Content marketing and copywriting are an important part of a successful hotel’s digital marketing strategy. More than just a digital marketing activity, hotel blog posts, SEO, and content, in general, hold a huge opportunity to earn organic website visits.
What is the proof? You are reading this article because we wanted you to find it. Similarly, you can reach your potential hotel guests with targeted content marketing.
Why is hotel content marketing such a valuable opportunity?
Because most hotels are not doing it, and those who do content marketing are doing it wrong.
Getting your content and SEO marketing right from the beginning, and putting in continuous efforts are guaranteed to generate traffic to your hotel brand website and increase search engine ranking (SEO).
Having 40-50 well-optimized hotel blog posts on the brand website of an average independent 5-star hotel can generate 450-500 new organic search engine visits daily, which is nearly 15,000 new unique visits a month. Do your calculation to find out how much would this cost if you had to acquire this web traffic from Google Ads or Facebook Ads. Calculating with a $0.5 average cost per click, this would cost around $7,500 a month or $90,000 a year.
Most independent hotels generate most of their bookings from organic search engine traffic. Organic traffic from content marketing is provenly converting better than paid traffic from Facebook Ads, Instagram, or Google Ads. We don’t know your conversion rate, but you can estimate how many additional bookings your hotel would be getting with that 450-500 new visits daily.
There are lots of bullshit advice about hotel content marketing on the internet. Feel free to skip all that. In this article, we will show the exact procedure of how we write amazing hotel blog posts and hotel marketing content.
To write SEO-friendly hotel content, your marketing management team will need a few skills and tools.
What does it take to write good hotel SEO content?
The reason most hotels not engaging in content marketing is the lack of skills and competencies of the marketing team. Hotel content marketing and hotel SEO are not rocket science, but cannot be done well without prior practice or experience.
Excellent writing skills
Don’t even try publishing articles without sufficient writing skills. Good writing is not easy. It needs to be engaging, clear, and the delivery needs to support the message your content aims to convey.
Experienced writers have systems to research, draft, and finalize 100-1500 word long-form articles in just a matter of hours – while the same process might take days for new writers.
Writing skills are essential for good content marketing management, not only for hotels but for any other industry.
Intermediate SEO skills
SEO has been an important part of successful copywriting for decades. Optimizing a long-form article for search engine visibility has an amazing potential to attract traffic from search engines.
SEO-writing requires a set of technical skills and an understanding of how search engine algorithms work. This skill set includes competitor analysis, keyword research, the ability to monitor search trends, and a lot more.
Understanding what your guests want to read about
Even the most well-written article will remain useless if it’s irrelevant to your potential hotel guests. Ideas about what your guests want to read about are the basis of any good piece of hotel content.
A few online tools
These include keyword density checker tools, word counters, search trend monitoring, and ideally social listening tools.
Learn how we write hotel marketing content that gets tons of organic search engine traffic
Each copywriter has a slightly different workflow, but the process of writing a great hotel SEO article is similar. We are going to share how we write amazing content for our hotel clients. The copywriting process can be broken down into 5 phases.
Consider each write-up to be a brand-building hotel press release
Some hotel marketing consultants say that writing content for your hotel blog is easy. It just takes a good topic then you can start writing. Big mistake When writing a blog post or article representing your hotel brand, you need to handle that piece of content as an important press release. If done correctly, your article will be read by hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of potential guests – which is an opportunity you don’t want to miss to impress.
Find good PR angles for your hotel updates
You might have specific topics to write about or specific news to share. It is important to understand that in a raw form, hotel news and hotel-related updates will hardly interest anyone – not even your guests.
Similar to a press release, your blog content or article is best to be presented as a story. To do this, one needs to explore PR angles that will bring attention to your message more efficiently.
Let’s take a simple example: your pool bar has a new signature drink. This is not a newsworthy event, and presented just as it is will hardly generate any attention or demand.
Imagine a photo of your new drink, with content that says: We just launched our new signature drink. It is served in a coconut and made of Bacardi and pineapple juice. Very boring.
Instead, you can share a story that introduces your influencers going crazy about your new cocktail, praising its fine tropical taste, refreshingness, and presentation that makes a perfect subject for guest Instagram posts.
You get the idea. Turn your update into something exciting for your readers, who will eventually become your guests.
SEO: do a keyword, search trend, and ranking research for your hotel article
Once you have an idea about your topics and PR angles, it is time to do SEO research for your hotel content.
Start by going to Google.com and look up what people and other companies write about your topic. There will be tons of articles – these are the ones that your article will be competing with. Check out the first 5-7 top-ranking content. Open each in a new tab or window and scan through those articles one by one.
