Hello, I am an in-house online marketer for a travel firm and one of the websites I optimize is for a hotel in Deep Creek Lake in Western Maryland that we launched last summer. I feel like I have already covered the basics and the hotel has done fairly well with a few decent rankings but I want to take it to the next level. I wanted to share my experiences and see what you all think or have any ideas of how to improve. The site is innatdeepcreek dot com The CMS is Wordpress, Thesis theme. 1. Basic Basic Stuff - I have already done the keyword research and place appropriate title tags, meta descriptions on each page of the site. I have verified the Google Places listing, along with Yahoo and Bing Local, and built that page out extensively. 2. National Local Directories: I have registered at all the free local directories I can find. I'm having trouble getting buy in for the paid national local directories such as BOTW. This is one of like 20 websites I manage, so I have to pick and choose my battles and I don't know if it's worth the time/trouble on my part to get them to spend a few hundred dollars for something like local BOTW. Are these sites really worth it, ROI wise? Does any of you have case study where you can say it definitely improved your traffic, or sent direct traffic? 3. Pet Friendly Directories: Our hotel lets you bring pet friendly. Interestingly, there are a TON of national pet friendly travel sites out there. I have manually registered for every free one I can find. 4. Local Reciprocal Listing/Linking: I have been spending a lot of time reaching out to other local businesses w/ websites that have "deep creek lodging" or "deep creek links" pages to get our contact info and link included. They seem to have one of the following responses: a) we swap links immediately no problems (about 15% of the time) b) (another 15%) they say they are working on their site and will do it once it gets fixed c) 70%- no response whatsoever. Since the sites are other local biz I feel that the reciprocal linking is probably more beneficial since we are jointly providing Google with more information about our local area and including the addresses and phone numbers. Some of these links have actually sent a decent amount of traffic & sales - one from a ski resort accounted for 20% of our total in January! 4. Competitor Analysis/Linkbuilding: I have done competitive research on other hotels in both open site explorer, and also searching for their address & phone number in Google for all the webpages that their phone number shows up (instead of links to the competitor site) and trying to get our contact information listed in those websites too. My understanding was that just listing of our business name next to our phone number and address in as many places as possible was important for Google Places. 5. Content Development - "Area Guide" Section - one thing I noticed with my top competitor hotel that has #1 spot for my key money term is that they have 216 pages where as I have about 20 now. I investigated further and I see they have this many pages due to the extensive amount of "local area information" - not just a list of restaurants but also churches, police department, weather, everything - sometimes having pages for each individual establishment/business without a lot of accompanying description, etc. I have begun trying to build out an area guide section of my site include pages based on search phrases like "deep creek shopping" and "deep creek restaurants" thinking that if I build out my site with more information about my local area, Google will value it higher. It takes a lot of time and effort to write unique, quality content. Currently these pages on my site are just lists of local businesses with address, phone and a link, but this is the main area I'm working on right now in terms of looking to improve my site's performance. Do you think this is a smart idea to try to essentially build a better local area guide than my competitor? Is that the key "battleground" to speak? Thanks for reading, ask me questions, and tell me if you have any additional ideas.
A couple things I noticed you didn't mention here: 1. Keyword density within your page. You said you did all the appropriate title/metadata keyword stuff, but what about in your content? I have heard 3% keyword density is best, but there are varying views on that. 2. Indexing your backlinks. Are the backlinks you created showing up in the Yahoo Site Explorer? In Google when you type link:yourdomain.com? If your backlinks aren't indexed, they aren't counting in your favor. 3. Your competition. Analyze the SEO on the sites who have the #1-3 spots for your keyword. How many backlinks do they have? You should check this to make sure you're in league with them in terms of backlinks. Good luck with your site!
Also when you check your competitors backlinks, check how many use the anchor text for the keyword you are targeting. This will give you another good idea of where you need to be at.
I would recommend that you get some social media links and also include press releases into your marketing plan. These two components can help increase your rankings tremendously...
Thanks yes- we launched a press release when we first built the hotel, and we have just launched our Facebook page. I am going to create a Flickr page as well.
Backlinks - I know that's the key, my competitor hotel is definitely ahead of me with backlinks - naturally they have been around much longer. But some of their backlinks are from Wall Street Journal and Washington Post travel sections. Targeting big boys like that is more of a big league PR issue - I don't even know where to start going after sites like that. I'm trying to out-compete them with local reciprocal linking with other businesses, and registering for every local directory and social media site I can find, but additional ways to find links is what I'm looking for.
on a side note, the marketing dept did a marketwire press release for $500 when we first launched the hotel, talking about the launch. None of the pages or links where it got syndicated are still up. I think the social media profiles are good for overall visibility, especially if you already have content to add (like, pics of our hotel for Flickr) - but I'm kind of lukewarm on press releases, especially as a paid investment.
I think Google's been pretty clear that Fbook & Twitter do factor into their algorithm. We have a Facebook page for the hotel, are looking to build it out with pictures, linking to other businesses, and to get a booking engine widget embedded in the page with iframe so we can actually get business from the Fbook page. Key is getting the GM on site to start tweeting since he is the closest to a "face" for the property that we have and we're working toward that.
ya above is good for local seo nice informations thanks for sheering Local Reciprocal Listing/Linking Content Development Competitor Analysis/Linkbuilding this is the most part of seo
Local business helps to get local visitors & leads for your business. For promoting your business in local areas, list your business in the Local business listing. You can also post a ads in local classified directory..
you can fine the local area and topi forums and blog directory and submit on them.SMO will also helps you to get a good traffic on keywords.
Have you fully optimized the G Places property?? Its Very important that your citation is the Exact Same across the board on every website you have applied it or Google will not attach properly to the Places property. Reviews Reviews Reviews!!! Places is heavily weighted on reviews. Get them not just on Places property's but other sites like yelp, brownbook, trip adviser etc.(if you are going to place reviews yourself use PROXIES) Ips are tracked and you don't want to F it up for your client. Use QR Codes and Make sure the coupons options are utilized and not expired on the Places Page. If you are using open site use the domain authority for reference of competition. Number off BL is not that important if you focus on the "Authority" of the BL. Also you can do the compairson side by side to easily to review. The diversity of root domain's and separate c class ips
That's really good stuff thanks. The company I work for isn't exactly small potatoes with 300 employees, so if it got around I was faking reviews for a hotel it may ruffle some feathers. But one "light gray" hat thing I'm trying to do is get non-technical guests to hand-write reviews - and then posting them on the sites on behalf of the guest essentially. So it really would be from a guest, we'd just be posting for them. RE: The local information being consistent. The hotel we bought, we re-named it after we bought it. It still says the name of the old hotel in a lot of places next to our address and phone number, and the Google Places page still shows up for old property - even though I have sent many requests to Google to take the old places page down, the property has changed names, etc. The old property was a dump (we totally renovated it) so it has some bad reviews. Doing the best I can, but kinds of things that you don't think about that become really important even in small brick and mortar business like this today.
I think building pages will help. Can you make pages and optimize them for "keyword cityname" for several nearby cities? They can be landing pages that would bring visitors into your site if they search with that cityname, while building up the overall size of your site.