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The hospitality industry was among the most affected by the pandemic. In this post-recovery period, we can see the lasting impact of the pandemic and lockdowns on consumer behaviours. At the same time, consumer demographics are naturally ageing while the digital landscape continues to evolve. If this is the “new normal,” then hospitality brands need to rethink SEO and marketing for a different breed of consumer demands and expectations. In this guide, we explore hospitality SEO trends, the customer cycle, how to build visibility where it matters, local SEO, content marketing, link building, digital PR, technical SEO, user experience and customer retention.
Across all industries, web traffic is down -3.6% in 2024 with bounce rates increasing +0.7% and conversion rates down -5.5%. However, hospitality is bucking the trend with traffic up +1.4% from the previous year.
Unfortunately, bounce rates are up a massive +7.6% while conversion rates are down -8.7% – both way above the cross-industry averages.
So, why are hospitality brands holding onto less of their traffic and converting fewer visitors? Well, we know that UX frustration is up +3.3% for travel and hospitality sites from the previous year. We also know that “best price” is the top priority (63%) for travel bookings and that price sensitivity for food and beverages remains high amid ongoing cost of living pressures.
Unfortunately for hospitality brands, eating out, travel and takeaways are three of the top four expenses UK consumers pull back on during difficult times.
Increased traffic volumes suggest hospitality demand is strong. However, lower conversion rates and higher bounce rates tell us that brands need to work harder on converting traffic into customers.
With UX frustration increasing, optimising digital experiences is key, but hospitality brands also need to consider market factors – like price sensitivity – that impact purchase decisions.
Google is still the biggest name in search, but a growing number of people are turning to alternative platforms for different purposes.
Recently, a lot has been made of Gen Z using Instagram and TikTok to find places to eat and other local businesses. Others are turning to Reddit for advice from real people or YouTube for travel inspiration and Tripadvisor for reviews or tips.
Quite simply, visibility on Google alone isn’t enough for hospitality brands.
You’ve also got the impact of booking apps to consider. Many travellers book hotel rooms through apps like Booking.com and Airbnb while online food deliveries continue to grow in the UK. Others use these apps as research/comparison tools before booking directly with a brand.
The hospitality customer cycle now incorporates more channels than ever before. As a result, building visibility where it matters is becoming more challenging. Brands need to be active on more channels, create and optimise more content for different channels and manage a larger collection of accounts. For most brands, this requires more time, more resources and more budget.
Gen Z and Millennials turning to social search is part of a much wider generational shift in the hospitality industry. Aside from using different channels and platforms throughout the customer cycle, younger generations are developing unique behaviours, preferences and expectations as they mature as online consumers.
For example, younger generations are prioritising travel above other “non-essential” purchases – despite economic pressures. In fact, Gen Z is driving much of the UK’s travel spending right now.
Source
At the same time, Gen Z is shaping up as the most sober generation. According to YouGov, 39% of 18-24 year olds don’t drink alcohol at all while 44% occasionally or regularly drink alcohol alternatives.
Today’s hospitality brands need to develop multigenerational marketing strategies that reach and appeal to all age groups. Aside from being present on the right channels, brands also have to adapt their messages to satisfy the demands of each demographic.
We can divide the hospitality customer cycle into four key stages:
However, the journey through this customer cycle varies for different sectors.
The customer cycle for food and drinks hospitality brands is relatively short. Hunger is a great motivator and prospects can move from search to purchase in a matter of minutes.
For hotels and accommodation, the customer cycle is significantly longer – and it’s growing. The latest insights from Expedia find it takes an average of 73 days for travellers to make their first booking (typically flights or a hotel).
According to data from Booking.com, the top three sources for travel inspiration are:
This shows how important multichannel visibility is, even at the early inspiration stage. It also shows that providing quality experiences to customers is the best way to win new ones through word-of-mouth referrals. In fact, restaurants, bars and hotels are among the top purchases consumers rely on word-of-mouth recommendations for.
