Importance of Local SEO Ranking for Hoteliers

Any business that has an actual physical location needs to put time into their local SEO. It is imperative, especially in the hospitality industry, for search engines to know where a property is located. There are several things you can do to ensure your property's location is known and that the information provided about it is reliable.

1. Make sure the property address is displayed on the website.

Is your property's address located in the header or footer of the website? Is there a contact page with the property's information, a map of the location and proximity to local attractions? If someone is searching for a hotel near a certain local attraction, the property's location itself will be the biggest influence for its ranking in the search results.

2. Own and manage Google and Bing business listings.

Google and Bing both show your business listing when someone searches for you. It's important to make sure that listing is owned and managed internally. These listings allow you to add photos, respond to reviews and edit information to keep it up-to-date. Vizergy allows its clients to manage Google My Business listings from their dashboard in the Vizergy Marketing System (VMS™).

3. Ensure UNAP is consistent across the Internet.

UNAP stands for URL, Name, Address, and Phone Number. It's essentially a property's fingerprint or online identity. Search engines don't just look to your website and business listing for information about your location and services, they also scan hundreds of other sites and directory listings for information.

If any of these listings are inconsistent, they don't trust the information and are less likely to show your property in search results. When running scans for clients, we often find incorrect information. It could be something as simple as one listing showing a local phone number and another showing a toll-free number or one listing having an address as Main Street and another as Main Blvd.

The search engines have no way to know what is correct and wouldn't want to show searchers incorrect information, so they will just not rank you highly in search results. Keeping up with business listings and checking all online listings can be a full-time job.

A good word of advice is to use a service like our Business Listing Lock to find a way to lock down your property's information across sites that search engines use for information. This way, if anything does change such as a domain name, phone number or address, you can change it in one place to push out across the web rather than manually finding and changing every listing.

For more tips on how to rank higher on Google, download our Search Engine Optimization Fundamentals Guide here.

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