Analyze the topics, headings, titles, and content ideas of these top-ranking articles to understand what made them so popular. The first articles in Google are not necessarily the best, but they rank high in Google for a reason. Your job is to write a better one. A longer, more info-rich, and better keyword-optimized article will have the most chance to rank higher.
Before getting started with actual writing, list 4-5 keywords and search terms that you will optimize your article for. Keyword optimization is not to be confused with keyword-stuffing, which is a painfully poor technique of amateur copywriters.
Let’s take a 5-star Maldives resort as an example. Some basic search terms and keyword ideas could be:
- “5-star resort in South Ari Atoll Maldives”
- “All-inclusive 5-star resorts in the Maldives”
- “South Ari Atoll diving in the Maldives”
You cannot go wrong with covering up to 3-4 topics in one article, given that your writing is coherent and relevant to your hotel guests. Following the previous search term examples, some a paragraph including these popular search terms would look like something like this:
“Most 5-star private island resorts in the South Ari Atoll of The Maldives offer excellent diving opportunities. With pristine clear waters and white-sand beaches, our (XYZ resort name) resort is a dream destination not only for divers but also for guests who seek total relaxation. Starting from this year, we include a 1-hour introductory diving course in our all-inclusive package.”
Choose your keywords wisely, do your research and make sure to optimize your copy for those search terms and it’s variants.
Writing an SEO-friendly hotel article
Writing is easy, but writing for search engines is even more difficult. It takes practice. Our workflow of writing high SEO impact content for hotels and resorts starts with a draft – also known as an outline.
Long-form hotel articles not only rank better in search engines but also get more shares. There are tons of research and analysis on the internet about this. When writing a hotel blog post or any online content, aim for 1,000 words as a minimum. But what to write 1,000 words about? You need to be creative.
Draft and outline.
Intro (100 words)
The sole purpose of your intro is to hook your people and make them stay to read your hotel blog post, or article. Start with something upbeat and attention-grabbing. Explain to your readers what makes you, or your hotel brand eligible to write about that topic. Asking unanswered questions and raising concerns is a great psychological tool to get the attention of your readers.
Outline your updates or news(100 words)
Once you got the attention of your readers, it’s time to outline what your content is all about. Be clear, present your main information as an executive summary. You might ask why to write a 1000-word article if you are about to share all important information in just 100 words? Good question. The answer is simple. Because a 100-word write-up is not enough for a reader to “get lost” in your content. The longer you can keep the attention of a potential guest, the deeper connection you will create.
Break down your content into 4-5 subsections (200 words each)
This is your time to get into details break down each 200-word subsection into 3-4 paragraphs focused on one topic each. This will help your SEO content writing and will also help to keep your hotel blog post organized.
Write a conclusion (100 words)
Only amateur and lazy writers skip the conclusion. Did you know that nearly 70% of people just scan through blog posts just to check the conclusion? This is the same with hotel blog posts and any hotel content marketing material.
To engage your readers, try asking questions in the conclusion section. Like “what do you think”? Simple questions make a huge difference, and as in real-world communication, using questions is a tool to get responses. This is a fantastic way to engage your readers.
Correcting and preparing your content to the highest editorial standards
Writing with high editorial standards to represent a hotel brand is mission-critical. Similar to other luxury brands, hotels need to aim for a spotless online presence with immaculate language and marketing communications. This is the reason why high editorial standards are essential when writing hotel marketing content.
This not only applies to hotel blog posts or hotel press releases but also to e-mail marketing, social media posts, and website content. Literally, any written communication from your hotel brand has to be 100% up to the highest editorial standards.
This includes grammar, word choices, clarity, correctness, delivery and even reading experience.
We always recommend to our clients to craft their written hotel marketing content in an identical tone of voice, very similar delivery. This helps to establish a consistent feel for the brand. Very important.
Conclusion
Content marketing for hotels is a largely underutilized opportunity. Most hotel managers just see it as some write-ups on the hotel website that has little to no impact on revenue performance. They are right. Most hotels do it entirely wrong, that’s why they don’t get any tangible results.
Writing SEO-optimized hotel content requires tools and expertise. Lazy efforts will only return poor results, so if a hotel management team does not want to invest in proper content marketing then it’s better to skip it entirely.
However considering the obvious cost-saving benefits of acquiring organic search engine traffic through SEO, the brand-building value of owned media on your brand website, and marketing communication value of engaging quests – content marketing is a fantastic opportunity for hotels that are willing to invest in it.
Daniel Diosi & Partners 