The problem with word of mouth is that each customer only has so many friends and family members they can recommend you to. Luckily, social media is the top digital channel for inspiration – and reach isn’t a problem on the major networks.
Platforms like TikTok, Instagram and Facebook are the perfect place to inspire hospitality intent.
@trainpal Another one of this place cause I just can’t get over it 😍 📍Mont Saint-Michel 🇫🇷 #france #travel #travellife #fyp #fürdich ♬ original sound – TrainPal
Another one of this place cause I just can’t get over it 😍 📍Mont Saint-Michel 🇫🇷 #france #travel #travellife #fyp #fürdich
Hospitality brands can also spark inspiration with content placements on third-party websites (eg: travel websites) and offline channels (TV, print ads, etc.). However, social is the top digital channel for this stage of the customer cycle. Combine this with a customer experience strategy that maximises word-of-mouth recommendations and you’re off to the perfect start.
Search takes the lead during the research and planning stage with four in five consumers using Google Search and Maps to find hospitality venues. When it comes to searching for local venues, 33% use “near me” searches and features while 26% search for specific brands and 19% specific cuisines. The planning stage is where the customer cycle differs most for hospitality sectors.
Travellers looking for hotels can spend weeks or months researching and planning trips before they make a booking. They use social, search, online travel agents, comparison sites – and a wide range of channels/platforms – to inform their booking decisions.
Meanwhile, people looking for places to eat or drink can search, compare and choose where to go in a matter of minutes.
For food and drinks hospitality brands, being visible in the right places at the right time is crucial. A rapid customer cycle means you only have a short window of opportunity to work with. So, timing counts for a lot, but you also have to quickly convert visibility into bookings or purchases – otherwise, prospects will probably buy elsewhere.
The key difference at the booking stage is foot traffic vs online bookings. For hotel and accommodation providers, the vast majority of bookings take place online while food and drinks brands can generate a lot of foot traffic from local search.
The key conversion actions for hotels and accommodation are:
The conversion actions for food and drinks hospitality brands are more varied:
Hotel and accommodation providers might get the occasional walk-in customer, but the majority of bookings happen online. Regardless of which hospitality sector you’re in, balancing direct and indirect bookings is a key consideration.
Direct bookings through your website and other owned channels (phone, email campaigns, etc.) are the biggest win for hospitality brands. While third-party booking platforms can generate valuable business, you don’t have to pay any commission fees for direct bookings.
Crucially, you also retain all of the customer data you collect from direct bookings, which is crucial for customer retention – something we’ll discuss in more detail later.
Commission fees and data loss aside, indirect bookings still have a lot to offer for hospitality brands. Above all, you can cut straight through to the booking/order stage of the customer cycle and win customers at the crucial moment.
Earlier, we talked about the importance of timing and quickly converting visibility, especially for food and drinks brands. Delivery apps can provide timely visibility when purchase intent is at its highest.
Indirect bookings play a more complex role in the hotel and accommodation customer cycle. Interestingly, several studies find that many travellers prefer to book directly from hotel websites, even if they use booking apps or online travel agents during the planning stage.
Local SEO merges the online and offline customer cycle for hospitality brands. If you want to drive foot traffic from local customers, this is arguably your most important channel, especially for restaurants, takeaways, pubs, cafes, etc.
Going back to the idea of building visibility beyond traditional search, keep in mind that social platforms now play a key role in local search and discovery. Local search increasingly drives online bookings, too.
With a Google Business Profile, you can allow customers to view menus, reserve tables and place online orders – either from your website or delivery apps.
Local search also plays a role in the travel planning process as people look for the best hotels in their destination.
Create a hotel Business Profile for Google Search and you can direct customers to your website and third-party apps to secure bookings from local searches.
Once you secure a booking or an order, your attention shifts to maximising customer value. This starts with the value of the initial purchase, but the long-term goal is to maximise profit through customer retention and/or referrals.
