's explore key areas for elevating your hotel's local rankings, before introducing some tools you might find helpful.

1. Set up your hotel’s business listings 

As a local business, it’s important that your hotel is listed across multiple directories, as each one is a platform where potential guests might discover you. Search engines like Google don’t just rely on information from GBP (which is clearly a must as explained earlier), but also use  multiple directories to determine the legitimacy and relevance of your business, which means consistency is critical, too. However, manually updating and managing listings across all directories, especially if you're handling multiple locations or hotels, can be difficult and time-consuming. The complexity of managing multiple passwords, or having to change hours during the holidays can make this task unnecessarily daunting. Even if you have the time to do it all manually, there are simply too many influential directories to ensure your business info is correct in every one of them n—unless you have a little help. 
Tools like Semrush Local’s Listing Management are designed to help businesses efficiently manage their listings across different platforms, ensuring consistency and accuracy in their online presence—without a ton of manual labor. You can effortlessly disseminate your complete local listings data or NAP (Name, Address, Phone) across a full network of directories like Google Business Profile, Waze, Yelp, Yahoo, Bing Places, and more within minutes, allowing you to conserve time and energy for more productive endeavors in expanding your local business. 

(Note that the directories you’re listed on are location-specific—take a look at the full list of over 150+ directories that Semrush’s Listing Management can automatically update.)

The tools can also help you suppress any duplicates, track your local rankings, compile performance reports and more—all in one centralized location. 

2. Satisfied guests boost local SEO for hotels

Reviews are a powerful tool for enhancing your hotel’s online presence and credibility. They act as social proof, providing potential guests with insights into the quality of your rooms and service. According to a recent survey, “88% of potential customers seek online reviews before picking local services.” 

From a local SEO perspective, they also contribute significantly to your visibility in search engine results. Search engines like Google consider the quantity, quality, and recency of reviews as key factors in their ranking algorithms. A steady stream of positive reviews can boost local search rankings, making a business more discoverable to local audiences. Search engines also rank you higher when you respond to reviews, whether they’re positive or negative. And how quickly you respond counts, too. As a business owner, this means you need to be checking reviews and responding fast – but who has the time? Luckily there are tools available to help you manage this task with ease. 

3. Optimize Your Hotel Website with Long-Tail Local Keywords

Long-tail keywords are important to your on-page SEO strategy for a number of reasons. First, they’re more specific and often show that a traveler has a higher intent to make a booking. For example, a keyword like “luxury beachfront hotel in Miami” is more targeted than a broad term like “hotel in Miami.” These keywords also typically have lower search volumes, which means less competition. 

For local SEO, long-tail keywords will usually include location-based terms. This is particularly useful for hotels as it helps them to appear in searches specific to a certain area. For instance, “budget hotels near Central Park NYC” targets visitors looking for accommodations in a specific area of New York City.

Here’s a good rule of thumb when considering what long-tail keywords you should use: what are your potential guests searching for? Is it a "family-friendly hotel with a waterpark in San Diego"? Maybe it’s a “romantic ranch getaway in Dallas”. Use these long-tail keywords to update your website content so that you give your site the best possible chance to rank for specific, targeted searches. 

4. Don’t forget your schema markup and local backlinks 

Schema markup is a form of microdata that you add to your website's HTML to improve how search engines read and show your page in search engine results. It helps search engines understand the context of your content, providing detailed information about your business, like reviews, hours of operation, and contact information. 

This is an important part of local SEO because your schema markup can be used to create rich snippets, which are enhanced search results that show more information (see the example below). Updating your schema markup is dependent on the type of website platform you use. For help on how to do it, see this detailed article. 

Backlinks are important for local SEO, too, and they’re a lot easier to implement locally than you might think. These are links from one website to another and are considered a vote of confidence, indicating that the content is valuable, credible, and useful.

High-quality backlinks from popular sites can drive traffic to your site, both directly from the linking site and indirectly, by boosting your search engine rankings. If you have a link from a local government page to your website (and you should definitely discuss this with your local tourism board or chamber of commerce), this can go a long way to giving your site authority.

Backlinks from local businesses, directories, and events also serve to enhance your local SEO by associating your site with a specific area. If you know there’s a conference or concert running in your town – or want a relevant local venue to recommend your hotel, asking them to backlink to your site is a really good way to get seen!