Google Making It Harder for Hotels to Rank Organically
Barriers to Hotel SEO
We are noticing a new trend with some of the high-volume, competitive keyword searches for hotel locations.
- Organic listings have been pushed down by PPC and map listings for the majority of the competitive, city-based keyword searches like “hotels in new york,” “hotels in las vegas,” hotels in San Francisco,” etc.
- Online travel agents and affiliate programs are dominating Page 1 results. The brand update (AKA “Vince Update“) that I talked about here in previous posts seems not to have benefited hotels.
- Results may vary for different cities. But for a search like “hotels in london,” at least a few more hotel websites need to show up.
Here’s a diagram of the SERP (search engine results page) for the keyword phrase “hotels in london.”
It’s not like London has any shortage of big brand hotels. Marriott, Hilton, Starwood and Intercontinental run some pretty big, star-rated and centrally located hotels in the London area. Why is it that none of them are ranking organically?
London nights.com, Expedia.co.uk, Tripadvisor.com, Booking.com, and Londonhotels.com are all resellers of rooms. They are websites, and not actual physical hotels; in my opinion, actual hotel websites should be ranking higher for a location-based term like “hotels in london.”
Why is Google serving these results?
What happens when you don’t rank, but you want visitors for the highly competitive keywords to find you? You buy keywords from Google! In the example above, Crown Plaza and Radisson Hotel are buying PPC ads to be there. So we understand that Google, like any business, wants to increase their revenue (which means selling more ads).
However,Google has achieved their dominant position by delivering relevant results. If they improve their SERPs by showing actual hotels for location-based searches, I believe this will benefit both hotels and searchers.