Ultimately, you want local customers or regular visitors to the area to come back and do business with you again. Likewise, you want existing customers to recommend you to their friends, family members and other acquaintances – especially when retention isn’t possible.
Either way, positive customer experiences are key to this – something we’ll come back to throughout this guide.
With the hospitality customer cycle becoming increasingly multichannel, building visibility in the right places – at each stage – is crucial.
Spark inspiration with organic posts, paid campaigns and partnerships as people scroll through their feeds. At the same time, optimise your accounts for social search, because more people are actively searching on Instagram, TikTok and other platforms for places to eat, travel destinations and local businesses.
Strategically publish content on third-party websites to spark inspiration among their audiences and tap into their domain authority to rank for valuable keywords during the organic search stage.
This is where the real planning and research stage begins for hospitality bookings. Just keep in mind that people are using more than Google for this now (alternative search engines, comparison sites, booking apps, etc.)
Reinforce organic visibility with paid campaigns and, again, not only on Google (think social, YouTube, paid listings on booking apps, ads on relevant forums like Tripadvisor, etc.).
Build visibility and optimise content for local searches throughout the customer cycle. Drive traffic to your website and foot traffic to your front door and support every conversion action that matters to your business (online bookings, phone calls, deliveries, etc.).
You can blend organic and paid visibility on relevant forums like Tripadvisor. You can also target relevant groups and sub-forums on other platforms like Reddit and Quora.
Third-party review sites can create important citations (more on these later). They also provide an impartial source of guidance for potential customers who want some help choosing a business with confidence.
Aside from generating business from third-party platforms, visibility on booking sites and apps is valuable during the planning stage of the customer cycle – especially for hotels and accommodation providers.
Driving traffic to your website can be challenging, but this is the most valuable channel for direct bookings. As mentioned earlier, hospitality traffic is up, too, while conversions are down. This reveals a major opportunity for hospitality brands with an SEO strategy that wins traffic and UX that converts.
For some hospitality brands, mobile apps are the perfect channel for keeping customers locked into the experience. You can personalise customer experiences, offer special deals, send notifications and nudge customers to their next booking.
Aside from mobile apps, email marketing is the most important channel for hospitality customer retention. Although emails are arguably less effective than push notifications, a winning email strategy gives you all the same direct contact benefit (provided you can get them to open and read).
Local SEO is one of the most important channels for hospitality brands – and not only for visibility, but driving business.
Google and other search engines want to show legitimate businesses in local results. Aside from verifying your business (eg: when you create your Business Profile), optimising your website for local search sends the signals search engines are looking for:
As an example of these in action, let’s look at these implemented on Mitchells & Butlers websites. We’ve been Mitchells & Butlers’ primary SEO partner for many years, boosting the local search presence of its brands including Toby Carvery, Harvester and All Bar One.
Starting with mobile optimisation, we can see each brand’s website uses the same responsive design.
Each brand also has its own mobile app, which users are prompted to download when they visit home pages on mobile devices.
Also, you’ll notice two CTA buttons at the bottom of the screen for online bookings. These stay rooted to the bottom of the display as users scroll and click through to other pages – this keeps conversion actions one tap away.
With location pages, each location you’re building search visibility for needs its own dedicated page. Each location page should include your business name, the location’s branch name, its location and a description.
Make sure every location page also includes NAP details (name, address and phone number) for the premise as contact details. On Mitchells & Butlers websites, you’ll also find CTA buttons for conversion goals on each location page.
Next, any business with multiple locations should have a location finder page on their website.
Ideally, location finder pages should include a dedicated search tool with auto-complete to help users find their nearest branch as quickly as possible. Adding a Google Maps embed to your pages will also help, allowing users to click through to Maps to access directions and other actions.
On the more technical side, local business structured data (schema markup) allows Google to show your business listing as a rich result in search.
Then you’ve got Core Web Vitals, which is part of the page experience signal that tracks three technical UX factors: loading times, interactivity and visual stability.
That’s the fundamentals of website optimisation for local SEO covered, but we’re not done yet. Later, we’ll be coming back to optimising sites for technical SEO, UX and CRO.
After your website, a Google Business Profile is the most important asset for local search. A complete Business Profile allows Google to show your information in Search, Maps, local results and Knowledge Panels.
Each business location you’re optimising for needs its own Business Profile. We’ve covered this topic in plenty of detail in blog posts, so take a look at the following for guidance:
Now, as important as Google is for local search, it’s not the only place you need to build visibility. You’ll also want to create business profiles for other platforms: Bing Places, directory listing sites, Facebook business pages, Instagram business profiles, etc. In fact, local search is the biggest area where social media is infiltrating the hospitality customer cycle.
Local search on social platforms is one the best illustrations of how the hospitality customer cycle is changing. Aside from platforms like Instagram and TikTok becoming local search tools, the top networks also demonstrate how platform use varies by age group.
In the UK, Facebook’s largest age group is 25-35 years (24%), followed by 35-54 years (19%).
Create a Facebook Page for each business location and you can show for local searches, promote your page in paid campaigns and set up key conversion goals.
Now, Instagram’s largest age group in the UK is also 25-34 years (29%) but its second-largest is 18-24 years (25%) – so you’re dealing with a younger demographic overall.
Instead of creating pages on Instagram, you have to create accounts for each location. First, create a Meta Business account for your company and, then, create Instagram accounts for each business location.
Aside from optimising for local searches, you can sell certain products directly from the platform via Instagram Shopping.
TikTok has the youngest demographic among the top networks with its largest age group being 18-24 years (40%). This is followed by 13-17 years (28%) and 25-34 years (24%), making 92% of its user base aged between 13 and 34 years old.
Needless to say, this is the platform for inspiring Gen Z while the top social networks play a crucial role in multigenerational marketing for modern hospitality brands.
Search engines want to see accurate NAP (business name, address and location) details across your profiles. Google, in particular, wants three key things from NAP details:
Aside from being accurate, they need to match perfectly, down to the same spelling and phone number format. For more guidance on managing citations and NAP details, take a look at the following article: Local SEO citations: The complete guide & best practices
We’ll discuss backlinks in more detail shortly, but the key thing at this point is that you want to earn local backlinks for each location page on your website. This can include local directory listings, local news sources, tourism websites, other hospitality sites – and plenty of other sources.
Customer reviews legitimate your business listings and help new customers choose you with confidence. Each business location needs its own profile of reviews and these are tied to each location’s Business Profile.
You don’t need perfect review scores, but a high volume of 3.8+ scores puts you in ideal territory. Again, we’ve got more guidance on this topic, so take a look at the following articles for further info:
Content marketing brings all of the key hospitality marketing channels together. So, in this section, we’re going to talk about content formats, link building and digital PR, and optimising for E-E-A-T and YMYL as a hospitality brand.
As hospitality becomes increasingly multichannel (and multilingual), brands have to create a wider variety of content to connect with audiences:
Of course, the ideal mix of content formats depends on the channels and audiences you’re targeting across them. You may have to test and experiment with formats to find the blend – and a content production system that works.
Link building and digital PR go hand-in-hand for hospitality brands – or any business trying to build a local search presence. Link building describes the active steps you take to earn backlinks from third-party websites. Meanwhile, digital PR raises your profile, encouraging other brands to talk about you, link to your website and partner with you.
So, first, you need to produce the kind of content that generates backlinks:
Now, in terms of raising your profile, there are five broad approaches to successful digital PR:
To drive your link building and digital PR strategies, be an active participant in the media and local communities. Network with journalists and publishers, attend industry events and be a newsworthy brand to generate valuable press coverage.
Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines are important to any brand with a content marketing strategy. It represents the role of experience, expertise, authority and trust in Google’s quality rater guidelines.
To demonstrate E-E-A-T in your content, make sure the following applies to everything you publish:
Now, YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) only applies to pages that could potentially cause harm to users with poor, misleading or dangerous content. This includes anything that could impact the physical or financial safety of your audience. So, we’re talking about any transactional page or content that covers YMYL topics, such as health, finances, security, etc.
For hospitality brands, this could cover travel advisories, advice on travel insurance, dietary advice and a range of other topics.
For any page that could be considered YMYL, prioritise E-E-A-T optimisation and update content as soon as anything changes – eg: new regulations, safety warnings, etc.
Technical SEO ensures search engines and people can access your website while laying the foundations for positive experiences. To maintain the health of your website, run regular technical audits to flag any issues with:
Website complexity is a common challenge for hospitality brands. Restaurant and takeaway sites can have online ordering systems, a branch finder, dozens of location pages and several menus for users to explore.
Now, imagine a cruise operator that provides the complete hospitality experience for customers, as they sail around the world. Aside from an online booking system, the website might include thousands of pages for destinations, packages, deals, travel guides, finance options and a depth of more content.
This was one of the biggest challenges when P&O Cruises first approached us for SEO services.
Given the complexity of its website, technical SEO issues can mount up surprisingly quickly, making them hard to keep track of and resolve before they cause lasting damage. We’re used to dealing with large, complex websites and our internal analytics system analysed every data point to identify and prioritise all technical issues. This allowed us to tackle the most important issues first and make a quick impact on the site’s ranking potential – enough to drive 1,200% you traffic growth.
You can read the case study for more info, but the key point is that technical SEO is a priority for hospitality brands.
As mentioned earlier, hospitality traffic is up, but UX frustrations have also increased with bounce rates up and conversions down. Clearly, hospitality brands need to up their user experience and conversion optimisation game.
Meanwhile, the divide between online and offline customer experiences is narrowing in hospitality. Most travellers book their own hotel rooms online while online food delivery orders remain high since lockdowns.
The customer experience is everything in hospitality and this starts from the first interaction with your brand.
In addition to the technical SEO basics above, optimise the following for UX:
Don’t simply follow best practices with UX optimisation and avoid making any assumptions about users. Implement a robust analytics system that collects the insights you need to make informed, impactful decisions – eg: how form optimisation impacts mobile vs desktop visitors.
Customer retention has drastically evolved for hospitality brands in the digital age.
In the previous section, we said the customer experience is everything in hospitality – and this is especially true when it comes to retention. Word-of-mouth recommendations from friends and family is the top source of inspiration for hospitality customers.
Quite simply, if you want customers to come back or recommend you to others, you have to deliver memorable customer experiences. Get this right and you can maximise customer value through retention and referrals with a mix of the following strategies:
Consumers in the UK have responded very well to loyalty incentives for food and drinks businesses.
According to the Gift Card and Voucher Association’s (GCVA’s) latest consumer report, 91% of UK consumers are actively involved in loyalty programmes.
Hotels have struggled more with retention during the digital age, but insights suggest loyalty is on the rise. Half of all room bookings for IHG hotels in 2022 were driven by its loyalty scheme while McKinsey finds 78% of consumers are more likely to book again when offered personalised experiences/deals.
Customer experience is the heart of hospitality retention while customer data is the leverage brands need.
If you need help implementing any of the hospitality marketing strategies in this guide, call us on 02392 830 281 or send us your details below and our team will be in touch. You can also check out some of our hospitality experience here.
Dave is head of SEO at Vertical Leap. He joined in 2010 as an SEO specialist and prior to that worked with international companies delivering successful search marketing campaigns. Dave works with many of our largest customers spanning many household names and global brands such as P&O Cruises and Harvester. Outside of work, Dave previously spent many years providing charity work as a Sergeant under the Royal Air Force Reserves in the Air Cadets sharing his passion for aviation with young minds. He can often be found in the skies above the south coast enjoying his private pilot licence.
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Categories: SEO